"Where you from, man?"

We pass a farm house. In the driveway a middle-aged woman and a teenager play catch with a soft ball, while a middle-aged man and another teenager unload groceries from a red Ford pick-up.

The hitcher sees this too. She turns to me and I feel her stare. “Where are you from?” she asks, and I am reminded of that scene in Easy Rider when Luke Askew, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper are sitting around a campfire smoking pot and Hopper asks Askew, whom Fonda and Hopper had picked up hitch-hiking earlier that day, where he is from. 

“It’s hard to say,” I tell her, like Askew told Hopper. Because it is true -- I am still trying to figure that out. Not so much where I am from but what I am from.

“What do you mean ‘It’s hard to say’?” she says patiently.

“It’s hard to say because,” as Askew told Hopper, “it’s a very long word.”

Still staring.

“A city,” I tell her.

“Which one?”

 “All cities are alike,” I tell her, as Askew told Hopper.

Unlike Hopper, she says, “No they’re not.”

And like Askew I tell her: “I’m from the city. A long way from the city. And that’s where I wanna be right now.”

She returns to the window. “Next left.”