A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow: An American Hitchhiking Odyssey

Tim Brookes was a 20-year-old Oxford student when he first succumbed to the lure of America's open road. Equipped with a change of clothes, a cheap guitar, and the youthful wanderlust of the Easy Rider era, he spent the summer of '73 hitchhiking from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again, an exhilarating experience that ultimately led him to leave old England to settle in New England. He's been here ever since. Twenty-five years later, he hit the road again, traveling light and following his thumb in a free-form re-creation of his first cross-country trip. His friends told him that times had changed, that fear stalked America's highways now, and that the only drivers who'd pick him up were bound to be as crazy as he was to undertake such an odyssey. But his friends were wrong, as this vivid and eventful book makes colorfully clear. Highlighted by wonderful photographs, A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow revisits old stomping grounds and discovers new ones, tracks down old friends and makes new ones, remembers old impressions of America and deftly sketches new vignettes of a country at once very different and surprisingly the same. In Manhattan, a rendezvous with an old girlfriend evokes all the changes wrought by a quarter-century of passing time, but it's not long before the seventies spring back to life in Sausalito when a hippie couple in a classic VW microbus pull over to offer Brookes a ride. He barrels across Nebraska with a gay trucker whose semi is linked by satellite to his home base a dozen states away, and blasts through the switchbacks of a mountain pass on a hair-raising ride in an ex-con's battered pickup. In Las Vegas he finds a neon-lit 24/7 time warp, while only a few miles away a high-desert ghost town summons up another kind of timelessness. On a back road in Ohio, we meet a beautiful Amish girl driving a horse-drawn buggy to a birthday party; half a continent away, a leather-jacketed Harley chick, is one of 300,000 bikers who roar into a little South Dakota town every year for a week-long blast. And these are only a few of the American originals who populate a book that captures all the spontaneous serendipity of the hitchhiker's vagabond life. Keenly observed, entertaining, and eloquent, A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow weaves past and present into a unique, ever-changing tapestry of intertwined roads and lives.