Sebastian Junger - Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

In the fall of 1986, just out of college, I set out to hitchhike across the northwestern part of the United States. Id hardly ever been west of the Hudson River, and in my mind what waited for me out in Dakota and Wyoming and Montana was not only the real America but the real me as well. Id grown up in a Boston suburb where peoples homes were set behind deep hedges or protected by huge yards and neighbors hardly knew each other. And they didnt need to: nothing ever happened in my town that required anything close to a collective effort. Anything bad that happened was taken care of by the police or the fire department, or at the very least the town maintenance crews. (I worked for them one summer. I remember shoveling a little too hard one day and the foreman telling me to slow down because, as he said, Some of us have to get through a lifetime of this.)

The sheer predictability of life in an American suburb left me hopingsomewhat irresponsiblyfor a hurricane or a tornado or something that would require us to all band together to survive. Something that would make us feel like a tribe. What I wanted wasnt destruction and mayhem but the opposite: solidarity. I wanted the chance to prove my worth to my community and my peers, but I lived in a time and a place where nothing dangerous ever really happened. Surely this was new in the human experience, I thought. How do you become an adult in a society that doesnt ask for sacrifice? How do you become a man in a world that doesnt require courage?

Those kinds of tests clearly werent going to happen in my hometown, but putting myself in a situation where I had very little controllike hitchhiking across the countryseemed like a decent substitute. Thats how I wound up outside Gillette, Wyoming, one morning in late October 1986, with my pack leaned against the guardrail and an interstate map in my back pocket. Semis rattled over the bridge spacers and hurtled on toward the Rockies a hundred miles away. Pickup trucks passed with men in them who turned to stare as they went by. A few unrolled their window and threw beer bottles at me that exploded harmlessly against the asphalt.

In my pack I had a tent and sleeping bag, a set of aluminum cookpots, and a Swedish-made camping stove that ran on gasoline and had to be pressurized with a thumb pump. That and a weeks worth of food was all I had with me outside Gillette, Wyoming, that morning, when I saw a man walking toward me up the on-ramp from town.

From a distance I could see that he wore a quilted old canvas union suit and carried a black lunch box. I took my hands out of my pockets and turned to face him. He walked up and stood there studying me. His hair was wild and matted and his union suit was shiny with filth and grease at the thighs. He didnt look unkindly but I was young and alone and I watched him like a hawk. He asked me where I was headed.