Hitchhiking

     I recall with considerable nostalgia the feeling of free-floating liberation while standing by the side of the road hitchhiking, studying perhaps for a considerable time the rocks at one’s feet, the café across the street, and the householder emerging from her door every five minutes or so, waiting for someone to arrive or just keeping tabs on me. Somehow, casting oneself to the mercy of chance, pretending for the moment to need nothing at all except the lift which cannot fail to carry the rider to the next experience.
     The decline of hitchhiking in the last fifty years surely signals a more general loss of cooperative spirit and a corresponding increase in suspicion and fear. Whereas people had once shared their vehicles in return for a social encounter, a chance at conversation, a chance to do a good turn to a stranger, they now think only of the chance of crime. I acknowledge that this possibility does exist, that either driver or rider might pose a potential threat to the other. Indeed I know someone who was killed while camping by the road alongside a man to whom he had given a ride. Yet prudence need not always mandate behavior.
     In my youth hitchhiking was commonplace. At key intersections there might be several travelers at once thumbing rides. Sometimes a handy telephone pole carried the comments of those awaiting a ride. College students and servicemen outnumbered drifters, I think, most of the time, but everyone moved on in the end, even the couples, even those with dogs. In the opening scene of Morris’s utopian News from Nowhere, a pleasant ferryman, brother to all, offers the narrator a ride, not for a fee, but freely in a spirit of loving cooperation. In the same way some years ago, “back in the day,” to use today’s idiom, a driver, incurring no loss and possibly gaining worthwhile conversation as well as a performing a mitzva, simply pulled over and inquired, “Where are you headed?” There is an entire visionary possibility implied in that gesture.
     I hitchhiked to college, though my parents sensibly offered to drive me to the train. Later I made what was called “autostop” in Europe and Africa where hitchhiking enjoyed a vogue sufficient to inspire pop songs by Karin Stenek in Poland, Anna Vissi and the Epikouri in Greece, and Patty Pravo in Italy, among many others. When I lived in San Francisco, owning no car, I set off on camping trips with my wife and daughter by thumb, and for years kept a permanent sign saying Berkeley on one side and S.F. on the other.
     I recall only one time that I really regretted accepting a ride. On our way to the Copper Canyon in northern Mexico, my wife, my daughter, and I enjoyed a day on a beach just outside of Guaymas. It was a place of marvels with shallow and calm water extending for several hundred feet, clear as glass, with plenty of fish and sea stars and other life. When we were ready to return to our hotel in town, we were gratified when a friendly car with several teenaged boys stopped almost immediately. It was not until we had seated ourselves, with a bit of crowding, that I noticed the youths were passing pints of tequila. I declined. The driver accelerated to an alarming speed. Fortunately, the distance was short and the danger soon past.
     I did, however, like all hitchhikers, meet many people of sorts I would have been otherwise unlikely to encounter. As a suburban kid, for me even encounters with friendly truck drivers, who might buy a stranger a cup of coffee, were novel, but some of the people I met were a bit more unsettling. More than once, gay men made a play for me. I recall one suited man in a huge car with sample cases in the back seat saying to me with a tired smile, “I’m a screw salesman, you see.” No one in my experience was any ruder than that.
     I did run into some nasty political sentiments, though. I once got a lift from a German immigrant who explained to me that Hitler was in fact a benevolent and heroic leader who had perhaps gone too far in his chastising of the Jews. It was only twenty years after the war, and I had never heard anyone speak favorably about Nazism. In southern Illinois a driver correctly pegged me as a college student and began playing redneck, baiting me with racist comments. He told me that a local drugstore still sold postcards of a lynching that had happened long ago, and his tone implied that those were the good old days. It was an occasion to keep one’s mouth shut.
     The joy I recall, though, was far simpler than meeting cranks and characters. Exhilaration arose from simply standing on the road’s shoulder, drifting with the river of time, for the moment like a mendicant monk, willing to accept whatever happened while wandering. Whatever the weather, whatever one’s luck, this sensation was unfailing.
     Hitchhiking had begun early in the history of automobiles when ownership of a motorcar was rare. Vachel Lindsay describes hitching in his 1914 Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. Surely the peripatetic jobseekers of the Depression vastly multiplied the number of people on the road, pushing the practice toward acceptability, and the servicemen seeking free transport during the war made giving rides patriotic. The heyday of the custom may well have been the late forties and early fifties, when On the Road made hitching hip and attracted travelers who perhaps could afford other modes of transportation but who preferred the romance and adventure of thumbing.
     By then, however, the nations’ interstate highway system was developing, and along with it the tendency of police authorities to frown on hitchhikers. From forbidding walking along the divided roadway, to bans on standing on entrance ramps, to a crackdown on hitchhiking anywhere, police who had always cast a dim eye on transients had an excuse to hassle people, searching them for dope and the like.
     This judicial suppression coincided with an increase in paranoia and a greatly increased suspicion of strangers, leading many to fear that hitchhiking must be associated with crime. In fact, though, this notion is simply untrue. The most comprehensive study of the question done during a period when hitchhiking was still common (the California Highway Patrol’s 1974 California Crimes and Accidents Associated with Hitchhiking) concluded “the results of this study do not show that hitchhikers are over represented in crimes or accidents beyond their numbers.” Prejudiced notions care little for evidence.
     Not only were hitchhikers subject to harassment from police; they also found far fewer people willing to give them a lift. In addition, car ownership had become almost universal, even among the poorer strata of American society, so those driven to hitching by necessity were not only small in number; they were also more likely to be oddballs or drunks or simply smelly.
     The Wobblies’ preamble states that they mean to form “the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” They felt they had a fix on what society should be like and they tried to make effective actions along that trajectory even while living under a predatory system that rewards only greed. In the sixties many felt that they, too, had glimpses of how to build an alternative arrangement based on cooperation and, dare I say, love, and they sought to realize these ideals with free stores, cooperative nursery schools, and food clubs, as well as political organizing in the era during which the Living Theatre raised the slogan “Paradise Now!” And hitchhiking surely has a place in paradise. The decay of hitchhiking is a symptom of the fragmentation of the human family. Our species, which gained its evolutionary advantage through cooperation, has unfortunately narrowed its sympathies, and we, are in my opinion, the poorer for it.