At a ceremony in London, earlier this week I received the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year award for my book, Interstate, which tells the story of a hitchhiked journey from New York to San Francisco. Although I spent much of my twenties travelling, that journey was unique in so much as it was almost entirely unplanned. I went to the US to work on a documentary project that, soon after the crew’s arrival, was postponed when some key promised funds failed to materialise. With my ties to the UK cut for two months, and already in the US, I made the decision to hitchhike across the country, with California the destination that seemed most logical. The rest of this article is a more polished version of the speech I gave when accepting the award, announcing I would share the £5000 prize money with the American Civil Liberties Union, encouraging others to join in matching my donation, and also a detail – outlined in this Crowdfunder – that I felt unable to explain in the immediate and very public setting of making a speech for an award I hadn’t known I would receive.
There were many reasons for why the trip was difficult. Hitchhiking is an onerous exercise in causing repetitive rejection and suspicion; the roadsides where I slept lightly saw me disturbed by animals and other drifters; that I’d gone to the US for other plans meant – when things were rough – that I myself was unsure why I’d ever put myself in such a situation. As I remarked when given the award, it was strange to receive acclaim for a book in such a prestigious setting, having whilst writing it been frequently judged a beggar (“panhandler”), criminal, or one of the many miscellaneous homeless Americans. For all that it lacked romance, by the same token the journey helped strip some of pretence and myth from the contemporary US, leading us to the book’s subtitle: “hitchhiking through the state of a nation”.
