It's a funny thing, hitchhiking. You try it once, you get rained on. Eventually you get where you want to be and you swear you'll never do it again. Later on you need to be somewhere, there's a party 200 miles away, and your car has broken down. You're skint but you promised to be there so you stand by the roadside... and arrive late, cold, triumphant, and the hero of the gathering. You tell people about the marketing executive in the Mercedes, the born-again christian who insisted on buying you dinner. When you get drunk you start to embroider; the poacher with the truck full of pheasants, the bus full of teenage girls who all gave you their phone numbers, the party you were invited to by the Chippendales.

Then you wake up and have to hitch back in blazing sunshine with a splitting headache. When you get home you promise, 'never again.' But you do. You hitchhike to Gallipoli for Anzac day, Pamplona for the running of the bulls, Berlin for the love parade, New Orleans for the Mardi Gras, the staircase to the moon in Broome. You make the Haj to Mecca. (OK, maybe not, but you dream about it.) Suddenly the world seems at once infinite, and tiny. You become aware of all those incredible possibilities, and how within reach they are. You become a hitchhiker. You get taken to parties, shown secret places, fed and watered, fondled, entertained, frightened, amused. You live, for a while, the range of human experiences and learn what it is to be alive.

And then you stop.

You have a fund of adventure stories to dazzle your friends with. You've been to all the places you wanted to go. The excitement fades, and you get tired of standing by the roadside. You hang up your black marker pen and old bits of cardboard you use for making signs that read 'Gibraltar', 'Las Vegas', 'Nempnett Thrubwell', etc. You get a job and settle down. You're content.

Almost.

Here's an entry from an old diary of mine that I wrote just as I was on the verge of becoming responsible, I had a job and was committed to buying a house, but occasionally my mind would fill with pictures from my other life...

'... standing by the side of a long straight road in central France. I have no idea how I came to be there, presumably somebody had dropped me off but the details are gone now. What I do remember is the loneliness. There was just me and this immense, deserted landscape with a road running in a straight line through the centre. A few trees, no hills to speak of, lots of fields but no cars. Oh, and the rain. The road disappeared into a black wall of rain that was advancing towards me, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. A car passed, without stopping, and a few minutes later so did another. There were two kids in the back, looking at me with expressions of total disinterest. Like I was some kind of inferior TV show on the other side of the glass screen that separated their world from mine. Then they vanished into the downpour. It was really close by now, and getting dark. I may have had a jacket but not much of one, and the overwhelming impression is one of helplessness. A few minutes later it occurred to the driver of the car that I was going to get wet and he came back for me. Contact. Talk about elation! I almost exploded with delight. And somebody gave me a bed for the night, or a night very much like it, in a chateau outside Poitiers. We drank wine and sat up swapping adventure stories until the wee small hours. Great!'

HitchHiking is not a career, at best it's a lifestyle that can be rewarding for a while. But having done it for a while you are changed forever. More self-reliant, you take a relaxed attitude because you know that everything usually turns out all right. But most importantly you have been face to face with reality, and alone with yourself, in the midst of everybody else's conventional world.

And, through these occasional 'self' moments, you carry with you always that seed of adventure and freedom that will sustain you through whatever the world throws at you in the future. You will always know that there is more to life than just 9 to 5 and mortgages, and with the knowledge of freedom you cease to be a prisoner. Life remains good, even if you never use your magic thumb again.

(And why should you? It's a hopelessly impractical method of travel, and this author has given it up for good.)

stragbasher

08.05.00. Front Page

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