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"In February, 1940, just across the Mojave River, north of Barstow, California, I found some very unusual inscriptions on a highway railing. Names and addresses of hitchhikers -- literally hundreds of thousands of them -- are seen on rails and signs of all well-traveled American highways. But the inscriptions at Barstow were not merely names and addresses. There were only eight legible texts, written in pencil on the white paint, and I copied them all, exactly as they were written, even in the matter of punctuation, if any. And they are given in "BARSTOW" entirely unedited. They probably represent a good cross-section of American hitchhikers.

Seekers after free rides get to Barstow from the west very easily, but they don't go on easily because they have the wide Mojave Desert to cross. The next inhabited spots boasting more than a filling station and a night club are Las Vegas, Nevada, 157 miles to the northeast, and Needles, California, 153 miles to the east. Over these lonesome stretches rides are scarce, and Barstow becomes a hitchhikers' bottleneck. Only a hitch-hiker would have the instinct to know it, but this railing is one of the psychologically good places to get rides. It is just across a river bridge, not too far out of town for the passing motorist to be in a belligerent mood towards anyone seeking to stop him, and -- very important -- it provides a place to sit. Here the hitch-inscribers pass the long hours, if not days, waiting for the one lenient motorist, and improve their time scribbling on their seat. The railing thus becomes a bulletin board, a wailing wall, a matrimonial bureau, and fillip to a flow of the unconscious mind.

The final line of the eighth inscription reads, 'Why in hell did you come anyway?' Breathes there a hitcher who, on getting stuck in Barstow, never to himself hath said, 'Why in hell did I come anyway?'"

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