Tangle - PREVIEW - The Friday Edition: The drifter's lament. Written by: A.M. Hickman.

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

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.Ad-free podcasts are here!To listen to this podcast ad-free, and to enjoy our subscriber only premium content, go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was written by: A.M. Hickman and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Jon Lall.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of my take. Today, you're not going to get much of my take. 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 called Hickman's Hinterlands, which I highly recommend, arguing that America wasn't unreasonably expensive.

Americans themselves were simply demanding more out of their lives, he argued. They wanted to live in urban hotspots and seek out fancy apartments or big houses, and they refuse to take bets on up-and-coming areas. Hickman told his story through his personal lens. He resides in upstate New York in a rural dilapidated town that also happens to be incredibly cheap and quite beautiful. I love the story. It felt like a fresh narrative delivered in this wholly unique voice,

and 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, in 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 so 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 asked Hickman to record the piece in audio format,

so what you're about to hear is him reading the story that's going up in the Tangle newsletter today. Of course, as a reminder, the full piece is only for members. This is a Tangle member's only edition. So you'll be asked to subscribe at Read Tangle forward slash membership to unlock the full episode if you're not yet a member. With that, here's Andy Hickman, writing on The Drifters Lament. The Drifters Lament. from an apocalypse. In a 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 morale was looser still. At an early age, I cut myself adrift, or I suppose if I'm to be charitable with myself, I was cut loose by forces larger than I was. Adrift indeed, and above all, always a drifter.

Dottering from place to place, mumbling to myself, tippling madly, I live 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 upon 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 to conventions of time nor 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 any but the paltrous 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 upon 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 looks something like this.

I get into a brand new minivan with a family of Mormon missionaries in Oregon. In a misguided attempt to show their son what one who has, quote, unquote, failed at life really looks like, they find themselves aghast in how the young child delights in my zany adventure stories. The boy concludes the encounter by declaring that one day he himself will be a hitchhiker and a hobo. Father's brow furls with disgruntlement. mother looks sullen and depressed. They give me a $20 bill and a book of Mormon. They flash a weak smile and then deposit me on a rainy roadside.

Promptly, a glue-sniffing nutcase breaks for me. So I pile into his filthy coop where he regales me with racist, frenological theories and tales from his life as the owner of a pet rat. And the rat occasionally interjects from his pocket. And he swerves all over the glistening highway as he huffs his potent. glue from a paper bag, murmuring. Following a ride like this, I might find myself at a gas station or a truck stop, slurping on a chili dog, shoplifting a soda, or pilfering expired sushi from the dumpster, still cold. A 16-year-old girl asked me to buy her Mike's hard lemonade, and I oblige

so long as she gives me some extra cash for a 24-ounce malt liquor as her tax. I put the booze in an extra large slurpy cup, hunched myself by the door of the station, in a corner where the cashiers cannot see me. And I hold a sign that says, California. I hold the sign to communicate to pass us by that I am, in fact, headed anywhere but here. And in a few minutes, a man with a rose tattoo on his neck accosts me, screaming at me to get a job. Doesn't he see that I'm already working right now? Just seconds before it seems he's actually going to attempt to start a brawl with me, a lonesome-eyed cougar-esque blonde in her mid-forties grabs my collar and escorts me to her rumbling Camero, and we speed off. Just as we pull onto the on ramp at a worryingly sporty, 70 miles

per hour, I realize the woman is wasted drunk. But no matter, she is about to tell me her entire life story over the next several hours, including many jarringly personal and even clinical details that I'd rather not know. At midnight, she'll leave me to sleep beside some kind of cistern for cattle in a dusty agricultural town that I have never seen before. Then I wake, and I begin again. I may do something like this every single day for months on end. In actual fact, I did it for years on end. I hitchiked over 100,000 miles in a five-year period. I passed well over a thousand nights sleeping rough on the road, sometimes very rough. And beyond my five traveling years, I passed another three and all as a stationary bum in various college towns, sleeping everywhere from

people's couches to dorm rooms to makeshift encampments and bushes, or on riparian floodplains. I even slept for some months on an aluminum john boat that I turned into a micro-house boat, which the police later stole from me. So it was for me, the consummate drifter, dropout, vagrant, itinerant, and vagabond, and a man whose grasp on morality, life, labor, and mind was so profoundly loose, I'm sometimes shocked to remember that the atoms and cells that composed my body did not drift away from one another, just as surely as I drifted across the map of the United States of America. We'll be right back after this quick break.

To the well-adjusted denizens of the morally upright corridors of this country, those sterling souls to whom terms like malt liquor and dumpster diving could only elicit vague unease or acute disgust, My life was a damnable tragedy for a young, able-bodied fellow, especially one who's literate, never slack-jawed, curious and surely capable of some sort of productive behavior, to decouple himself entirely from all comfort, routine, and surety of good fortune. In order to pursue an aimless life of vagrancy is a waste of perfectly good human resources. And many times, such people approached me with some ambition to, quote, and put me in touch with various resources for people suffering from a plight like mine.

It was all very touching and frankly a little stupid. For rather than speaking to me as a fellow man or conversing with me about the finer details of who I was or why I was living as I was, I was almost always presupposed to be a tragedy. The visual cues were serious enough to nearly ensure that interpretation. But to my mind, my life was no tragedy. I rather enjoyed it. Of course, if I were ever to vocalize this enjoyment to those who sought to save me from my hellish plight as a homeless drifter, I would only elicit blank stares of bewilderment.

For such an admission would violate the narrative. But, in fact, more than having enjoyed it, I miss it. I miss being homeless. It is with immense fondness, wistfulness even, that I look upon my years, is a rough and ready vagabond. No doubt I'm nostalgic for my traveling period, partially because it liberated me from my crumbling rural hometown.

It isn't as if anything great was waiting for me back home. Instead of languishing there, I sought the thrill of exertion and adventure, and I got it in spate. Even years after the specific nature my drifting is taken a different shape, I cannot help but pine for my rough days again.

And though in many quarters, I am still expected to write about that period of my life as if it were all a dark and twisted travail of completely Dickensian proportions, I cannot write about it like that. The truth, in many ways, is that those years were among the greatest and most fascinating of my life. And how could this be? Because, in my own estimation, to be a vagabond is only, to be honest. For most of human history, life was one long. and apparently endless tenure of drifting vagrancy. The period of humans as rooted and civilized creatures is mostly a novelty of recent mark.

Indeed, great European estates would not exist if it were not for the daring fellows who ventured out from the cradle of humanity in Ethiopia. Our salt of the earth yeomen, our wise and old local characters and landmen of a most rooted variety, their own ancestors were drifters, just as I was, and as I still am.

The nomad has cast the very seed of the ones who scorn him and hunt him down. He's the rhizome buried deep within the roots of those who pity him, his kin and forerunners were the living precursors to settled civilization. And as true as any of this may be at the scale of all humanity at large, it is particularly true of America. The society formed upon the mysterious soil of the new world was, by nature, settled only by those who departed from the old country and more than this by men who swaggered around a barbarous and wild continent

continually for centuries. To this very day, the American is not a stranger to the U-Haul nor to the cross-country interstate voyage in search of his fortune. Many vigorous people, individuals as well as families, regularly pull up the stakes in search of their personal Eldorado elsewhere as a matter of course. So natural is this sort of thing that about a century ago, Julius Ivola, the pioneer of Italian fascism,

quite aptly called modern Americans, quote, the nomads of the asphalt. Sometimes wisdom comes from the most unlikely places. We'll be right back after this quick break. Yet even for our American mythos of pursuing opportunity, our collective psyche appears to be ill at ease with our natural proclivity to wander. The nomad identity in the United States is almost exclusively the province of those on the fringe. To adopt the term for oneself would be considered madness for a well-heeled American.

This is even true if he does, in fact, move constantly, whether pose to a truck driver or a doctor, an academic or a soldier, a ranch hand, or an oilman. The question, where do you live, expects an uncomplicated answer. At each interval of his sojourns around the country, it is imperative that the American everyman takes up residence somewhere, usually in houses that are built so poorly, they really might be considered semi-permanent structures by anthropologists and a distant future, as would be the other buildings in which his commerce is conducted. And there, at his residences, he keeps up appearances as a civilized, settled paragon

of sedentary contendment. This is true, even if the intervals at which he maintains fixity upon the map are exceptionally short and sporadic. At each of these intervals, too, should our nomad of the asphalt find himself face to face with a bona fide tramp, he'll act somewhat appalled at the day. destitution of a life so adrift. In so doing, he's genuine. His appalled countenance is no fabrication. Even if it creeps onto his face, the very minute he himself is loading boxes onto yet another U-Haul truck. And so it is that we find the modern Americans quote-unquote nomadism to not only be of

asphalt and interstate highways, but also of drywall, air conditioning, telephone bills, and pay stubs. Each somehow legitimizes his peripatetic nature. Each is a soothing palliative distracting him from the real shape of his condition. Yet even in the moment when the decidedly mobile American working man is face-to-face with the drifter, and even as he may dial the police

or as he may launch into a red-faced soliloquy about how the drifter should, quote-unquote, get a job, a strange obliqueness overtakes his gaze as he looks upon the vagrant, kind of discomforting recognition that rattles him. For what is he really looking at but a radically simplified version of his own ethos? What is he looking at but a naked depiction of the last breaths of his early American heroes, the settlers, the pioneers, the frontiersman he's watched on the silver screen

through so many old westerns and films? To him, the rambling vagrant is a sight that is at once repulsive and quietly, one that harkens to something deep and primordial within himself. wordlessly then the living the vagabond is a living breathing reminder of the essence of america's genesis and continued uneasiness on the map he is the foil the surface on which old ancient memories of nomadic journeys are projected viewed in this life the drifter's coarse haggard looseness upon the surface of the country is only a testament of a disturbingly honest variety now if all of this analysis might seem disturbingly self-aggrandizing coming from a vagabond, well, I'll state for the record one major obstacle to any self-aggrandizement I could derive from it. I quit that life. Though I continue to live on the road, life of the solitary vagabond is now behind me. It was anything but a sustainable way of living and traveling. In fact, it nearly killed me. But its unsustainability was not revealed to me for the reasons

that many who were removed from the drifter's life would imagine. On nights during flash Hey everybody. This is John, executive producer for Tangle. We hope you enjoyed this preview of our latest episode. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to readtangle.com and sign up for a newsletter subscription or you can sign up for a podcast subscription or a bundled subscription which gets you both the podcast and the newsletter and unlocks the rest of this episode, as well as ad-free daily podcast. more Friday editions, Sunday editions, bonus content, interviews, and so much more. Most importantly, we just want to say thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offering, so stay tuned. I will join you again for the Daily podcast. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y'all.

Peace. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Law. Today's episode was edited and engineered by John Law. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kayback and associate editor's Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saul, Lindsay Canuth, and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and John Law. And to learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at reetangle.com.