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.

Hitchhiking in France

     I don’t know if there was ever a golden age of hitchhiking, but I do know that it was challenging in Europe even forty years ago. When Patricia and I arrived in Luxembourg in the fall of 1970 on Icelandic Airlines, often in those days the cheapest transatlantic flight, we barely caught our breath, so eager were we to plunge into the uncertainties of the road. Ignoring the considerable charm of the small country where we had landed, the very morning after our arrival we stationed ourselves on what we, though mapless, figured might be a road that would eventually lead toward Paris, put out our thumbs, and waited for our adventure to begin. The adventure was not, however, at all swift to meet us. After several hours had passed, Patricia contrived to cut my hair with the surpassingly dull scissors attachment on our old multi-tool knife. We waited. The sun climbed. In spite of her craftsmanship, the poor tool with which she had worked may well have made my appearance more alarming yet. At any rate, we found ourselves waiting still. The sun had passed its meridian by the time some Algerians picked us up and, when they heard how long we had been by the side of the road, commented, “People are afraid of Charlie Manson.” (His trial had been sensational news a few months earlier.) This initial ride was our first taste of the great-hearted North African hospitality we were to enjoy so much in the months to come. The next morning I shaved. We kept moving, albeit in fits and starts.
     Some days later we selected a spot near the Cité Universitaire in Paris, heading, we hoped, toward the land of the troubadours and Châteauneuf-du-Pape. As in Morocco, Amsterdam, and Ibiza, we felt as though we were working through the itinerary of the hip version of a Cook’s Tour. Every utility pole in the area was covered by the comments of travelers like ourselves, not infrequently lamenting the lack of a ride. One said “What kind of a shithole is this?” though another counseled “When you feel down think where you are and where others are. Love and peace, Jane, Miranda, and Sher September 1970.” Many of our predecessors had, it seems, enjoyed ample leisure to linger in Paris and philosophize a bit before departing, and yet they had all eventually moved on, and we did as well, pausing in Lyons for a few days before heading further south.
     Hitchhiking puts more than the traveler’s schedule at risk. Part of its charm is marginality. In America and elsewhere, while it may be tolerated, it invariably attracts suspicion. From our post on the on-ramp of the autoroute, we saw the cops coming. Though we dropped our thumbs out of respect, the gesture was useless. We were apprehended, questioned, and driven to the local station where the officers diverted themselves, going through our backpacks thoroughly, inspecting each item and then passing it around their circle. They took the most curious interest in our belongings. The excuse may have been to search for cannabis or weapons or poached truffles, but they seemed to be simply passing the time of day on a slow afternoon. I am afraid their rewards were few. One was delighted to come upon some condoms which he held in the air, brightening the entire mood and attracting a flurry of witty comments. Finding a recorder, a gendarme asked Patricia to play, and she managed to pipe out a creditable version of the Marseillaise. We now had the officers on our side, but not until all were thoroughly bored did they issue a ticket, assess a fine, and kindly drive us back to the on-ramp to continue awaiting a ride.
     It was by then deep into the afternoon and we were pleased when, after a relatively short interval, a dark and gleaming luxury car, as though just arriving out of a dream, pulled to the side and the inviting door opened. We were not only on our way; we were in a factory-fresh Mercedes, just purchased by our driver, a small middle-aged Greek business owner with the pencil moustache of a leading man of the twenties or a villain of the thirties. To break in the new engine, he had decided to drive from his home in Germany to Spain and back. He was accompanied by an employee, the pleasant and strapping young fellow who had waved us in. The worker’s family lived in Barcelona, and the pair meant to stop there before turning around and heading back.
     We appreciated the car’s fine suspension system as we cruised through southern France. The entire side of an outbuilding set among vines was painted with the visage of Louis Pasteur along with his enthusiastic recommendation of wine as not only the “healthiest” but also the most “health-giving” of drinks. Our sightseeing was punctuated by increasing outbursts of imperial irritability from our driver who exercised the last full measure of capitalist privilege, while the younger man was quietly compliant and submissive, patient as well, as the day wore on.
     Among our host’s displays of ill-temper, he fulminated now and then against the hippies. In the fall of 1970 none were more aware than we that the crest in the masses now considering themselves in some way counter-cultural had coincided with a strength in the dollar, modest airfares, and a re-imagining of the old post-university Grand Tour, resulting in what must have struck Europeans as unseemly crowds of shabby semi-indigent young American tourists with backpacks. (Later, when we took a ferry to Ibiza, our cheap seats were in a large lounge where a Franco government channel played for hours on the television, warning the righteous Catholic Spaniards about the corruption that dissolute young addicts were bringing to their country. Patricia and I stood to the side while the other passengers, a working class bunch returning home for the Christmas holidays after working on the mainland, seemed to stare sullenly at the screen, glancing now and then at the American suspects before their eyes.)
     Like the Falangists, the Greek could not stand hippies. His vituperation didn’t settle down for a good ten minutes after passing another hitchhiking couple. I wondered why he had consented to pick us up (even more or less shorn) and decided that it must have been to acquire two new subordinates whose place in the divine order was beneath even his workers who, after all, had at least some connection to his own interests. Secure in the knowledge that his new underlings were not quite of the filthy sort that would soil his leather upholstery, he could proceed down the road in his new car, comfortably provided with cushions of every sort of superiority.
     It occurred to me that I might experience a crisis at the border. In my passport picture I had long hair and a beard. It seemed more likely than not that the border official would comment on the change in my appearance, perhaps even question my identity. Should our volatile host he see the picture what effect might it have? (Just to overdetermine the case, in addition to my mane, I sported in the picture a necklace and a handmade Paisley vest.) Might we find ourselves stranded in the middle of the night at some chilly high pass in the Pyrenees?
     As it happened, the border guards hardly glanced at our passports and we glided through into Catalonia, but the boss’s irascibility had been increasing along with his fatigue. He told the Spaniard he had to keep talking to keep the driver awake. If he couldn’t think of anything to say, he should sing. Even this stimulation proved insufficient. Suddenly he decided he had had enough. Pulling abruptly to the side of the road, he announced that we would sleep there, though we were within an hour of Barcelona. There was no discussion. We tried to settle down.
     Within a very few minutes we heard snores arising from the Greek, plangent roars that seemed to strive toward greater volume with each breath. Peeking back toward our rear seat, the Spaniard saw our eyes were open. He grinned. His eyes jumped from his employer to us and sparkled merrily. He began grimacing satirically. He could be browbeaten all day, but now it was the boss who looked ridiculous. He began pulling faces, then mimicking the snores with comic exaggeration. We gratified him with obvious amusement, making common cause against the rich man, the rich man who quite abruptly came to, realized he was being made a figure of fun, and, without a word, started the car again.
     He drove silently into the dark city. Though he had been offering us the hospitality of his worker’s house all day, telling us we would have some brandy, some snacks, a special bottle of wine, now those notions had vanished. He pulled to a curb in a neighborhood darker than a film noir.
      “Out! Out now!” he ordered. We obeyed, trying to exchange a warm parting look on the Spaniard to show that we were on his side, though we were relieved to be leaving his boss’s company. The Greek screeched away, and we pondered our situation. We had no idea whether we were near the city center or in the suburbs. There were few lights and less traffic in a neighborhood of large old buildings divided into flats around inner courtyards. Unsure what our next move should be, we considered our options. Unexpectedly, the Greek’s car came hurtling down the street and slowed as it cruised by us. It did not stop. We walked a way at random, looking for some sign of an open business or at least another human from whom one could ask directions. The Greek came creeping by again, unwilling either to abandon us or to aid us.
     As he sped around the corner, I recalled another traveler’s saying that in Spain there still were night watchmen who patrolled such precincts, carrying the huge eighteenth century keys that opened the massive, ornately carved street doors. One could summon such a person, I had been told, by clapping. So I clapped and heard the sound echo somewhere far back in the darkness. I clapped again, only half-heartedly, when I was gratified at the sight of an ancient approaching watchman, wearing what looked like robes of woolen blankets, who kindly directed us to a railroad station, always a reliable location for cheap hotels. Our route lay through the produce market, where now, an hour before daylight, the workers were setting up for the day’s trade. Their faces seemed like caricatures, lit by many small kerosene lanterns, and they were drawn to us like flies to discarded candy as we stumbled by the spectacle and exchanged a few words, but the produce was an apparition of perfection. By the time we arrived at the Park Hotel where a desk clerk was still awake the sun was coming up and I found it difficult to appreciate the comfort of a bed due to my annoyance at paying for a night which was already virtually over.
     Chance had whisked us swiftly through southern France. Tomorrow we would visit Gaudí’s Park Guell and recall Orwell’s descriptions of factional fighting between the building on the Ramblas; we would eat calamari alla romana and discover a few days later that condoms were illegal (though available) in Spain where Franco still was to linger another few years. Our utter stranding while hitchhiking in Algeria was months in the future as was our fortunate falling in with a genial crew when they gave us a ride in Austria. We would have Christmas in Ibiza, spend six weeks in the cafes of Fez, and suffer losses by theft, doubtless to our fellow Americans, at the Amsterdam Youth Hostel where people puffed chillums openly and Jimi Hendrix played through the speakers. But we could guess none of that nor did we try. We lay in a cheap Spanish hotel – secure in youth -- welcoming the approach of an obscure future.

Hitchhiking in Algeria

     Algeria had enjoyed at the time of my visit less than a decade of independence. People pointed to bullet-scarred walls with pride. The government was the secular National Liberation Front – the Islamic fundamentalists were studying scripture instead of seeking to take power. In several ways, the revolution was evident even to the casual traveler; the contrast with Morocco was inescapable. Instead of cramped rooms where boys crowded on benches and chanted Koranic verses all day, there were many small, modern schools. Health clinics, though decidedly modest, operated even in small towns. When a beggar approached the tourist seeking a handout, a practice approved by Islam, others sometimes stepped up to say that no one needed to beg, that the NLF provided for all.
     We set out eastward from Oran, taking a bus to the edge of town and then seeking to hitchhike the coastal road to Roman ruins in Cherchell and on to Algiers. The fact that we caught a few rides only took us into the deep countryside where we became stranded. In the U.S.A. hitchhiking, now all but extinguished, was fairly efficient back then, but along this particular route we saw only a horsecart every twenty minutes or so, a car or truck once or twice an hour. We were in a rural spot, well out of any town, yet somehow a crowd of children gathered from here and there once they had heard about the novel attraction. They hunkered down just across from us and gazed with satisfaction, thinking perhaps of how their friends would be impressed by their encounter with such exotic characters. When we opened a backpack to get a drink of water, the crowd stirred in excited interest; boys craned their necks to learn as many of our secrets as they might.
     Patricia felt a desire to pee. There was no cover for a considerable distance, and the children would never have let one of us out of sight in any event. We waited. In the distance a man on a donkey appeared, not a promising figure from our point of view. He approached and trundled by with hardly a glance our way.
     After several hours, a pickup truck pulled over, the window rolled down, “Est-ce que vous êtes americaines?” “Oui, oui.” The window rolled back up and the care accelerated. Wondering if the driver was a critic of American foreign policy, we waited on. After ten minutes the car reappeared, the window opened, and through came a hand with an old oversize American banknote, what proved to be a 1907 five dollar bill. “An American army soldier gave this to my grandfather. Take it, you can use it perhaps, but you must write me a postcard from America.” And off he sped.
     We were beginning to consider the possibility of sleeping rough by the roadside, and by now we both wanted to pee. Suddenly, of all things, an empty taxi appeared, though heading in the wrong direction. We remembered a village named Khadra only a few miles back, so we hailed the cab and asked to be taken there, figuring we could catch some sort of bus. The town was small, lacking a hotel or a real restaurant, but there was a small café which, we thought, meant a likely w.c. We went in and inquired and the man behind the counter gestured toward a door. A so-called “Arab toilet” would have been welcome indeed, but, when the door was opened, it revealed only the small back yard of the café which people clearly used as a latrine.
     Thrown into the street, we had by now gathered a crowd of followers even larger than that out in the countryside. A local madman wandered by and they tried to set him on us, and might have enjoyed a more amusing spectacle than the lot out on the highway, but we had by that time found an informant who told us that no bus would leave until five the next morning. We were kindly offered the option of sleeping on board the bus. This seemed satisfactory, though the urination problem was becoming urgent.
     Just then, a car drove up. The local schoolteacher had heard of our arrival and had come to offer us immediate relief and hospitality. Though we were backpackers, we were foreigners who knew something of the world, and he considered himself unfairly stranded in this village, cut off from the modern culture his education had led him to prize, even while he remained rooted in certain traditional Maghrebi values. To us he meant relief (he had running water, even), as well as dinner, and a bed.
     Later that evening, as his wife brought steaming tajines from the kitchen and he urged us to eat more and more, we tried to be civil by exchanging a few words with her. “No,” he said, “Don’t bother with her, she is ignorant. She doesn’t know French, she can’t read at all. Forget her.” We imagined that she and the children would share whatever we failed to consume and found the thought no spur to appetite.
     The following morning, the night watchman in a ragged djellaba, who carried a rusty old blunderbuss older even than himself, tapped on the window to awaken us, and we caught the five o’clock bus for Mohammedia from which one might board the main line of the train system to Algiers. It was most unlikely we would have another opportunity to see the mosaics at Cherchell.