Harrisburg is a critical stop on Sal’s return from California: a place where the journey home becomes a trial of deprivation and where the road’s supposed wilderness shifts from the distant West to the familiar East. The city holds together two encounters—the wandering man Sal calls the Ghost of the Susquehanna and Sal’s own hunger-stricken night—before a ride carries him onward toward New York.

Route and Arrival

Traveling east in October, Sal reaches Pittsburgh by bus and still has 365 miles to hitchhike to New York. With only a dime, he walks five miles out of Pittsburgh, then catches rides in an apple truck and a large trailer truck through a rainy Indian-summer night to Harrisburg. The city is not a destination so much as a precarious interval on the way home: Sal is tired, nearly out of money, and intent on continuing east.

The road around Harrisburg brings him into contact with a man who says he is bound for Canada. Carrying a paper satchel, the older drifter walks quickly and talks at length about meals and places where he has received help, including charity homes and Red Cross offices. He also recalls finding a new hat beside a Virginia road and claims that the Harrisburg Red Cross has not lived up to its name. Sal understands him as a wandering hobo who travels on foot and sometimes asks passersby for money; for that stretch of road, the two are fellow bums.

The Susquehanna Encounter

Sal and the drifter walk seven miles beside the Susquehanna. Sal describes the river and its banks as frightening in the darkness, while the distant railway yards occasionally illuminate the surrounding cliffs. The man stops to search his satchel for a belt, uncertain whether he left it in Frederick, Maryland, or Fredericksburg, Virginia. His uncertain recollection and determination to keep walking give the journey an aimless, unsettled quality.

The promised bridge is never found. The drifter walks in the roadway despite approaching traffic, while Sal keeps to the ditch and fears the older man may be struck. After separating from him at a railway underpass, Sal changes his shirt and puts on two sweaters. A driver then gives him a ride back to Harrisburg and points out that he has been traveling in the wrong direction. Sal spots the drifter again beneath a streetlamp and asks the driver to stop and tell him that the road leads west, toward Pittsburgh and Chicago, rather than east toward Canada. The man rejects the warning and walks away; Sal last sees his small white bag disappearing into the darkness.

An Eastern Wilderness

The encounter alters Sal’s sense of the country’s geography. He had assumed that America’s wilderness lay in the West, but the drifter makes the wooded backroads of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia seem equally remote. Sal connects this landscape to earlier American travel and settlement, recalling figures such as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Daniel Boone, and William Bradford, as well as roads and cabins formed in an earlier, rougher world. Harrisburg thus marks a change in the journey’s imaginative map: wilderness is not confined to the open western spaces but also persists along the eastern rivers and roads.

Night in the Station and Departure

Sal spends that night on a bench in the Harrisburg railway station. At dawn the station masters throw him out. He is starving and has no money or practical knowledge of how to beg; the last food he can draw on is sugar from cough drops bought months earlier in Nebraska. Weak and fearing arrest if he remains another night, he leaves the city with barely enough strength to reach its outskirts.

His next ride comes from a gaunt salesman who believes that prolonged fasting is beneficial and says he has not eaten for three days. After about a hundred miles, the driver relents and gives Sal bread-and-butter sandwiches from among his plumbing-fixture samples. Sal eats them while waiting in the car during the man’s business calls in Allentown, then laughs from exhaustion and weariness. The driver eventually takes him to New York. Harrisburg is therefore both a point on the route home and the setting for a reversal: the return east offers no immediate safety, but the city’s ordeal ends with food, transport, and movement onward.