Eradicating Boundaries: It's A Small World Among Hitch-hikers After All ...

She jokes of all the ditches she's slept in over the years, and the few Aussie truckies who'd ask her up front for a screw (taking no for answer like any gentleman). She's professes a deep love of the spontaneity and lack of certitude, the abandoning of plans, schedules, order and knowing. I wouldn't say hitch-hiking was a side interest of hers, much rather, an integral part of an adventure loving free spirit!

I was left to think of boundaries again, and how she was attacking them in her formal, academic world as a widely recognised and lauded social researcher. Doesn't hitch-hiking itself serve to diminish those same boundaries between people? And so in her professional life she was eroding the boundaries between people and animals (even between people, animals, plants and objects in the long run) and in her personal life she was eroding the boundaries between people themselves ... Very harmonious paths.

Footnote:

We were kindred spirits of a kind, both impressed at the coincidence of our coming together so smoothly. On the subject of which it emerged that she'd been visited by a Dutch girl while living in Toronto. The girl had read her book and wanted to meet Barbara on her trip across Canada. She was hitching with a cycle of all things! Not Yvonne? Yes Yvonne, the very same girl that had approached me about a cycle/hitching tour of Australia, whom I'd met in Europe some while later! All we'd need to complete the circle is for Erwan to run into Yvonne back home .... I was collecting quite a list of awe-inspiring and auspicious coincidences hitching planet Earth.

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