HAILSTATEBEAT: The Hitchhiker's Guide To Starkville

Emmanuel Lauwers had been to the United States before, but only on brief trips to San Francisco and New York City. They were great cities, certainly, but he didn't feel like he'd really had the full American experience. So for his next trip, Lauwers flew from his home in Liege, Belgium to the starting point of his American adventure in Dallas, Texas. The plan was straightforward: hitchhike through the country all the way to Chicago where he would take a bus to Toronto and fly home out of Canada.

The journey was going smoothly for a while. From Dallas he made his way to Houston, and after his visit there he managed to get to New Orleans with little trouble. From New Orleans, Lauwers was headed to Memphis. The rides he was able to catch took him through Jackson, Mississippi and got him onto I-55, leaving him with a straight shot to Memphis.

And then his last ride dropped him off at a tiny gas station on a stretch of 55 between Jackson and Winona that was surely the inspiration for the term middle of nowhere. That's when Lauwers's always-present optimism began to wane. It's not that he was worried people wouldn't want to pick him up. He was worried there wouldn't be any people to pick him up.

Meanwhile, Mississippi native Hays Stephens was on his way from Yazoo City back to Starkville, Mississippi. A Mississippi State fan his whole life, he was trying to get to town in time to catch the baseball game between his Bulldogs and the Florida Gators, the opening game of the last home series of the season. Somewhere in the empty stretch of highway between Jackson and Winona, Stephens pulled over at a tiny gas station to grab a few things from the convenience store.

That's when he saw Lauwers.

"He had a sign that said, 'I'm from Belgium. I'm hitchhiking across America,'" Stephens later recalled. "I said, 'Man, c'mon. Get in the car and let's go.'"

The two young men picked up a steady conversation as they drove along, and it didn't take long for Stephens to feel sure he was safe. He hadn't picked up a dangerous man – just a curious one.

Lauwers went on to tell him that his goal was to see the real America, not just the big cities "where all the people go and the tourists take pictures." Halfway through the ride, Stephens had an idea.

"Man, if you really want to see real America," Stephens said to Lauwers, "come with me to Starkville and we'll go to this baseball game. If you're not in a big hurry to get to Memphis, just stay with me in Starkville tonight and I'll take you to Memphis in the morning."

An hour later, Emmanuel Lauwers was hanging out in the Left Field Lounge eating sausage, making friends and watching a school he'd never even heard of beat the No. 1 team in the country, helped by a home run that landed just a few feet away from Lauwers himself.

Unsurprisingly, Lauwers was surrounded the entire night once people started hearing his story. At one point Stephens even apologized for introducing him to so many people.

"No," Lauwers said, "I just went from a homeless guy to a famous guy. No one even wanted to pick me up. This is great."

Wherever he went, Lauwers was being given food and drinks or getting offers to arrange rides and places to stay along the way. Everyone wanted to meet him and hear his story first hand, while nearly all of the new friends he made tried to convince him to stay another couple days for the rest of the series. If you think this is fun, he was constantly told, you should see what it's going to be like on Saturday.

"People here," someone said to Lauwers when he remarked on the kindness he'd been shown in Starkville, "people in the south, regardless of any perceptions, care about people."

"It's so unexpected," Lauwers said. "It is definitely a community which makes it more easy to talk to everyone and meet everyone. It's been really fun."

Starkville was never the plan, though Thursday night at Dudy Noble Field was, in a certain way, always the goal. He got to see a piece of the country that most certainly was not on his itinerary and have an American experience he was quite thrilled to stumble on, a surprise look into a classic college town.

"It's really cool," he said. "It's really the picture you make yourself of an American campus. There's this stadium and all of these people running by the water and people waving their colors. It's very cool."

Plus, he got to see a good baseball game.

"I don't know much about the rules," he confessed, "but I got that we won. So that's good."

Mississippi State University Athletics

HAILSTATEBEAT: The Hitchhiker's Guide To Starkville

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