Couch Surfing

Columbus, Ohio (June 22):

I’m standing in the living room of another person’s house, watching other people play beer pong.

That’s an inauspicious place, I admit, to start a story, let alone a blog. I’d rather my in media res opening unfold elsewhere, and I don’t doubt that future posts will find me perched atop mountains and wading through streams. But this first story begins, ingloriously, with a scene instantly familiar to any college student: red cups; damp table; white balls skittering beneath crummy, crumby futons.

***

Couch surfing: that’s what I’m doing here in Columbus, crashing at the apartment of an Ohio State graduate named Ryan on my way out west.

The I in that sentence is actually a we: I’m accompanied by two road-mates, Amanda and Chris, whom I’m taking as far as Boulder, Colorado. Amanda is a friend: I met her studying abroad in Australia, and we’ve stayed in touch since. Chris, whom I hadn’t met until the trip, is Amanda’s soon-to-be research partner in Colorado, where they’re examining the effects of the pine bark beetle on the trees of the Rocky Mountains.

At the moment, Amanda is buried in a wilting armchair, wearing her customary half smile of private amusement. Chris, miraculously, has defied the stereo’s barrage by falling asleep on the futon, still sitting upright with impeccable posture. All partygoers are amazed; Unnaturally Tan Girl (I'm pretty that's the name on her birth certificate) hikes up her tube top and watches him, slack-jawed. Chris’ head flops around as though mounted on a slinky.

Ryan, our host, ambles over to check on our well-being. We’re good, we assure him, we’re great, we’ve never been better. He nods with satisfaction, presses another beer into my hands.

Amanda chose Ryan from among legions of prospective hosts on the Couchsurfing website, his principal merit being an abundance of sofa space. He’s hosted couch-surfers before – including an Obama volunteer, which, he claims proudly, was "my contribution to the campaign” – and he seems genuinely concerned for our welfare. I’d assumed that he would leave us to explore Columbus on our own, but instead he’s acted as tireless tour guide, shepherding us to a cheap spaghetti joint and a bar called The Surly Girl, whose décor struggles to decide whether it wants to be pirate- or cowboy-themed. After dinner he shows us around the OSU campus, and I’m reminded of all those college tours, now five years distant: there’s the freshman quad, the new library, the lake that everybody swims in before the Michigan game.

Now he's taken us to this house party, about a mile and a half from his own cramped apartment. "You guys are next on the table, right?" he says to me and Amanda, his broad smile hinting at beer pong's implicit promise: that, given enough patience and ball-throwing aptitude, our spectatorship will materialize into an opportunity to get drunk ourselves.

***

Ryan is the kind of kid – smart, eager to please, his earnestness tempered by dry humor – that Amherst teems with, and the kind I’ve always found agreeable. (Ryan could be a sociopath, of course, for all I know about him, but when you travel you have little choice but to pass reflexive judgment upon people met only briefly. Superficially, then: not a sociopath.) The other partygoers, all OSU students, possess a pleasant familiarity as well; instinctively I pair each with a doppelganger fished from my pool of friends. Unnaturally Tan Girl drops to her hands and knees to chase a ping-pong ball, and Tight Shirt Dude stares with a lecherousness that he scarcely bothers to keep surreptitious. Save for the letters on the collegiate sweatshirts, I'm in Crossett Basement.

And it seems suddenly that entire scene has been staged for my comfort, to present a final reminder of home when I'm hundreds of miles west of my turf and heading wester. I imagine that, after I leave, Ryan and his friends will give up the charade they're acting out for my benefit and return to whatever arcane forms of recreation normally occupy their time, which are, I don't know, things exotic and quintessentially Ohioan. The sameness of our rituals is exactly what baffles me - somehow I'm amazed that college culture trumps regional differences. Our next two stops are in St. Louis and Lubbock; I wonder about the character of those places, about their citizens.

Thailand, with customs that feel now even more alien, hangs on the horizon.

***

The ball nudges my foot; I stoop to pick it up. When I stand I see I've been joined by a thickly-eyebrowed kid with whom I exchanged a few pleasantries earlier.

The kid's drunker now than he'd been then, and without any preamble he says, "I've heard Amherst pays its professors like a hundred and twenty grand a year."

"Some of them, yeah."

"Damn," drawls the kid, his voice thick with disgust and incredulity. "And that they work, like, three hours a week."

"There are probably a few like that," I admit. We both tilt back our beers and contemplate this state of affairs. When I lower my can, he's glaring at me like I'm personally responsible for this outlandish pay structure; which, insofar as I've provided Amherst four years' worth of tuition, I am.

"Fucking bullshit," the kid almost snarls, and stalks away.

***

We're outside. It's late, almost three, and I'm standing on the lawn, waiting for Ryan to take us home. Amanda and the finally conscious Chris are perched on the porch steps; other people, whose names I've finally gleaned (ironically, an hour before I never see them again), have come outside to get rid of their cigarettes.

I'm talking to a guy named Alex, a friend of Ryan's with a beleaguered, world-weary air that might be an affectation. Alex has just finished telling a very elaborate story about the crazy things he almost did during his last mushroom trip, eg, nearly jumping out of Ryan's bedroom window. "I think it probably would have been high enough to kill me," he speculates, with apparent indifference. Even if his good-humored melancholy is an act, it's still pretty amusing.

Now he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a black leather-bound notebook and a black pen. "You know what?" he declares, and thrusts the writing materials at me. "Write down your address." He beckons to Chris and Amanda. "Couchsurfers! Give my your addresses."

"You carry this all the time?" I ask, taking the notebook.

Alex nods earnestly, and somebody from the porch shouts, "Check out his handwriting! He has fucking incredible handwriting. Fucking... Declaration of Independence handwriting."

I flip through the notebook's pages of tidy, geometric capital letters. "It's really not that great," Alex says sheepishly.

"Anyway," he goes on, "I'm going to write you guys letters. I just bought fifty envelopes and fifty stamps, and I'm going to write fifty people fifty letters. And I really want to send some to you guys. You're the best couchsurfers Ryan's ever had." His mouth is serious, but his eyes are creased by a smile that might be warmth or might be bullshit. I can't tell, but I dutifully print:

Ben Goldfarb
National Parks Service, Yellowstone NP
WY (don't know zip)

"I better get one," I say. The whole thing is absurdly gimmicky, like the movie in which Haley Joel Osmont goes around committing random acts of kindness, but Alex assures me he'll write, and the idea of receiving a letter in the Wyoming woods from a complete stranger appeals to something literary in me. Amanda and Chris sign the notebook, and Alex looks back and forth between us, nodding and grinning and repeating, with alcohol-fueled enthusiasm, that we're all going to be pen pals.

***

Ryan comes back outside, and sees Alex holding the notebook. "Is this the letter writing thing?" he asks rhetorically, and rolls his eyes. Alex giggles, and I see there's no way any of us are getting anything in the mail.

"So, listen," Ryan says to we couchsurfers, apologetically, "the thing is, I really wanna get fucked up." Understandable, we say, totally, go for it. "So," he continues, heartened by our encouragement, "I'm just gonna drink some more and crash here, if that's cool, and you guys can just walk back to my place." He digs in his pocket for his keys and describes the route home.

"Are you sure this is cool?" he asks one more time, and his face is creased by worry - abandoning us is anathema to his interpretation of the principles of couch-surfing. It's cool, we say, and he smiles widely, burden lightened, and springs up the stairs and into the house. Alex nods a curt goodbye and follows him. We walk back to the empty apartment.