{"id":335,"date":"2021-03-26T03:45:41","date_gmt":"2021-03-26T09:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.sxu.edu\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/?p=335"},"modified":"2024-03-22T08:21:25","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T14:21:25","slug":"another-ride-with-the-hitchhiker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/archives\/335","title":{"rendered":"Another Ride with the Hitchhiker"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

SSW for March 25, 2021<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Potential spoilers! If you’re not caught up on your Suspense episodes (as of September 2, 1942), go listen to \u201cThe Hitchhiker\u201d first<\/a>. Then come back here!]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cdrive-in\u201d today, like last week<\/a>, brought another bout with eternity, this time through Lucille Fletcher\u2019s \u201cThe Hitchhiker,\u201d a Suspense episode on Sirius XM\u2019s Old Time Radio station. I saw the title as I was flipping through the stations, and I had that immediate thought: \u201cDo I want to go there?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I knew the story and I knew the effect. Orson Welles. The driving. The narration. The other-worldliness. The common, relatable story of a cross-country trip. The impenetrable story of crossing over\u2014not the Brooklyn Bridge, but the breach between here and eternity. Has Orson, or Ronald Adams, as his character was named, made it to his destination yet? Is he still making that cross-country trek, picking up hitchhiking women, crashing into a field of cows? Or did he, soon after making that phone call home, succumb to the Hitchhiker\u2019s \u201cHallo!\u201d and find out \u201cwho he really was\u201d and where he was going?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My first reflection is the moment of indecision in me to listen to the episode this<\/em> morning. In a flash of a moment when I read the title on the radio display, all the thoughts above ran through my mind\u2014one of those flashes of eternity in an instant\u2014and I hesitated, not sure it was right, at 5:12 AM, to be entering into reflections of the sort that this story would, yet once again, arouse and confound in my mind and soul. My first thought is: this instantaneous thought process would not have been possible just a few years ago, before the time of radios that sent written messages\u2014words denoting station and program and song titles\u2014across a display screen. So here is how the modern world is separate from the world of the Hitchhiker, the world of September, 1942. Yet, as I listened, my dominant thought was how unchanged our worlds are: a mother saying goodbye to her son getting in his car on a journey. And indeed, there\u2019s so much about the journey and the situation that is unchanged: the sound of the engine accelerating, the highway sights, the roadside cafes, the radio, and the narrator\u2019s drifty and precise observations as he makes his way over monotonous terrain and terrifying preoccupations in his mind. This does sound a lot like my morning commute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The difference\/similarity between 1942 and 2021\u2014the driving, the moment in time, the eternity\u2014is one of those recurrent themes, those instantaneous flashes of big meaning, that appear in my mind, time and again as I make my way through the story. I can\u2019t help feeling I\u2019m somehow with Ronald: we\u2019re both driving; we\u2019re both terrified; we\u2019re both talking our way through somehow (and sometimes, alas, with aggressive thoughts, though mine don\u2019t verge, fortunately, into contemplations of murder, as Ronald\u2019s do, in his time of greatest crisis). My car is very different from his\u2014I with my radio-messaging-display and quiet electric motor\u2014he, with his internal combustion engine and manual transmission accelerating through all the gears. But the internal combustion engine is still in the forefront of my mind: it\u2019s what I think of when I think of cars and highways. Everything about his trip stimulates feelings of familiarity and hominess. His reflection of his mother at the end brings quiet hope and familiar images. He\u2019s read somewhere that \u201cLove can conquer demons,\u201d and he pictures his mom in her \u201ccrisp house dress\u201d (that moms wore in the 40s, 50s, and 60s when we were young, when we needed our moms so, when there was such comfort there\u2014both otherworldly and oh so simple and understandable).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ronald drives, endlessly it seems, across so many regions of our country, with many descriptive details evoking the grandeur and monotony familiar to anyone who has gone on a road trip. It isn\u2019t until he is in a surreal part of the great American Southwest, in New Mexico, with its \u201clunar\u201d landscape and barren and sublime mountains and prairies and mesas, that he decides to make the phone call. We get the operator, speaking operator-speak, something none of us have heard these many years, yet still so familiar. Ronald has to request \u201cLong distance\u201d\u2014as indeed there was a time, long ago, when local and long distance were different services needing different operators who had to talk to each other\u2014and, essentially, \u201cbuild\u201d or link a connection across a network or series of networks to reach a place really far away. Ronald was attempting to reach a place far away\u2014but not just physically far. Wherever Ronald was\u2014and it wasn\u2019t New Mexico\u2014he was connecting to Brooklyn, and he did get connected\u2014to his confusion and woe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I get ahead of myself. That call, with all the operators, and the coins falling in the slot with the familiar ding, so perfectly inhabited that space between the familiar and the surreal. While the new technologies of electric cars and radio displays did not essentially change the experience of driving and all its attendant fears and possibilities and routines, the new technology of the cell phone, once again, has made narrative drama and suspense all the more difficult for writers. I forgot how dramatic a pay phone could be! Ronald\u2019s call was expensive, even by 2021 standards: $3.85, to be deposited in coins, one at a time: 15 quarters and one dime. We hear each one fall\u2014but not only that, there are instructions from the operator: \u201cAfter you deposit $1.50, please wait. When I have collected the money, you may deposit the next $1.50.\u201d So, we hear the six coins fall\u2014and the suspense builds through this most quotidian of processes. The operator collects and gives permission to continue. Six more coins, six more dings. Then the final four coins\u2014and that most familiar and most shocking of phone calls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story ends, and I have to shut off the radio before there is any disruption to the mood of fear and worry over the eternity\u2014or end\u2014of Ronald\u2019s fate. But I recover soon, as it occurs to me that perhaps Greg Bell has some provocative notes on the story. So I turn the radio back on, and it comes on right away, since radios nowadays no longer use tubes that need to warm up\u2014and it\u2019s Orson Welles I hear. He\u2019s talking about the war effort \u2026 in a most visual way that would require its own essay to depict. He pronounces the first syllable of \u201cNazi\u201d as though it were \u201cgnat\u201d (gnat-zi)\u2014a pronunciation I haven\u2019t heard before. So, the thematic mixture of familiar\/other (or different)-worldly continues. Welles is encouraging people to buy war bonds\u2014to lend Uncle Sam 10 cents on the dollar \u2026 possibly through a payroll savings plan. He has much to say about it, with a fine statement about the preferability of US bonds over Nazi or Axis bonds\u2014on our wrists. So we\u2019re right there, in September of 1942, just about 10 months into this war, with such a long way to go, an eternity, but still the movement from Brooklyn to New Mexico, and ordinary life and transitions to eternity are happening at home, on the radio, as though no war ever disrupted and took over life as we know it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Hitchhiker\u2014strange and right there (always appearing, always surprising)\u2014is a moment in time, and a forever, out of time. Greg Bell comes on and reminds us of Lucille Fletcher\u2019s stature as a suspense writer (she of \u201cSorry, Wrong Number\u201d fame). I think of her relationship (wife) to the great musical composer of Suspense, Bernard Herrmann, who was, it so happens, the musical composer for tonight\u2019s episode. Fletcher, we learn, wrote the Hitchhiker specifically for Orson Welles, and sure enough, Orson Welles, put his usual genius right there and made it become what it needed to become: a piece of terrifying moment in time, across time, repeatedly casting us into the familiar, made just unfamiliar enough. Ronald describes it when he is traversing New Mexico, near the end. In his loneliness, he looks out on the gloomy landscape and his movement across that country, which he pictures in terms of the indifference of a fly walking across the face of the moon. And then he calls his mom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SSW for March 25, 2021 [Potential spoilers! If you’re not caught up on your Suspense episodes (as of September 2, 1942), go listen to \u201cThe Hitchhiker\u201d first. Then come back here!] The \u201cdrive-in\u201d today, like last week, brought another bout with eternity, this time through Lucille Fletcher\u2019s \u201cThe Hitchhiker,\u201d a Suspense episode on Sirius XM\u2019s … Continue reading Another Ride with the Hitchhiker<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just-life-in-general","category-ssw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1044,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions\/1044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}