The Blond Boy in the Big Blue Bus
For Aidan M. Fitzsimons ’20-25, home is a cornflower-blue school bus. It’s 36 feet long and eight feet wide, with a T-444E diesel engine of legal drinking age. There’s a dreamy rendition of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” painted onto the bus’s left flank. The “Great Wave off Kanagawa” surges up on the other side, but frozen, as if someone pressed the pause button just in time to stop it from washing itself right off the wall. In its more boring, yellow, pre-Aidan days, this school bus could have held dozens of kids. Now, it’s home to around 350 of Aidan’s books, the live-edge redwood writing desk he built himself, his stove, his sink, and his queen-sized mattress. He hasn’t got a bathroom. He doesn’t need one: When nature calls, he steps outside to answer.
Aidan’s been living in his “Big Blue Bus” for the past five years and three months. He’s traveled around 180,000 miles across all 50 states, poured a bottle of Mount Hope Bay water from his native Massachusetts into the Pacific Ocean, and hitched a ride with an estimated 900 different drivers across America.
Now, at 26, he’s parked his bus in the backyard of a chill dude in Phoenix and returned to Harvard to finish out his senior year, just weeks from finishing his Social Studies thesis, “E Pluribus Unum: The Dream of Democracy.”
“This is just a brief hiatus,” he tells me. “I can’t wait to go back to my bus.”
Aidan is wiry and nimble; he’s got a tree-climber’s build. When he spots you from across the room, he’ll probably stick his tongue out. “Cheers!” he’ll say when agreeing or assenting to something. He’s got a long, blonde Jesus mane and is happiest barefoot. If you trace his bare footprints back a few years, running the film of his life in reverse-motion to the period before the Big Blue Bus, you arrive at Aidan’s starting point — Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel, “On the Road.”
Aidan read Kerouac’s book during the spring of his freshman year. “I was like, wow — people used to just stick their thumbs out and cross the continent for free?” he says. “I was really struck by that, because it feels like people don’t have real adventures anymore. Kinda feels like we’re very risk-averse.”
But “risk-averse” wouldn’t be the word to describe Aidan. “Spring 2019 — that’s my junior spring — I dropped out because I wanted to pursue hitchhiking,” he says. He’d gotten his first taste of hitchhiking the summer after freshman year, when he spent “two months doing a big, zig-zagging loop around the country,” in an attempt “to see as much of America on as little time and money as possible.” But something was brewing besides his hunger for hitchhiking: “I wanted to write the Great American Novel. That was my dream,” Aidan says.
He envisions the novel as a uniquely American cocktail that combines “real world adventures and other representative characters and nature and stuff” and then weaves in “all the best of American philosophy and literature.” From the desolate Utah deserts to the Smoky Mountains of Dolly Parton country to the white steeples of New England to the “tall palms like Truffula Trees” of Los Angeles, Aidan soaked up America’s natural beauty, a landscape spectacular to the point of terror. He gulped down the works of America’s literary grandfathers like a desert wanderer at an oasis — Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau — and wrote poetry, stories, and essays of his own.
One time, lost somewhere in the dry depths of Arches National Park in Utah, his desert wandering became abruptly, horrifyingly literal. He’d wandered away from his backpack, climbing red rocks and exploring, when night fell in a sudden dark slump. He used his phone as a flashlight; it died. Darkness and dehydration bit into him.
“I’m feeling delirious,” he says. “I end up curling up in a ball in the sand, just hoping to survive the night.” Even though he’s sitting right next to me, smoking an American Spirit and freezing his butt off on this bench overlooking the frozen Charles, I’m still afraid for his life. “And I totally survived!” he exclaims. “I was like, ‘Wooooh! I’m alive!’” Irrationally, I have the impulse to slap him five and also just to slap him.
Again and again, while trying to observe America from the background, Aidan ended up thrust into the foreground. “I thought I was gonna become the writer, but I became, without realizing, the character instead,” he says. I ask him what he found out about our wacky nation. “I think I found out that people are good,” he tells me. “Americans are really good and kind.”
He tells me about a girl in Kentucky who made a six-hour round trip out of her way to get him to the meeting point of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Aidan tells me about Skooliepalooza, what he suspects is the largest convergence of vehicle-dwelling nomads on the planet. Every January, thousands flock to this “big, anarchic city” in the Arizona desert in their school buses, vans, converted ambulances, and RVs just to “shuffle around and do drugs and dance in the dust.” Aidan describes it as “the densest walkable city in America that has stars that crystal-clear and perfect.” In a piece called “Skoolie Sunset,” posted on his Substack, “Beatin Paths,” he writes, “Every evening, hundreds of nomads climb onto the roofs of buses and other rigs to watch the sun go down below the mountain horizon. The moment the last shred of orange appears, we all start howling like wolves.”
Aidan allows that hitchhiking is not without risks — and it takes a huge vibration to make Aidan’s danger seismometer jump. “99 percent of people are good,” he tells me, but just to set his own mind (and his mother’s) at rest, he has a policy of asking every driver he hitches with if he can snap a photo of their license plate and send it to his mother before climbing in. Generally, the drivers are all for it. But even the best insanity sieve is fallible.
One time, standing in the shoulder of a road in the Ozarks, Missouri, looking for a ride to Springfield, he watched a beat-up car pull up. Inside was “a woman, 50s, short blonde hair. She’s got bright purple eyeshadow and eyeliner, bright purple lipstick, and bright purple nails.”
“Are you armed?” she demanded. No, he was not. “Okay,” said the woman, reaching down. “Well, I am!” And she whipped out an enormous pistol out of “an ankle holster or God knows where.” The gun was purple, sparkly, bejeweled.
One thought buzzed at the center of Aidan’s brain: “If this chick sneezes right now, my chest explodes and I die. Like, that’s crazy.” He ended up accepting the ride anyway.
To Aidan, accepting rides from strangers — even purple-bedazzled, trigger-twitching ones — is a way of thickening the fabric of American democracy.
“I actually don’t think you can have a democracy in a culture where we can’t hitchhike,” he says. I ask him why. “Because in a democracy we all sort of accept that we’re intrinsically related to each other and that we have power over someone else’s life. Someone’s vote, far away, influences my life,” he says. “And so in a sense, we’re already all in each other’s hands.”
Aidan seems frustrated by the flattening effect of stereotypes, especially in politics. Trump supporters are no exception. “They’re kind people,” he says. “They just have different media sources and different tribal memes. What they actually had agency over was choosing to pull over for the fucking bum on the side of the road.”
Aidan’s enthusiasm for all of America’s parts and people is a unique flavor of patriotism; for him, curiosity can be the beginning of love. “There’s so many good, beautiful threads in America,” he tells me. “Some stuff about America has revealed some stuff about what it is to be human, or what it could be to be human.”
I wonder just what this stuff is. We’ve migrated to his dorm room to escape the cold, and I’m sitting on the edge of his mattress, sitting directly on the floor (he ditched the school-issued bed frame long ago to be closer to the ground). I’m looking around at the paperbacks packed onto the shelves, the maps of California and colonial Rhode Island on the walls, when a whiteboard by the bed catches my eye.
In blue, orange, and teal, Aidan has written down some lines of his own poetry: “The small good I can do I will try … God is forged of such smallnesses in love … What light I am blind to is still light.”
Maybe this is a taste of the stuff he meant.
—Associate Magazine Editor Clara Shapiro can be reached at clara.shapiro@thecrimson.com.