Hitchhiking

I miss hitchhiking, or at least I am nostalgic about hitchhiking. Not that it was such an enjoyable experience, frequently cold, wet, dark or interminable, but there is something lost in a world where hitchhiking is more rare than skydiving.

Hitchhiking bespoke an unspoken public trust that it was safe to be out and about. Both the hitchhiker and the driver trusted that a kid on the side of the road in suburbia wasn’t a serial killer, and standing by the side of the road wasn’t an invitation to predators. Today we have a more inward, cocooned mentality, defensive and relating electronically rather than informally with strangers. We have been told and tell our children so often not to talk to strangers that we have come to believe it.

Hitchhiking peaked in the 60’s, and I did very little after 1970, the last time I was carless. But, for 10 or 12 years the thumb provided frequent, if irregular transportation and minor adventures.

I started hitching around town when I was 12. It wasn’t very unusual, and in fact having parents for chauffeurs was perhaps more unusual. My first interstate trip was in the summer I was 17. The rides didn’t always come, and the worse the weather the less likely was success. I got groped once, but just got out of the car.

In August 1966 a friend and I bummed across the country and back returning with lifetimes of stories. One morning we woke up at the Denver YMCA, having discovered “3.2” beer the prior night. Almost the first car to come along was a cop who kicked us off the road. He was nice about it, as were the next cop later that day who did the same thing. The third time the cop was pretty helpful, as we had inopportunely been dropped off in front of the state prison at Canon City, a really bad place to hitch. He checked our id’s over his radio and drove us downtown, suggesting that perhaps we could take a bus. So bus we did, the 4:30 PM from Canon City arriving in Albuquerque at midnight. Now, in those days the Albuquerque bus station was right adjacent to Route 66, so at midnight we stuck out our thumbs, and sometime around 8:00 AM, a very bad night, we got picked up by a guy in a ’48 Chevy who was working his way across the country with a siphon tube. We bought him a loaf of bread and let him drop us off in the Arizona desert before he had to refill his gas tank.

How do I remember a conversation from 40+ years ago? “How long have you boys been in California?” the cop asked. “About an hour, officer”. “About an hour and already you want to go to jail.” No jail time, but we did learn that it was legal in California as long as 1 foot was on the sidewalk. Got to play by the rules. One time a guy picked me up in Sacramento on Tuesday afternoon and dropped me off in Boston on Friday morning.

So I have stories that they don’t have. On the other hand, as I write this one of them has just emailed from Australia, one is going to Mexico on Friday and the other one spent a semester in London, mostly traveling through Europe. So they have stories too. What I wonder is whether there actually is more danger hitching now than 40 years ago, or whether incidents get more publicity and we are simply more risk-averse. Is there more danger in the streets or only in our heads?