I found Halvorson and Orange Acres through CouchSurfing.org, an online social network that pairs travelers who need a place to stay with total strangers who don't mind putting them up—for free. It's hardly a new concept: Mennonites, Mensa members, and Esperanto speakers all have their own free travel clubs. And since 2002, Hospitality Club has brought a more wide-open approach through the internet. But the former are all confined to niche demographics, and the latter has been slow to take off, owing, perhaps, to its Geocities-chic interface. CouchSurfing is slick, aspirational (its slogan used to be "Creating a Better World, one Couch at a Time"; the current one is "Creating Inspiring Experiences"), and growing fast.
Since its inception in 2004, the site has swollen to 3.7 million members in 249 territories and countries; it touts 6.6 million "positive experiences," a metric it tracks through a self-reporting survey system. Media reports about travel-networking sites like CouchSurfing—and there have been a few—typically present it as a portal for backpackers and study-abroad types looking to see Europe on a budget, an à la carte youth hostel for the Facebook generation. (...)
Part of the appeal of CouchSurfing is that it offers you the luxury of choosing precisely the kind of person you're looking to stay with (provided they'll have you, of course). You can seek out specific hosts—a college senior, a senior citizen, an urban farmer, an actual farmer—with the ease of picking heirlooms at a farmer's market. It's an advantage that hitchhiking never had.
And hosts talk openly about traveling vicariously through their surfers. Bud and Carol, a near-retirement-age LDS couple in Utah, had us sign a guest log articulating (among other things) the scope of our trip, along with a written guide to our hometown. They don't travel much themselves, but their kids do, and so they host as many travelers as they can as a form of karmic insurance. In Mississippi, we stayed with an Air Force vet from Seattle working as a contractor at a Naval air base. He'd given up on meeting new people in Meridian—how could you, unless you joined the Rotary Club or a church? For him, hosting surfers was a way of keeping in contact with folks like himself.
Bill, our host in Duluth, described himself in his profile as a Zamboni operator and freelance detective. In reality, he manned the graveyard shift at an assisted living facility and supplemented his income by donating plasma on the weekends. With the decline of the Iron Range, he explained, blood was now the city's largest export. This was also false.
Greeting us on the front steps of a Victorian apartment building overlooking Leif Erickson Park, he cuts a distinctive figure—aspiring mutton chops and a shock of rusty-brown hair framing a pair of beat-up glasses held together by masking tape. His neck cranes down and then back up when he walks, as if he's ever battling an invisible torrent of sleet; the lazy eye almost seems superfluous.
In anticipation of our arrival, he's sorted through a dumpster for an extra set of couch cushions, bedbugs be damned. But, he warns, "I'm gonna have a rager tonight, kind of. Like it'll be pretty wild, so if you guys just want to stay with someone else, that's cool."
The rager ultimately consists of seven people, clustered in a kitchen. There's a strobe light in the living room, but no dancing. The whole thing, Bill concludes, would have been better if he could have scored some dry ice. Still, he shows us the side of the city you'll never find in a guide book: a Brazilian Laundromat with live parakeets; an abandoned ski jump with a panoramic view of the harbor; and the "graffiti graveyard," an I-35 overpass that's home to the city's finest underground art.
by Tim Murphy, Mother Jones | Read more:
Photo: sweens308/Flickr
