Zach Hickson arrived in San Francisco to stay three years ago, at twenty-seven, because nowhere in America seemed more appealing at the time. The city was mild and fragrant. The streets on clear days had a liquid energy, and seemed to offer opportunities that he hadn’t had before. “It was a place where I could do what I wanted to do,” he told me recently. He began to call the city home.
Hickson was brilliant. He was brought up in a military family, on the gritty south side of Houston, with an I.Q. higher than both of his parents’. He struggled to fit in, got in some fights. When he was a teen-ager, he saw “Into the Wild,” the rugged adventure movie starring Emile Hirsch. “As long as I can remember, I just wanted to travel, and I was told it wasn’t possible,” he said. “I saw that movie and thought, There’s a way.” He left home at eighteen with his best friend, who had terminal cancer. They hit the road, staying no more than three days in any one place, because Hickson wanted him to see as much of America as possible. When his friend died, everything went dark for a while. Hickson kept travelling. He visited all forty-eight contiguous states, and, when he realized that he’d mostly seen just gas stations, he visited all forty-eight again, camping in national parks.
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