Three nights ago at a house party, I was talking to my friend’s boyfriend’s coworker’s new husband, who is from Mexico. We bonded over having traveled via informal rideshares; him there, me in Europe. In both cases, what was memorable about the people we rode with was how boring they were. He and a friend ended up with several conservative-seeming people, who had never met each other but who all stiffened in unison when the two of them began to discuss smoking weed. I had ridden in a car from Strasbourg to Brussels, with three complete strangers who within minutes discovered they all worked as tax accountants. They were amazed at the coincidence, and went on to talk for a long time about what to me sounded like the most boring job possible. I had just been promoted from intern to staff animator on a French kids’ show, but no one had follow up questions about that. I stared at the ceiling of the car and prayed for the ride to end.

I’ve been thinking about the state of hitchhiking in America since my friend Jeffery said, “have you heard the theory that Texas Chainsaw Massacre was partially funded by Ford Motors?” I said what are you talking about! He said that in the ‘50s and ‘60s, hitchhiking was so common that people would use it to commute to work. It was totally normal to wave down a stranger and get into their car, and violence by or against people seeking rides was relatively uncommon. Ford stood to benefit from an end to hitchhiking; it was allowing people to participate in society without having purchased a personal car. There are people who claim Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which came out in 1974, was created specifically to make hitchhiking terrifying to most Americans.

I believe most things I hear, and this one is easy to buy into. After the friend group in Texas Chainsaw Massacre parts ways with the hitchhiker who will eventually lead them to their violent deaths, the driver remarks, “that’s the last goddamn hitchhiker I ever pick up.” Many of my peers share the inherited attitude that riding with strangers is extremely dangerous, and have never tried it. Whether Ford funded anti-hitchhiking art or not, the 1970s seem to have been when a lot of people picked up their last hitchhiker.

I hate spending money. Every time I drop forty dollars to take an Uber, someone else is driving the same distance at the same time. I could be in their passenger seat, to no one’s detriment. Instead, we’ve all been cowed into only riding in our own cars or paying through apps for other equally unknown people to drive us.

I left the house party alone, even though I could have caught the C train with my friend to a second one. I was still thinking about how remarkable it is to be in a car with boring strangers. Are most people boring? And is that what hitchhiking could be like if everyone started doing it again?

***I’ve hitchhiked twice, and neither time was with a driver I would describe as particularly normal.

This past summer, my girlfriend Emily and I were driving to Maine and needed to get her car, which we’d left at a friend’s house in Rosendale, New York. We wanted to do this all in one day, and we were figuring out which bus to take. She kept reminding me there was a stretch of the afternoon when Dan couldn’t come get us from the bus station. I said, so what, we can figure it out when we get there. Part of me hoped we would have to hitchhike.

In 2018, I was leaving Ladies Night at the Woods in Brooklyn. I’d come alone and was leaving alone, three drinks in. Heading towards the Williamsburg bridge, I ran into my friend. I had a mild crush on her but hadn’t acted on it. She was wearing a denim vest and was with her much younger girlfriend, and I used her phone to capture photos of them, clutching each other and laughing. They’d have broken up and blocked each other as far as Venmo within two weeks. I was ready to go home. I was going to walk over the bridge.

***The friend group in Texas Chainsaw Massacre is on a day trip. They live in a world where hitchhiking isn’t scary yet, so when they see a scraggly guy with his thumb up, it’s not too tough of a decision to let him into their car. The thrill of a horror movie you’ve already seen is in knowing not only when and how each person is going to die but at what moment it’s going to be too late for them to escape their fate. There’s the comfort of the whole group being completely safe, laughing together inside a locked car with the ease of people who haven’t known terror, and a deepening dread as they make decisions that bring them closer and closer to the line past which there will be no going back.

***In Rosendale, Emily was on the fence about hitchhiking. Our other options were waiting for Dan to be free to pick us up, which would lose us hours of daylight driving, or haggling with the various taxi operators listed on Google, none of whom were anywhere near us, and so would take half an hour to even show up and then need fifty to sixty dollars for the eight minute ride. She agreed to “let me try this,” and I walked to the edge of the road.

I thought the minute my thumb was in the air cars would be slowing down and fighting to drive us to Dan’s house. We’d have our pick of who seemed like the best fit. The reality was that people weren’t stopping. Every car that passed, I pictured what I must look like to them and winced.

After about 20 minutes of this — Emily joining me for parts of it and then backing off to stand with our bags at the picnic table — a woman who’d been in the parking lot for a while approached us. She’d been waiting to see her friends off on the bus that had just departed back to New York. Where did we need to go? We followed her to her dark green sedan and she popped her trunk so we could put our bags in.

***In 2018 Williamsburg, I’d said goodnight to my friends and was walking alone when a man fell in step beside me. He asked in a soft voice what I’d thought of the music in there. I used to hate answering questions about music. I said what, I don’t know, it’s good I guess. My friends and I would laugh sometimes about how Ladies Night at the Woods always has a few guys who don’t know it’s a lesbian night. I figured that’s what this was.

Then he said, “where are you going? Can I drive you?” I said I’m good, thanks. He said, “Please. I can take you where you’re going. I really can’t be alone right now.”

***Amy, the woman in Rosendale, was conversational, and we learned we’d all spent time in Utah. Emily and I were there for four days last summer while on the way to California, and Amy, who left Brooklyn years ago to become a farmer, had gone there for an agricultural training program. We all agreed that Utah has the best landscape in the world and the worst, most tense people. The guy managing her work had been vehemently racist and sexist and would go on long tirades daily. She decided to report him to the program, even though she didn’t expect it to amount to much. It’s a small community and people look out for their own. I told her I think that is so brave and cool.

Now, she and her husband work farms in Rosendale. Her mother-in-law even lives on the same road as Dan. I was amazed at the coincidence, and I still regret not trying to stay in touch.

***The guy driving me over the Williamsburg Bridge was less chatty, but when I asked him what he did he said he was a park ranger. I said, I’ve never met a park ranger. How do you get into something like that? He said that honestly, it’s mostly guys who wanted to be cops but didn’t make it. I turned to him laughing. Seriously? Isn’t it so easy to become a cop? Like don’t you barely have to be able to read? I can’t believe the parks are full of wannabe cops. That’s so dark! He kept his eyes on the road, but the skin under them pulled tight and I watched him decide what he was going to do next. He exhaled through his nose and I turned my face to the widow. When we got to the other side, I said here is great.

***The first Texas Chainsaw Massacre victim spends a lot of time outside of the house where he will be killed. The sun is shining down and his girlfriend sits on a tree swing. There’s a period of time where he can still move away from it all, but he decides to walk into the house. Once he’s past the staircase it’s way too late. A large masked man with a chainsaw is waiting for him, and he’s dead in moments, kicking off a chain of events where the rest of his friends are drawn in one at a time to be dismembered and killed. It’s easy to imagine doing things differently, or making better choices, and it’s grim to think that what they’re going through is the price of a few bad calls made while being reflexively open to strangers.

***I walked from my friend’s house party to the F train, still thinking about ridesharing in other countries. I was tired enough to want to be driven, and Uber said the rates were “lower than usual,” but I checked and they didn’t feel very low. I pulled my jacket closer and thought about how unfathomable it would be in America to get into a car with someone boring. Because hitchhiking is so stigmatized, socially median people don’t do it.

Lots of people daydream about leaving Brooklyn to farm or imagine they would stand up to a racist boss, but Amy’s actually done both. She’s the kind of person poised to let two women semi-stranded at a bus stop into her car. Someone who proactively lives out their values, even when it isn’t convenient or safest to do so. Trophy for Amy! The Williamsburg guy was at a different extreme: a failed cop experiencing feelings he couldn’t hold on his own, and no one to call, and so had taken to roaming Brooklyn for any woman willing to get into his car and be a distraction. Once we were crossing the bridge, his plans for us weren’t clear to me and might not even have been to him.

Both sides of hitchhiking — picking up and getting in — are popularly considered highly dangerous, so if you do participate in it, you’ll encounter someone who is, for better or worse, exceptional. No tax accountants! I took out my notebook on the subway bench and wrote “Americans are denied the experience of riding in cars with boring strangers.”

My train was still five minutes away, and I wished it would come faster. The teens on the bench next to me were rowdy, jostling each other and shouting while others ran to the end of the platform and back. A man also seated on the bench had stood up and moved away when they got loud. I decided I’d get into a different car than them when the train came. Then the girls were in front of me, pressing in and yelling, and one grabbed my notebook. I yanked it back and they all began hitting. I rose to my feet or was pulled and the biggest one was moving me in the direction of the tracks, so I yanked us all back against the wall and sunk to the floor covering my head. Between kicks I got back on my feet, but I wasn’t holding my bag anymore.

***Not everyone dies in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The final girl crashes through the window of the house in a moment of confusion among her captors and takes off, wobbling, on foot. They’re still after her, but she makes it to the road.

I said give me my bag. My phone wasn’t in it. They ran around me yelling, towards one platform exit and then the other. I staggered towards one of the two grown men who stood waiting for the same train and said please, I’ve just been mugged, can you call 911? Now, can you dial. Please. You need to dial faster. Right now. He was holding his phone but not dialing, just staring not quite at me, and then the teens were running up on us. I moved past him to the second man and said please help me. He said “I don’t have a phone.”

When the final girl reaches the road, an eighteen wheeler is charging towards her. The driver notices that a woman is covered in blood and screaming and slows the truck without a second thought so she can get in. The chainsaw-wielding man starts to saw through the truck door, and so he and she run down the road together, where they’re picked up by another stranger in a car and ferried away from the scene. As quickly as an encounter with a stranger kicks off the whole nightmare, another set of strangers passing by at the right time puts an end to it.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre is striking as a depiction of just how bad strangers can be. The most deranged person you’ve ever met could be around the next bend in the road! It’s safer to just not open your car door, or to skip the subway and call an Uber if it’s late at night. But exceptionally good and exceptionally malicious people are both far outnumbered by regular people standing around or passing by. For everything that the characters go through in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, they still live in a world where strangers don’t hesitate to get involved.