In 1994 Mike McIntyre, a successful 37 year old San Franciscan journalist hits his mid-life crisis full on: "If I were told I was going to die today, I'd have to say I never took a gamble. I played life too close to the vest ... Wiping tears form my eyes, I know it's time to bet or fold. Just this once I want to know what it feels like to shove all my chips in the pot and go for broke". With which he quit his job, packed a bag, emptied his pockets and set off to cross the continent without a penny ... He documents his trip from San Francisco to Cape Fear, North Carolina in The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America (Berkley Books, New York).
Some years later, a young Englishman slumming on the beaches of Goa in India has planted in him the seeds of a similar mission by the freaks still lingering there. Tom Thumb was a dreamy lay-about at age 20 pre-occupied with the spiritual dimensions of living. He read a book by and met the guy who hitched from San Francisco to Argentina without a dime (Robin Brown, Further Up the Road) . Convinced the experience would add dimension to his life he headed back to England only to travel back to Goa once more without a dime "living in poverty to complement [his] search for a simple spiritual sanctity." He set out in the summer of 1997 and published his account in Hand to Mouth to India (Alchemy Books, London).
The two accounts are radically different, on radically different routes, by radically different souls, and yet they are united by a certain introspection, enlightenment along the way, and of course poverty and thumbing (rides, and their noses at common-place, bourgeois values).
Mike seems a typical American, having passed much of his life in the comfort of middle class living, approaching forty, realised he's not really lived yet. He's different though, biting the bullet and trying, however superficially (he still has a bank account after all), to live a hard dream, to test himself and his suppositions. And he has a lot to test. He's full of all the middle class paranoia you'd expect of your average American couch potato. All the way he's stunned and amazed by how friendly, supporting and open the people around him are, how readily they'll help a stranger out. He's not ungrateful, just unable to understand, again and again. Eventually it clicks though and with eyes wide open he remarks:
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