Hitchhiking

When I was in college I hitchhiked everywhere. It was 1968 and everyone hitchhiked everywhere. A friend and I hitched from Antioch, which is in south-central Ohio, to a wedding in Kansas. I hitched to work every day on my co-op job at a private elementary school in Berkeley. Another friend and I hitched a ride to San Francisco in an 18-wheeler when our Volkswagen bug died in northern California. We hitchhiked down to New York City from another co-op job in New Hampshire with a series of truck drivers.

I also picked up hitchhikers. I drove with one of my workmates at the New Hampshire job to Antioch one weekend to visit our friends there and we got the last tank of gas paid for by the student hitchhiker we picked up on the interstate. I picked up hippies with dogs, Okies, drunks, students, people with broken down cars, dueling couples, just about anybody. There were a few rules I tried to follow, both as a hitchhiker and a giver of rides. If I was driving by myself I always gave rides to women, almost always to male-female couples, and cautiously to single men or groups of men. I accepted rides from women, mixed gender groups, and tried to avoid single men. Sometimes, however, you couldn’t tell who was driving until they slowed down or stopped, and it was always a leap of faith to take the ride. You thought you could appraise the driver with a quick once over—older than a certain age, dressed beyond a certain style, and with a certain ambiguous look—were usually good indicators that you let this one drive by. But you never knew, really. The truck driver who picked us up in northern California had needle marks up and down his arms but insisted on taking us over the Golden Gate Bridge, down Van Ness to Market and then to the corner of 19th Street where our friends lived. “I wouldn’t want my kids stuck out on the highway.”

Now, everybody’s afraid to hitchhike and nobody wants to pick one up. The descent into this condition was gradual. After college I moved to a New Mexico village named Placitas and the hitchhiking culture was still viable there, for a time. But as the nature of the community changed from local Hispano land grant peppered with back to the land immigrants, to commuter suburb of Albuquerque, hitchhiking became reduced to picking up only those on the highway from the freeway to the village—still assuming no one who had business in Placitas could be bad, and finally, to only those you knew, who were few and far between because we’d all given it up.

Why did it become unsafe to hitchhike in Placitas? As a microcosm of society in general, one would think that the gentrification of the community would translate to the gentrification of hitchhiking. People with more money and better cars could pick up the less fortunate with impunity and deliver them with grace. Those of us still out on the road could trust those behind the wheel to provide a ride in style. Alas, it doesn’t work that way, of course. As we become more comfortable we become more afraid of those who don’t share our comfort. Those who are still not comfortable aren’t benign college students anymore (college students don’t hitchhike to demonstrations in Washington D.C.; the few who go fly) but those perceived to be the losers who haven’t bought into consumer culture to the extent necessary to avoid any kind of disruption or break down that necessitates hitchhiking. It’s a vicious cycle: the perception becomes reality as those of us who still haven’t completely bought in rarely have to look for a ride, and when we occasionally do, don’t bother hitchhiking because we know they aren’t going to pick us up. So the ones left out there on the highways are what Hank Williams called them, the ones from Life’s Other Side.

I recently picked up a hitchhiker, however, from Picuris Pueblo, hitching a ride from one small village to the next, and I was very glad I did. He asked me if I was coming to the buffalo dance at the pueblo the next day, and then he told me that he had danced in the previous day’s deer dance. He said it was such an overwhelming experience that he couldn’t remember much about it except who was dancing on his left and who was dancing on his right. He didn’t know if there were people watching, he didn’t know how long he danced, he only knew that he danced as a deer would dance and then he ran for his life as the hunters came after him for the kill. He had a big grin on his face throughout this whole story and I then I dropped him off at the post office, where he met another friend and got in his car for the next leg of his journey. The commuters rushing down the highway missed a great story, and missed the opportunity to remember that theirs is not the only way to live.

Solution: Car companies will discontinue the manufacture of any car that doesn’t run on four cylinders and the government will run van taxis, like they do in third world countries that stop and pick up all the people on the street who need a ride, for a minimal fee. They will also run the taxis out on the highways between cities and so there are no more hitchhikers, only passengers.