Riding with Strangers: A Hitchhiker's Journey

by Elijah Wald

To me, that remains the great pleasure of hitchhiking: Not the rare, wild rides that make exciting stories, but the small, cumulative experiences of close meetings with complete strangers.

In an ever more isolated and paranoid world, this makes hitchhiking a perfect antidote to alienation. It throws you together with all sorts of people, from different areas and backgrounds, with different tastes and beliefs,

a lot of people who are very different from you, and with whom you might disagree about almost everything, are being awfully nice to you. It is an education I would recommend to any young person, and plenty of old ones too.

And yet, as is obvious to anyone cruising the highways, the roadside is no longer thick with optimistic voyagers, eager to run away from ...

On the contrary, the greatest danger is that we will isolate ourselves in cocoons of mistrust, unable to get together with others who share common needs and interests because we feel so threatened and alone.

"If you trust everyone you meet, you will occasionally get robbed; but if you distrust everyone, you will spend your whole life surrounded by thieves."

It is not the most predictable or secure form of travel, the one you would select when you had a pressing engagement or a prescribed round of appointments. But when you have the time and inclination to wander for a while through unknown climes, open to whatever they may hold, there is no better means.

And there you have the second pleasure: surprise. What would be the point of travel if we knew precisely what awaited us?

Traveling by train or bus, or worst of all by plane, we have subtracted the journey itself from this equation.

If we fly to Guatemala, we may be astonished, enlightened, and edified by what we find on arrival, but we have experienced nothing in the intervening miles that would not have been ...

How many of us even talk to our fellow passengers? And how many of them would appreciate the intrusion? We are all marking time in a traveling antechamber, waiting for...

This is the marketable fantasy of contemporary travel: the pleasures of adventure with all the comforts of home.

Poets, philosophers, and sociologists bemoan the isolation that has been a side effect of virtually all progress and invention since the Industrial Revolution. Machines have brought us many advantages, but also have inexorably cut us off from the day-today intercourse that once was an inescapable part of life.

It is people who make our world, for better or worse.

Even where enforcement is more general, a well-placed "Yes sir" every couple of sentences can keep you on the road, or at least delay your ejection.

an Illinois state trooper pulled over and told me it was illegal to hitch on the interstate. I expressed surprise, as is appropriate in such situations, and asked what I should do.

In that way, hitchhiking is sort of like living in a dodgy neighborhood: if you get mugged the week you move in, you might move right out again, but if you've been living there happily for a long time, one robbery doesn't define the place for you.

I ate a roll, drank half a bottle of milk, walked back to the roadside, and the first car that passed was a family on their way home from vacation who took me all the way to Madrid. Trials overcome and virtue rewarded. I was eighteen, and never for a moment unaware that it would make a good story.

The real danger involved in picking up a hitchhiker is that he or she will interfere with the pleasures of the drive. Americans, more than any other people on earth, see their cars as extensions of themselves, steel suits they put on whenever they go outdoors.

In general, when people say they would be afraid to pick up hitchhikers, the truth is that they simply don't want to stop, but think that fear is a more acceptable excuse than selfishness.

So yes, there are dangers involved in hitchhiking just as there are dangers involved in riding motorcycles, in climbing mountains, in drinking whiskey-and I would not suggest that anyone should risk them if no commensurate pleasure is derived from the experience.

"Towards Cleveland." I always say "towards," indicating direction, not "to," which might suggest that I want a ride to precisely that place.

He paused a moment, then nodded and gestured for me to climb in. I scrambled to get my pack, fold my umbrella, and run around to his passenger door. Speed is good manners, especially with truckers. I tossed my pack up onto the seat, grabbed the bar behind the door and swung into the cab, with my guitar in my spare hand, then fumbled everything into some sort of order as the truck got under way. The first ride always tastes sweet.

I asked if things were better now that the Soviet Union was gone. "No!" He was surprisingly vehement. "Before, it was better. There was order. The Communists, they kept everything in control. There was no crime, for example. Now, everyone is going crazy, the young people especially. It's not safe to walk on the street. It's like now in Iraq. Before, Saddam made a dictatorship and it was order, people could live their lives. Now, it's a mess. It's like a dog-excuse me, it's an example-it's just like if you have a dog, and you keep him chained up all the time in your yard, and then one day the chain breaks. He'll run like crazy, go all over and get lost, because he is not used to this. It is the same with people."

one gets to feeling a mix of gratitude and dread when drivers bring up the subject of religion. Gratitude because their beliefs prompted them to pick you up, and dread because the inevitable conversation is ahead.

Stop the rain! Hear my prayer, Lord, you have done so much for me, now show yourself to this friend!" He moaned and yelled for half an hour, and eventually we hit a patch of clear sky. "You see?" He turned to me, triumphant. "Do you see the power of God? He heard my prayer and He has stopped the rain!" A few new drops splattered the windshield, but he was undaunted. "Do you see what faith can do?" The rain was falling faster, but he would not turn on the wipers and admit defeat. Finally, we were almost blind and he had no choice but to clear the windshield and go back to crying unto the heavens for a miracle. And so it went, for an hour and a half of intermittent showers, until I could stand it no more and asked to be let off.

So, as I say, I am genuinely grateful to all the people of faith who pick me up, but I was doubly grateful to this farmer-missionary for chatting about his work and his motorcycle trips rather than attempting my personal salvation.

what those beads stand for?" he asked. "No." But I could guess wh...

After a while, you inevitably reach the conclusion that your choices affect your luck. If you are an optimist-and only an optimist will last any time as a hitchhiker-you cast this in terms of virtue rewarded.

Hitchhiking is an exercise of faith, and the more you trust it, the more it rewards you. I have met many hitchhikers who refuse short rides, insisting that you go faster if you wait until a through-car stops. Some days, I'm sure they arrive ahead of me. Every day, though, they have longer waiting periods at dull entrance ramps, meet fewer people, and forego the potential rewards of chance.