Romain Coudrier: TMPC – The overview

“Tu marcheras à pieds, connard !” (TMPC) or “You’ll walk on foot, asshole!”… This is the pleonasm growled at our level by a driver during our crossing of the Grand Ballon (Vosges massif, France) to reach Germany. These words still resonate after nine months of hitchhiking, tent on the back, across the Schengen area. If the author of these words only knew how lucky he has brought us! This excerpt provides an essential overview of the “TMPC” project. On the one hand, a certain atmosphere of the road. Inscriptions of previous hitchhikers on the signs, decapitated Barbie, plastic hand in the back of a car, search for a peaceful corner at nightfall… A theater of the absurd where everyone will see what he/she wants. But above all: the encounters along this same road. A connection is established (or not) with the drivers, observation games take place… Sometimes intimacy develops.

The encounter can be fleeting, as with these two drivers who greet and kindly pity the fate of the hitchhikers who find themselves on their route, before moving on. It goes a step further when someone indulges in a surge of solidarity and decides to trust two strangers. We then witness a whole choreography to make space in the vehicle and provide a “presentable” space for newcomers. Then come the portraits. Whether it’s a hard-looking man with his face cut by a shadow or a wolfdog displaying disconcerting serenity in the back of the vehicle, “there are a few encounters in life where truth and simplicity are best merry-go-round of the world”.

Exoticism is no longer on the other side of the planet but in the eye. The tribal tattoo of a driver with an imposing build and illuminated in blue by the vehicle’s sun visor. The electric pink clothes bearing the image of New York worn by a young woman who stops on the side of a road in the middle of the Sicilian countryside. The arm of a driver wearing a rosary and carrying a cigarette in the gap of a window… It’s simple and yet, after waiting or walking along a road it becomes a little carnival.

Sometimes it goes further. We build connections. Then the meeting ends and we part with a hug, where it all began: on the side of a road. Before looking again for a good place to spend the night.

“Walk by foot like assholes”? It was nice.