Dear readers,
About a year ago, a Tangle staff member introduced me to a writer named A.M. Hickman. He had just published a fascinating piece on his Substack, Hickman’s Hinterlands, arguing that America wasn’t unreasonably expensive — Americans themselves were simply demanding more out of their lives: living in urban hotspots, seeking out fancy apartments or big houses, refusing to take bets on up-and-coming areas. Hickman told this story through his personal lens; he resides in upstate New York (but, as you’ll see in a moment, is also a bit of a nomad) in a rural, dilapidated town that also happens to be incredibly cheap and quite beautiful.
I loved the story; it felt like a fresh narrative, delivered in a wholly unique voice. I began devouring Hickman’s writing — on class, on the birth of his daughter, on the death of his mother, on what it’s like to travel via bus through rural America, and even on his longing (and our shared affection) for the desert.
So, a few months ago, I got Hickman on the phone and pitched him on the idea of writing for Tangle. What stories was he turning over in his head? What piece did he want some help with from a sharp and unique editorial team? What was he working on next?
He was brimming with ideas, but one in particular caught my attention: a story about how he missed being homeless. Hickman had spent years as a kind of nomadic “bum” (his words) hitchhiking across America, and in a flourish, he described all the ways in which he felt more alive and more intellectually stimulated during that time in his life than any other. I was intrigued, and I pushed him for a draft.
Today, I’m proud to be publishing that story in Tangle, from one of my favorite up-and-coming writers in America. I hope to publish more of Hickman’s work in the future, and if you enjoy the piece, I encourage you to sign up for his newsletter and support his work.
Best,
Isaac
The Drifter’s Lament
A Report From an Apocalypse.
In the long history of the human race, a great deal has been said about “loose women” — but curiously, far less has been written on the topic of “loose men.” To say that I have suffered from a grave and ghastly “looseness” of not only morals but also of mind would indeed be true. Prone to intemperance and the mad flightiness of the rogue, I have so often lived what I could only describe as “a dissipated life.” Loose morals ravaged me, and my grasp upon my own morality was looser still. At an early age, I cut myself adrift. Or, if I am to be charitable with myself, I was cut loose by forces larger than I was.
Adrift indeed — and above all, always a drifter.
Doddering from place to place, mumbling to myself, tippling madly — I lived life as a foolish young buzzard lives, roasting under the desert sun or hiding from the dark, chilly rains of desolate coastal ranges. I did not work a job, nor did I retain a fixed address, own an automobile, or sleep indoors on any but the rarest occasion. Living life as a scavenger, I subsisted on discarded food, slept in ditches, engaged in petty malfeasances of all forms and flavors, and was hopelessly pinned down in a miasma of cynicism and snarling snark. With great gusto and reckless abandon, I hated “society.” So I left it; and for many years, a thicketed, greasy, unshorn beard hung down on my face like a filthy rag — the national flag of the dropout, the punk, the ne’er-do-well, the hobo.
This was my life — a life so loose that I could not even abide the conventions of time or of calendar. I was unregulated by every definition of the word.
Above all, the nature of my dysregulation was geographical. I suppose I fancied myself a sort of self-made guerrilla sociologist, and the nature of my research as such was chaotic in the extreme. My inability to remain in any place for all but the paltriest lengths of time was famous amongst those who knew me; I was both the king of the “Irish Goodbye” and the patron saint of the startling and unannounced arrival.
Raising my thumb lazily on the sides of the highways and roads, I hung my hat on fate — and for long bouts of time I rarely spent more than one or two days in the same place. I would enter any automobile that flung the door open for me, regardless of where it might take me or who might be behind the wheel.
And so I found myself mesmerized by the unfathomable randomness of the American byways, and found randomness itself to take on a sort of quasi-divine form. It became a primitive, pagan-esque religion for me; I reveled in the strange and often hilarious contrasts between my various hitchhiking rides.
It looked something like this:
