A Portrait of Contradiction

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Death of Upstate New York

This is a true account of a hitchhiking adventure I had in May, 2025

“I should be giving you a ticket. Hitchhiking is illegal in New York State.”

But he didn’t. His arm paused as he reached out to give me back my ID. I could tell he had a lot of questions, but he didn’t know where to start. “It’s a silly law,” he told me before turning away to the comfort of his black maria. The second cop was more intrigued.

“I’m going to take you to the edge of my district so you aren’t my problem anymore.”

I appreciated his honesty. As we sped along parallel to the Canadian border, I explained to him how I had ended up stranded in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, with only my bike and a cycling kit. I recounted my attempt to bike around the lake.

“What lake?” he asked

“Lake Erie through Buffalo and Toronto. Oh wait, sorry, Lake Ontario, not Lake Erie.”

I told him of my sickness—how I’d passed out on the side of the road while biking through Toronto. Luckily, I had fallen to the right, and when I regained consciousness 45 minutes later, I was pleasantly refreshed after my catnap in a velvety patch of grass next to a Timmy Ho’s. I explained to the officer how I had managed to get my bike stolen in Kingston. It had been my fault, a careless error no doubt spurned by my three day battle with nausea, vomiting, and vertigo—I was inside the gas station for 30 seconds tops, and when I came out, my bike was gone. I should have realized Kingston was a big city with lots of petty crime. I had tried to get a hotel room, but the peevish man behind the counter told me that without my ID—stolen, of course—I wouldn’t be allowed to stay in any hotels. I had wanted to cry then, but I didn’t. I don’t own many things. My most expensive possession is my bike, my second most my cycling computer, my third most my camping gear. In one fell swoop, I had lost my transportation, my identification, and my gear. As I walked under the streetlights of Kingston, I lost my dignity, too, as people catcalled me from dilapidated cars and sleazy drive-ins. My figure was wrapped in tight Lycra cycling gear, and my carbon-plated cycling shoes click-clacked on the unforgiving Kingston pavement. I made my way to an empty lot, trying my best to mitigate the brazenness of my new persona as a stripper cosplaying an Irish tap dancer. I curled up under some brush, careful to avoid years of accumulated cigarette buts, broken liquor bottles, and needles. Before the sun had a chance to rise, I received a call from the police. They had recovered my bike. I met them in an ocean of concrete under the lights of an islanded McDonald’s drive-through that floated in the expansive strip mall parking lot. All of my bags had been removed from the bike, and the derailleur had been kicked in, rendering the bike unrideable. The bike had been ditched, the camping gear being more practical than a broken bike to the unhoused people who had made off with my belongings. If they had known how much that bike was worth, they probably wouldn’t have left it on the side of the road. As the stars turned off and the sun began its march West, I began my march East toward home.

The cop interrupted my story.

“So they just let you across the border with no passport?”

He was jumping the gun.

“I’m not there yet, that part of the story comes next, sir.”

So I explained how I had hitchhiked to the Alexandria Bay Thousand Islands border crossing. The cop was fascinated that I was able to weasel my way across the border with no identification. He mumbled something about border security that I didn’t quite catch. As if kids clad in skintight Lycra sporting broken bikes and dashed hopes are the next big threat to US national security. The road across the St. Lawrence in Alexandria Bay is an interstate, so I’d received first-class attention with a ride in a police cruiser from the border into town. A couple of rides later, I landed on the side of State Highway 37 in the middle of this cop’s jurisdiction, where he had felt obligated to take me to Ogdensburg. I requested that he take me to the east side of town so that catching my next ride would be easier. He checked his laptop. So much for hands-free driving.

“Sure kid, I don’t have nothing else to do.”

We rode in silence for a minute. He kept looking over at me, confused by my character, intrigued by my story, and horrified by my lack of bathing. As I stepped into the midday heat, he reminded me not to hitchhike anymore. He must have forgotten that he had just agreed to drive me to a spot where it would be easier to hitchhike. I nodded and thanked him for the ride. Before he had the chance to roll away, I had my thumb out begging for my next ride.

Fifteen minutes later, a short bald man with a round face leaned over the center console of his car to get a better look at me out of his lowered window.

“Where you off to?” he queried.

He eyed the dried vomit plastered to the front of my cycling jersey, my unkempt hair, and the 600 miles of built-up grime on my legs from the gravel roads of Vermont, the Erie Rail Trail, and the backroads of Ontario. His eyes lingered on the DARTMOUTH written across my chest in all caps. Some of the tension in his posture dissipated. Sometimes, my Ivy League white privilege really helps me.

“As far East as you’ll take me. I’m not picky. I’m just tryna get to New Hampshire.”

He threw his Riverview Correctional Facility chef’s uniform into the backseat to make room for me as I contorted my bike to fit into the sedan’s trunk. “Huel” was embroidered on the chest of his uniform. Despite his efforts to shed layers, the New York sun was biting, and sweat stains ran down the front of his wife-beater. The sweet smell of sweat and empty soda cans was thinly veiled by his cheap cologne. The St. Lawrence popped in and out of view through the trees on the left side of the road as the man told me about his work as a prison guard and chef at a medium-security jail.

“They are good guys for the most part.”

The car ate up the road as he coaxed the vehicle to 75 in a 55.

“They help me in the kitchen, the ones that are well-behaved. We don’t get many predators. No murders or rapes. All that shit goes to Dannemora. We don’t have the security for that. Lots of drugs here. That’s probably what we get the most: drug busts. Dealers, users, enablers. Guys who made some mistakes. A lot of them get their life together here, and we try to help them with that. Some do college here even. We are pretty relaxed. When we do get perverts, I don’t let them in the kitchen.”

According to the State, Riverview Correctional Facility “offers an intriguing blend of the state’s urban environment and rural charm.” Huel seemed to agree.

“It’s a pretty relaxed place, not much happens. We are nice to the guys; they all mostly get along. We never have any problems. It’s not as bad as people think.”

He was a poster boy for the New York State prison system, a system that hasn’t historically lived up to the standards Huel was promising. His optimism painted a picture of a pretty little place, almost a commune, full of good old boys who baked and had play dates by day and read peacefully to each other by night.

This image contrasted sharply to the report given to the New York State Police just two days after I talked to Huel. A report detailing how Huel’s coworker, Melissa Dixon, had accepted bribes in exchange for supplying inmates with drug paraphernalia and weapons. I wonder if Huel knew that Melissa was having sex with some of the inmates. Was he aware of the rape allegations against her, or was he a blissfully unaware appendage to New York’s criminal injustice system? According to Huel, rapists couldn’t stay at Riverside. New York State agreed. Melissa now resides in a maximum-security prison on the other side of the bars.

“You want a Mountain Dew?” Huel said as he looked at me.

I was finishing my second bottle of Mountain Dew as we coasted into Massena. We glided through stop signs as Huel cataloged the death of Upstate New York.

“Nothing has changed, but people have left, and the town is different. Life here isn’t what it once was, but nothing has changed for me, really. People don’t want to build here anymore, nobody wants to live here, but I can’t imagine leaving.”

Through all his contradictions, Huel was right. Massena felt like the type of place where nothing ever changes. If you left Massena for a week and came back, things might seem radically different, but if you left for 10 years and came back, it would feel as if not a day had passed. The population has been decreasing for decades. The city is in the bust of the boom cycle as profits from industry and the local locks dry up. People are leaving with the money. Only the unemployment rate and crime rate have increased in the past decade, both by a measure of twofold. Massena is Huel’s hometown, but he had errands to run first. He needed weed. So did his underage son. We continued east.

“We do some geebs and dabs, my son actually got me into those things. My wife and I have always been smokers but last year I caught him smoking and he was ripping a dab. I couldn’t be mad. He’s 18 now. The new stuff is too intense, I prefer flour. But we smoke together sometimes. It’s fun to share that with him. We have a nice porch, and when it’s warm out, we sit under the street lights and talk.”

Even though weed is legal in New York for individuals who are 21 years of age or older, it is only available for sale in certain municipalities. Huel and the rest of St. Lawrence County have to travel East to the Akwesasne Mohawk Reservation for their marijuana needs.

I cautiously prodded, “Does it ever bother you that the people you guard are in jail for doing the same thing that you do all the time?”

He was quiet for a second as he leaned on his left arm against the open window and hung his right wrist loosely over the top of the steering wheel.

“Yeah, the laws are a lot different now. It’s not really that big of a deal anymore here.”

“But buying weed for your son could land you in jail right now. Some of the inmates at Riverside are probably there for distributing to underage kids or even just for using weed before it was legal here. You are part of a system that punishes people for the very thing you are doing right now. How do you feel about that? How do you think about that when you are around the inmates?”

Another long pause. “I don’t really think about it that much. Like I said, they are good guys mostly. They don’t all deserve to be locked up, but they are and I don’t really guard them that much. I just cook for them, man.”

I was wary of offending Huel. The power dynamic was palpable. I was a passenger in a stranger’s car. He either didn’t want to talk about it or he genuinely hadn’t thought about the issue in depth. He wanted to appear to be a man who is a cog in a machine with no autonomy. He wanted a hands-off approach to law and order—one that rendered him a chef, and nothing more. He’d never known anything different. Huel’s father worked in prisons his entire life. Now the old man sits on his porch and watches the world go by. Huel seemed to have little aspiration to do anything else. He’d worked as a prison chef since high school. His affinity for weed often left him plagued with the munchies. Being a chef was the natural solution to Huel’s pressing problem. Yet I felt as if I weren’t getting the whole story. He had a quiet intelligence to him. As we talked I observed flashes of curiosity and wit. It seemed improbable that this man hadn’t thought about his contradictory lifestyle. I pressed him again, but he shut me down.

“I don’t know kid. I don’t know.”

Akwesasne is a stoner’s paradise, complete with 27 dispensaries plopped along 4 miles of road. As we traveled east along State Highway 37, it wasn’t hard to tell where the county line sat. The pearly green gates of ganja heaven are well distinguished. Amid billboards for the Akwesasne Mohawk Casino resort, complete with twelve hundred slot machines and 130,000 square feet of gameplay, dispensaries flourish like a field of OG White Widow. Some like to keep it classy like Green Reserve and Grass Roots Dispensary, but some dispensaries like Buddabing, G-Buddz, and—my personal favorite—Another Damn Pot Store, are truly boundary-pushing establishments.

As we pulled into the parking lot of Sovereign Cannabis Company, I wondered how Huel had made his selection of dispensary in the weed utopia of Akwesasne.

“It has the cheapest shit and the dudes here know me pretty well.” He told me, matter-of-factly.

“You want anything?” He offered.

I thought for a minute but decided against it. I’d had six run-ins with the cops in the last 24 hours; I was bound for another one before I made it home, and I didn’t have a great place to put any contraband.

“You want another Mountain Dew?”

I shook his hand and thanked him profusely for the ride. I wrangled my bike out of his trunk and walked across the parking lot, Mountain Dew in hand, as Huel disappeared through the tinted doors of Sovereign Cannabis Company, his quest for kush nearing its completion.

Disclaimer: Huel is a pseudonym.