Summer of 76

First of all, you need to know that I have never been afraid to take off on some adventure, even from a young age. I was riding trains and buses between cities by myself starting at 11, and I often went rogue… Going off the planned path. Likewise, if someone had an idea for an adventure of dubious outcome, I was in.

I have been trying to figure out when I first started hitchhiking, and to the best of my recollection, it started and finished in that summer.

Once I went off to college, I pretty much stayed away other than holiday breaks and a stretch of a few months when I went back to New York and lived with my parents while I did a life reset. This meant, I lived in the college town, Anderson, Indiana, more or less year round. During the academic year, it was your normal college experience. (Well, normal by my standards.) But during the summer, things got weird. There was a skeleton crew of students that hung out, and we had fun, but I also mixed with locals.

I worked all over that town doing a mixture of punch-the-clock, and bulletin board odd jobs. The college was a fairly reliable source of at least some income, working gigs in the auditorium, building and grounds, etc. But I also worked for the City Street Department, a variety of restaurants, a mom and pop gas station and even a gig as a pool boy. (Not my official title but I choose to claim it because it was part of the job and pool boy sounds better than gopher).

One of the more memorable, though not particularly fun, jobs I had was selling books door to door. This mostly consisted of talking to lonely women, some of them struggling financially, a few of whom broke down and cried when they realized they couldn’t afford what I was trying to sell them for their children. I am proud that I never asked for a sale as the price of listening. I listened a lot.

There was a group of us from Anderson that carpooled down to Nashville, TN for training and the usual sales rah rah bullshit including Zig Ziglar. All in all, we were meant to get the message that if we couldn’t make it work we would be failures. I bought into that for a time until a senior I respected called me a sucker. I can honestly say that the thing I remember most about Nashville is sitting in a little cafe and listening to old time country singers on the jukebox. The bright florescent lights, the linoleum floor and the tinny sound of the speakers has stayed with me. Of course it was a song of loss, playing in a place that looked like it had accumulated its own share of loss. This was a different version of Nashville than you have probably experienced. This was real, classic, Old-Timey Nashville.

We were kept in our college groups and assigned a territory…ours was West Central, NY. They split the men and women up and the women wound up in a nice A-Frame that they rented outside of Jamestown, and the guys wound up in a vacant college apartment in Geneseo, NY. We had no furniture. No one got us a place to stay, as a group we had to use our wits to figure that out. There were a total of three cars among us, a big Chevy Caprice for the guys and the ladies had two cars.

This led to a logistical problem, because even though we were based in Geneseo, our actual sales targets were spread through towns all over the area. Since rural NY is not exactly a public transport paradise, that left us with our thumbs as our primary source of getting from place to place. I ranged from just outside of Rochester, to Jamestown, to Erie, Pennsylvania.

I used that thumb a lot.

In the space of about 6 weeks I accepted dozens of rides from strangers both generous and pragmatic (asking for gas money or to share the driving). There is no way I can remember most of them…I remember a lot of trips here and there with no memories of the rides along the way. Somehow at the end of the whole thing I managed to get from Anderson, Indiana to Nashville, Tennessee and back again. I am sure it took a least a dozen rides total but I can remember only two of them…that and sleeping under a tree next to a Waffle House because I had nowhere else to sleep in Nashville.

This is the story of the five rides that I still remember all these years later.

THE HIPPIE AND THE INDIAN

I’ve heard it is now okay to use the word “Indian” to address native Americans. I do not know if that is widespread or not. I will defend my use of the term though, because as we were doing the perfunctory greetings that you do when you step into a strangers car, the gentleman introduced himself as such.

This was almost a stereotype of the time. A road movie like “Easy Rider”. They were driving an old station wagon north on I 65 through Indiana and like a number of rides the smell of weed hung heavy in the air. This was both common, and a much bigger deal back then if that makes sense.

I think they were nearly as broke as I was because they asked for some gas money during a pit stop and I had very little to give. I don’t think they were happy about that but in the spirit of the times, they were chill and did not strand me there. After all, having just spent a night under a tree because I had no money for a motel, I was clearly their people.

There was something vaguely menacing about the situation. It reminds me of a week I spent in Moscow in 2003. Nothing specific, just an aura of subtle menace. I might have been overthinking the situation, but when you are soliciting rides from strangers on the sides of deserted highways, sometimes in the middle of the night, overthinking is a survival skill.

But nothing happened, they dropped me off and we all parted ways in the standard way, and a thank you. That’s all it took because you knew you would never see each other again.

Hitching, like any endeavor, has its rules and mores that evolve over time. Here are the truths of the summer of 1976:

There was no GPS and there were no apps because there were no cell phones. Unless you found a pay phone along the way and you were lucky enough to have someone to check in with, no one knew where you were and you had no way of telling anyone where you were. At some point: hours, days, weeks maybe, you would be missed. But no one would know where to even start looking. Not even what state to look in.

You were a singular entity that had walked into a void, and should you vanish, you would vanish into that void…Without a trace.

The same truths applied to the good Samaritans that picked you up. No one could know who they picked up and if they were forced to drive somewhere, no one would know where. They could be forced to buy fuel and food with impunity because credit card transactions were traced on paper with no real electronic trail. If a merchant was fastidious about dates and times, a very delayed manual analysis of your credit card statement might shed light. But that trail could be weeks old.

The drivers walked into a void as well.

BEAUTIFUL DANGEROUS

There is another angle to these truths. That sometimes, YOU as the rider were the source of that vague sense of menace. The sense that something was off; and it was you that suddenly became the unexpected.

I was in Upstate New York now, In the region to the south and east of Rochester. Farm country, little towns, and a lot of open space. I was walking along a road, hoping for a ride but there was no one. No people, no cars, just the sound of insects and a light breeze ruffling the endless corn stalks.

I am not exaggerating when I say the cars came at most every 15 mintues or so. Hitching is a numbers game, and you need more traffic than that to score a ride. During the intervals, it felt like every other human had left the planet.

Eventually a nice looking, late model car pulled up. It turned out to be driven by a nice looking, late model woman.

After I climbed in and got settled I thanked her for picking me up and we took stock of each other, as is customary. That’s when I realized, that she realized she had made a mistake; she was frightened.

“I thought you were a lot younger” she stammered.

I was a scrawny 19 year old wearing shorts, a ball cap and tennis shoes. The combination made me look like an adolescent. She thought she was rescuing a wayward kid, maybe a neighbors child, maybe a runaway, or maybe just a juvenile that needed help and her big heart couldn’t help itself.

She would have never stopped to pick up a 19 year old male.

I don’t remember much about what happened next, I like to think I offered to get out, but I don’t remember. That would have been hard because I would have been back to walking down that deserted road for several more hours.

I do know this for sure: I started talking, I started talking a lot. I reasoned that being chatty would be less threatening than sitting there like a silent psychopath. This went against character because I was pretty shy especially with women, and especially with attractive women.

The car was expensive and I remember feeling that I was out of my weight class, being in this fancy car with this impeccably dressed woman. I remember what she was wearing vaguely, dark skirt and white blouse. She had wavy dark hair.

There was no early exit, she drove me to where she said she was turning off. The goodbye was friendly, but I am sure she was relieved to be rid of me.

After all, have you ever heard of a serial killer that couldn’t talk up a storm?

RIDING WITH THE BANDIT

This is the 70’s and if you know you know. But if you don’t know I guess it’s my job to fill in the blanks.

A big part of 1970’s car culture was the Pontiac Firebird TransAm. Built on the same chassis as its Chevy cousin, the Camaro, the Pontiac was the more popular car. The direct cousin to the Camaro was the relatively tame Pontiac Firebird. TransAm was a seriously hotter version. Because the Camaro badge lives on people remember it more, but the car all car-oriented guys wanted was the Pontiac beast.

Its most famous moments came as the car driven by “The Bandit” in “Smoky and The Bandit”. Starring Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason and Sally Fields, it combined that pony-muscle car culture with the then raging CB/Trucking culture.

Imagine my surprise when in the dead of a summer night, on US 20 in western NY, a white-on-white TransAm pulled up. The driver, in the customary manner, hollered for me to hop in. But the driver was getting out of the car, and motioned for me to get into the drivers’ seat. To the best of my recollection he was tired and needed someone to drive for awhile. The second I left the shoulder, he was out like a light.

Having driven a succession of college-appropriate land yachts like Chevy Impalas, Ford LTDs, and Plymouth Furys, this was a disorienting experience. Instead of the sitting in a straight back living room chair like the cars I was used to, the seat was practically on the road and my legs stretched right out in front of me.

I soon got used to the car, and other than a slight dispute about which road I should be on, my friendly companion slept until I got to my jumping off point. It was at least an hour…an hour in the scheme of things is a solid stretch when you are hitching.

I am willing to bet that in the annals of hitchhiking, the driver going right to sleep after handing you the keys to his hot sports car is pretty damned rare.

Visibility Is Everything

Something I learned really quick during my brief but active hitchhiking career were the rules of visibility. They go something like this: during the day you are invisible, at night you stick out like a sore thumb.

THE PARTY BUS

Okay, it wasn’t a bus, but there definitely was a party going on. After awhile, I found out that I was definitely invited.

This was another late at night in the middle of nowhere ride. There was a group of four in the car when I was picked up: two girls and two boys just a little older than me. I suspect the girls wanted to pick me up over the objection of the boys, because, had they amorous plans, I was definitely going to be the wrench in the works. Likewise, it was the girls who encouraged me to join the merry band while the boys said everything by their silence.

I was a little bit of a square but I had grown up in not the best place in Queens and had found myself in situations more than once. So I had pretty good spidey senses, and those senses were telling me that there was probably nothing good to come of joining up with this already weed and alcohol infused traveling circus.

They were heading to someplace where supposedly there was a huge party going down; it could have been trouble, or maybe I was an idiot who could have hooked up with a girl at this supposedly amazing party.

I’ll leave it there. I do remember the mild back and forth on whether I would join them. When I demurred and they dropped me off at the exact spot they had promised. There were mixed feeling from my hosts.

That was the contract… between rider and driver. You could offer anything and decline anything. No harm no foul.

I hope it was a great party. I kinda wish I had gone.

The most critical trait you need to succeed at hitchhiking is of course patience. Shocker, I know. It’s more than just the obvious ability to wait for a ride to come along. It’s also the thing that can keep you out of trouble…knowing when it might be better to walk a few miles than to grab a ride in a sketchy area, or the ability to pass on a ride. It’s also knowing and accepting that long rides are rare and it could take many rides to get where you are going. If you are lucky, and get a ride for a couple of hours, you can expect the last leg of your ride to to consist of a whole lot of short rides. It’s also about knowing the you are rarely lucky enough to get a direct route.

If you are traveling northeast for example, you might have to go directly east or even southeast before you can find a way to go north.

JUST THE THREE OF US

Which is how I wound up standing under a barn light on a pole alongside Indiana State Road 109 in the middle of the night. I had walked a long way by that time from where I was dropped off at the I70 interchange. I rarely stayed still, I figured movement was my friend. A mile travelled is a mile closer no matter how you do it. No one was coming, and when they did they sure as hell weren’t stopping. It was a super dark moonless night which was a lot of the problem. People need to evaluate you from a ways off. Five seconds in their headlights was not enough time. So I stood under the barn light. Well it worked and soon a shiny red Corvette screeched to a halt a few yards down the road.

Let’s talk about ‘Vettes for a minute. For some reason their drivers get a bad rap and I have never understood that. I worked in a full service gas station for a time and I serviced thousands of cars, pumping their gas, washing their glass and checking under the hoods. You get to know the drivers when you do all that. If anyone could stereotype drivers by their cars it was me. And I can tell you they defied stereotypes. Actually, you could usually stereotype the cars by the drivers. For example, college girls were usually low on oil and needed air in their tires. No biggie, that’s why they paid a few extra cents a gallon to come to us; we looked out for them. But when it comes to Corvettes, I have a very high opinion of their drivers because so many were extraordinarly kind to me. From the party boy friend of an old girlfriend who tossed me the keys and told me to take her out for a ride, (and that by the way she likes you a lot) to a couple who were determined to load my bike onto their ‘Vette when they came across me with a flat tire. But in this case, this was my first encounter.

The thing that hit me first was how gorgeous this car was. It was candy apple red with a white interior and was either a convertible or a T-Top. Whichever, the thing didn’t have a lid. The second thing that impressed me was the young couple that were in the car were occupying the two seats in this two seater.

When I walked up to the door I just looked at them and said “How…”. I didn’t finish the sentence because the woman jumped out, told me to sit down and then plopped on my lap. I will admit this was a nice arrangement, but to be honest, I was so taken aback that they would do this that I felt nothing but gratitude. As we were rocketing along I thanked them for stopping and the guy said “There was no way we leaving you out there.” I don’t remember much about the ride other than it was fast and windy and I had a woman in my lap. I am pretty sure they took me all the way back to my cousin’s house where I was staying. Good people.

EPILOGUE

I easily accepted a couple of hundred rides that summer. The thing I find most shocking is that after that ride in the Corvette I never did it again. Just stopped cold turkey. I guess I really didn’t have anywhere to go. I worked jobs in Anderson, got a decent bike and rode it all over creation. It was that time in life where you could borrow friends cars and soon I had my own.

Had I needed to I surely would have, the tricks of the trade were still with me, and I wasn’t scared of it. The times and the needs just changed.

Today that sounds like a tremendous risk, but it wasn’t really then and it probably isn’t now. I think we are just more afraid of each other… and that is very sad.

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This post and any accompanying photos are human authored.

Photo Credit: Glenn Keller

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