Made a snap decision not to catch the chinatown bus from Philadelphia and instead caught the metro south and stood by the freeway for a while before a little guy in one of those new old-style cars (are they chevrolets?) stopped and took me just down the road. He was a guy who liked knives, pulling out an enormous blade from under the seat which he said he needed for protection. He was on his way back from picking up a few little bags of weed. He said he didn’t have any of this to give me but he did have a knife for me, and also gave me a ball that proved to be endless entertainment for the rest of the day.
I waited for quite a while maybe an hour bouncing the ball when finally a guy who used to be a roadie for the grateful dead, a young guy with a whole lot of cocaine that he and his friend were going to try before they went a fishing. He only took me a couple of exits down the highway but assured me I’d be in a great spot to get a ride into DC.
I got bored at his spot because there wasn’t much traffic afterall, sitting on the safety barrier strumming my guitar when a black guy in a beat-up sedan leaned over with a puzzled look and asked if he could assist me. He could. We were cruising down the highway before long and he had a beer next to him. He offered me a busch from the cooler that I had buried underneath my guitar, and being quite thirsty I undid my seatbelt and got me a beer. He was on his way to the racetrack, apparently the only place in the state of Delaware for slot machines. He was keeping busy in his unemployment “giving back” the $1000 he had won there the day before. He dropped me off another 20 miles along.
From here I had to jump some barriers and things in order to get to the onramp, where I waited some more time before a guy in a big black ute (or truck I think they call them) pulled over and offered me a lift a little further down the road, to a very pleasant spot with nice autumnal leaves, green grass and 6 different roaring highways intersecting in an appealing spaghetti type fashion. There wasn’t much traffic at this entrance, and so the wait wasn’t quite so disheartening, but equally long.
Finally a Bolivian delivering tropical fish to pet stores picked me up and gave me a decent lift to the outskirts of Baltimore. I ate some McDonalds (being hungry by this stage some 7 hours after breakfast) and decided to press on.
I didn’t have to wait too long on a very busy road for a baltimore local to pick me up and take me “through the tunnel”. I didn’t know what that meant, but it turned out it meant the tunnel under the harbour. He was an Amtrak employee who gave me a great tour of all the local railway yards in Baltimore. He also gave me quite a scare, telling me that Baltimore was the murder capital of the world (incidentally the unemployed gambler had told me the same about DC earlier that day). He showed me the cuts in his lip and eye where he’d had run-ins with the gangs of dissaffected youth in this town of 60,000 heroin addicts. I had to see this, I decided, and besides, after so much waiting during the day it was a bit late to get to DC. He dropped me off in the south of town and I caught a bus full of black guys who all seemed to be high-fiving each other, talking just like urban black people do in the movies and in hip-hop songs. Thankfully they ignored me and my tell-tale backpack (and lucky for them cos I had that knife handy!) It turned out that all the hotels in B-more (Be more Careful) were booked out. So the hitchhiker turned regular commuter, and caught a $7 train to DC where the possibility of a bed was better.
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