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Two summers ago, I began offering my couch to complete strangers. Even my most idealistic and free-spirited friends thought I was a little nuts.


"You're letting people you don't know into your house while you're sleeping?" is the typical response. "How do you know they aren't axe murderers?"


"Trial and error," I reply.


First came Peter and Lars from Frankfurt, then Rosaria from Mexico City, then Katy from Vienna, then Jonny Danger from Austin, and Jonny Danger's whining girlfriend, whose name, like many others, I've forgotten. I met all of them through the three social-networking websites I belong to, Couchsurfing.com, Hospitality Club and Global Freeloaders, each of which matches hosts with travelers who need a place to stay. The pairing is entirely voluntary, and there is no obligation to be a host or a guest. Users fill out profiles like those found on MySpace,

hoping that their taste in movies or their testimonials from fellow users will persuade their fellow members to give them a place to crash. Or, sometimes, even more.


I'd joined partly out of nostalgia for my hitchhiking-backpacker days, and frustration that I no longer had the money or time to travel — so I would let the world come to me. And it did. The variety of people on the site was astonishing. My L.A. apartment has been coveted by a fifty-year-old Pakistani chemical engineer, an evangelical preacher from Nigeria and a mother from Alabama who wanted to know how far I lived from the film studios in Hollywood. She hoped to launch her daughter's acting career from my couch. That I am still alive attests that most of these encounters have been pleasant and brief, and sometimes pleasantly brief.



Until Karine.


She emailed me in January. An artist from Marseille with kinky blonde hair, wrapped in a blue scarf from Tokyo, she was desperate for a place to stay. On the last leg of an around-the-world trip, she'd just driven down from San Francisco in a rented car and knew no one. When she emailed

that afternoon asking for a couch, I wavered. I was already hosting two couch surfers, a young Russian woman and an older Bulgarian man, and my house was at capacity. Already hesitant, I checked her testimonials, many of which implicitly suggested that she was unreliable, that she sometimes didn't turn up at her hosts' at all, a couch-surfing faux pas for which I'd turned down guests in the past.



Then I read Karine's blog, with its poems about "The Road" — like many French travelers, she was inexplicably mesmerized by Route 66, and a place called Zabriskie Point in Death Valley. If there was anyone who embodied "the world," I decided, it was Karine; she had been rolling through it for a year, picking it up like a snowball, and I wanted some of it. I wrote back that she could stay for a night.



That night we went to a party and came back to find my bed occupied by a snoring Bulgarian. We shared her air mattress. I woke and found her snuggled against me. Nothing else happened. But when Karine and I dropped off the other guests at the train station, we felt strangely like a married couple, relieved to finally have our space back. We got home, took one look at each other and tore each other's clothes off. After all that time sleeping in the same bed, the first time was so hungry it was almost awkward. In bed, Karine forgot all her English, and I my French. Neither was really needed, however.



A week later we watched Zabriskie Point, then drove out to Death Valley and had sex in the weird silence. As we sat half-naked in the dust I remembered the film we'd watched only a few days before. In a single afternoon, a young fugitive lands a stolen plane in the desert, meets a woman there and has an affair with her. At one point, the camera pulls away to reveal that the lovers are surrounded by hundreds of other couples, rolling around ecstatically in the dirt — an homage to free love, travel, and uncertain and temporary freedom.