Saturday, March 31, 2007  24.) The Hitchhiking Years: The Storm
By the time I got to Ohio again, the freshness of Spring had
given way to the first signs of Summer. There was no question I
was also not the same. The person who had slept in a farmer's
field the night after my 18th birthday was significantly less
idealistic than before. Do you remember that? I had been
attacked by a dog in Buffalo and the next night in Ohio was when
I really dealt with the paranoid aftereffects, especially when I
heard a pack of dogs barking in the distance.  This time it was
around 5 weeks later and I was in southern Ohio heading East.
Yes, I was much more used to being out there. My first major
hitchhiking trip had been from Massachusetts to Florida and back
on Spring Break earlier in the year when I was still 17, but
that was with another guy from my hometown of Dhahran, Saudi
Arabia. It's much different when you're out there on your own,
and I had gone through quite a bit. Of course, this account is
skewed because I mostly