A Requiem for Hitchhiking

IT WAS THE SUMMER of 1990, three years before my parents’ divorce, when my father and I took to the road in what was still called Yugoslavia. We went on a day-trip by bus from the Italian port city of Trieste all the way to the coastal town of Portoroz. Once there, we realised there was no transport back to Italy until the day after. My impatient dad was already fed up with the place. So, he started walking north along the road. Suddenly, he turned around to face me. He extended his right arm, stuck his thick thumb in the air and put on his artificial grin, pulling the corners of his mouth to prop up the cheeks.

“You have to lock your gaze with the driver as soon as your eyesight allows it. The longer you can hold the stare, the more likely you are to hitch a ride. You must focus on the driver. Stand on the road and keep your hand up!”

I was deeply embarrassed. Couldn’t we afford a hotel? Didn’t we have money for a taxi to the next bus station? He had just turned 50 at the time, and although he was handsome, fit, and youthful, it seemed to me that after reaching 30 begging for a ride was somewhat creepy. Also because he was wearing skimpy shorts, a crimpled and faded polo shirt and a small back­pack that made him look like an overgrown schoolboy on vacation.

We were not that poor, although we were nouveau pauvre since dad never really earned much money, squandering most of the inherited assets and capital, selling land and apartments to buy a shiny white Porsche during the 1970s energy crisis, or to travel around the world whenever he felt like it, living carefree, telling us not to count on any inheritance nor any financial help. “If money is the problem, no money, no problem,” he’d say. It sounded like something he learned in his hitchhiking days.

He was an adventurer. He happened to be in Chile in 1973 when CIA-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet kicked out socialist president Salvador Allende. He was in Berkley, California, during the Summer of Love of 1967. He told me he had crossed the Sahara desert on camelback with Bedouin tribes. He also rowed in a kayak in the Pacific Ocean with Tahiti locals, while my mother was raising my two sisters, me, and my brother primarily on her own dime.

In the fall of 1966, when I was a few months old, dad signed an IOU to his father-in-law to buy my grandpa’s Ford Taunus which he drove for 6,000 km from Northern Italy to Afghanistan, through Turkey and Iran, so he could join the beatnik parties in Kabul. He picked up some American hitchhikers along the way, and in Afghanistan they all got arrested for mucking about cloaked in burqas. He was freed by the Italian consul who invited him to attend a royal Buzkashi game, a polo match played with a goat carcass instead of a ball. After reaching no-man’s land at the Attari-Wagah border between Pakistan and India, he sold the Taunus, along with a cherished Pierre Cardin portable radio my mother had forgotten in the car, in exchange for an antique carpet and a passage from Karachi to Japan on a cargo ship circumnavigating India. In Tokyo, dad sold the carpet to sail to Los Angeles, where he worked for a stint at a McDonalds. Then he thumbed his way cross-country to New York, before running out of money and flying back to Italy after six months on the road. By that time, I had learned to walk, and he had become an expert hitcher, privy to the secret techniques on how to hail a free ride, which he was now teaching me under the Yugoslavian sun.

His generation was full of hitchhikers. In 1966, the year of my father’s earliest world tour, I spent the first summer of my life on a beach near Venice while a few kilometres away a young Gujarati man who had just turned 22 arrived in that magical town after hitchhiking all the way from London. He had long curly hair, a disarmingly charismatic smile and snazzy bellbot­tom pants, which would get him all the way down to Naples thumbing rides. A few decades later, that Indian man would become my father-in-law. “Italian drivers were lovely. I met so many friendly people who gave me rides,” he tells me.

Perhaps the fact that on the road featured a hitchhiking anti-hero with my first name, it made me feel summoned to briefly test that life —even though it was just a speedy foray along Italian highways in winter, not a summery American coast-to-coast. The idea of hopping on trucks, without a schedule or a plan, floating like a cloud in the highway wind, felt exciting and so outside the scheme of things like a career, stability, the norm

Share this on

But by 1990, when my father and I found ourselves on that hot summer road along the coast of the Istrian peninsula, hitchhiking was a moribund art. I would witness it again only along rural roads in Cuba and some parts of India, and occasion­ally in the wealthy UAE, among the not-so-wealthy migrant workers’ community.

Hitchhiking seems to have become the vestige of an innocu­ous past, the symbol of a lost freedom from an era of transporta­tion when giving someone a ride was simply the decent thing to do, a way of sharing your position of privilege because one day you might need to cash-in the karma… and hitch a ride yourself. It opened up new worlds, connecting social classes that might otherwise never meet face-to-face.

THE VIVID FOCUS OF ADVENTURE

In 1985, barely 19 years old, I was working in Rome as a summer intern at the news agency Associated Press. I was having lunch with my girlfriend visiting from our hometown. Back then, there was a more flexible sense of privacy and affordable trattorias were still seating strangers at the same table. We were savouring spa­ghetti and clams, white fish, and a cheap carafe of chilled white wine next to a fellow who looked ancient to us but was probably just over 40. He said he was a screen-writer for national TV, RAI.

We got along well. So, when he invited us to hitch a ride with him to the beach, 45 minutes away, and dip into the sea in Ostia before sunset, we irresponsibly went along. We knew it could be dangerous, but it felt right. Honestly, risk was part of the excitement. So we got into his car.

The slowly setting sun was coating the Roman landscape with golden hues pervading us with a languid feeling. The sea felt comfortably warm, the sand on our feet a relief from the city’s suffocating cement. We swam with a smile, the salty water reinvigorating our muscles and calming our nervous system. It was a memorable day in the pleasant company of an older man who never showed ill intentions. When you take a chance, and things go well, there’s an extra quality to your joy. That’s one of the secrets of hitchhiking.

And nothing horrible, inappropriate, or lewd happened. Just strangers sharing time, enjoying the sunset, feeling the breeze dry our hair, windows rolled down while driving back to Rome on a balmy summer evening, so many years ago.

The following winter, I spent a week skiing with the same girlfriend in her family vacation home in the Italian Alps near the border with Switzerland. I’d run out of cash, so I couldn’t afford the ticket for the five-hour train ride to my next destination. Too embarrassed to borrow money, I had no other option but to hit the road pretending I was going to get on a bus out of that valley under the shadow of the Matterhorn. Instead, I stretched my arm and stuck out my thumb. I was alone. Taking chances.

There was a moment of thrill, of course, when a car stopped, the window rolled down, and I had to quickly X-ray the drivers to understand if I was going to get attacked. I had to rapidly size up a stranger to determine possible threats, and if I would be able to de­fend myself against them. What did I know about those chances back then? Not much. I was naïvely self-confident, and boyishly irresponsible. My judgement was misguided by the heightened sense of focus of that experience we call adventure.

Those few hours among dusty gas stations and raucous traffic along the A4 highway across Northern Italy turned out to be a crash course in sociology and politics. I chatted with drivers from the Piedmont, Milan, and Bologna. While cruising through the smog of Lombardy, a boy a few years older than me said he had just finished the mandatory military service. He cynically explained how he and his accomplices defrauded the army by pretending to fill the combat tanks with fuel, turning in fake receipts. That’s how Italy lost most of its wars, I thought to myself. This ride pro­vided me with firsthand accounts of my country whose darker and corrupt side I’d been familiar with only through hearsay.

I remember the disorientating yet stimulating feeling of being allowed into the intimate space of a stranger. The smell of ashes from the tray, the broken cable, the soot on the floor, the sticker on the dashboard, the telling emblem hanging from the rearview mirror. It was a dream-come-true for a budding writer, this possibility of decoding a character through the objects in those private surroundings I was given momentary access to. It was thrilling and, again, nothing bad happened to me. When you take a chance, you might actually experience something useful. That’s another secret of hitchhiking.

In those rebellious years, I also read the 1976 Tom Robbins novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which became a movie with Uma Thurman sporting giant hitchhiking thumbs. Perhaps because I’d left home at 16 myself, I also instantly connected with the melancholic and weird Chris McCandless, the hitchhiking character

Share this on

It’s possible that, as the teenager I still was, I exposed myself to danger because I’d recently read the most important hitchhiking novel of the 20th century: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I didn’t find its stream of consciousness style particularly gripping. Rather drawn-out and rambling, to tell the truth. But I remember being impressed with a sense of unpredictability in the lives of the char­acters which, in this 1957 roman-à-clef, were inspired by key figures of the Beat movement, such as writers William S Burroughs and Neal Cassady. Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg was portrayed as ‘Carlo Marx’. And perhaps the fact that On the Road featured a hitchhik­ing anti-hero with my first name, it made me feel summoned to briefly test that life—even though it was just a speedy foray along Italian highways in winter, not a summery American coast-to-coast. The idea of hopping on trucks, without a schedule or a plan, floating like a cloud in the highway wind, felt exciting and so outside the scheme of things like a career, stability, the norm.

In those rebellious years, I also read the 1976 Tom Robbins al­ternative novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which became a movie with Uma Thurman sporting giant hitchhiking thumbs. Perhaps because I’d left home at 16 myself, I also instantly connected with the melancholic and weird Chris McCandless, the hitchhiking character who in 1996 inspired Jon Krakauer to publish Into the Wild, the gripping tale of a solo exploration in Alaska gone wrong.

For almost a century, since the 1939 novel Grapes of Wrath, which begins with a hitched ride, thumbing your way to a destination has provided novelists, songwriters, and screenplay writers with the elements of surprise, tension, risk, and pos­sibilities which are hard to resist. For my generation, and the two that preceded mine (Boomers and Silent Gen), the allure of the encounter with strangers on the road has been assiduously romanticised in numerous movies, songs, and books.

One scene from an antique black-and-white feature is still etched in my mind. In the 1934 movie It Happened One Night, Clark Gable boasts that he can teach Claudette Colbert how to hitch a ride. But he fails miserably. All Colbert has to do is fix her silk stockings to the garter belt on her thigh to get a car to come to a screeching stop. This vignette makes me think of all the sexual tension and male narration around women and travel. It’s an ageless way of implying prurient possibilities between a man with a car and a lady stranded by the side of the road.

As that woman boards a stranger’s car, if we dig into Sigmund Freud, we can imagine the vehicle as an extension of the driver’s body and observe the monstrous phagocytising in the metallic embrace of the automobile. This could imply that hitchhiking is viable mostly for men, as things could only go wrong for anyone else.

THE HIGHWAY OF TEARS

In 1980, in the damp valley town of Northern Italy where I grew up, one cold day a classmate brought sad news to my high school: a friend of ours, after missing the bus to school, hitched a ride from a stranger who drove her to a secluded place where he raped her. I was ski-racing every weekend with this friend, gifted with a jovial and genuine smile that transmitted a conta­gious positive outlook on life. After the violence she suffered, I’d always catch a veil of melancholia shading her eyes.

I immediately felt the desire to punish the man who did this, overcome by a feeling of heaviness clenching my stomach, a sense of helplessness, shifting into the sudden realisation that the world is not a simple, welcoming place, and that peril always lurks just down the road, behind the metallic doors of those cars whizzing by on the local highway. More than 40 years have passed, but the trauma of what happened to her is still in my memory as an early lesson of the brutality of life. Al­though it didn’t deter me from hitchhiking myself, years later.

But it’s no coincidence that this horrific episode happened at the end of the 1970s when, in many parts of Europe, all the flower power, trippy hippie innocence of 1968 had twisted into the metal flavour of P38 bullets shot by leftwing and rightwing terrorists in kidnappings and attacks. By 1977, the naiveté of a peaceful revolution collapsing barriers and social mores had morphed into a politicised urban guerrilla, destabilised with the shock of domestic and international terrorism.

The carefree aspects of the message of universal love, which hitchhiking was a part of, began to turn into a trap for the weak and the innocent. Maniacs and predators wanted to take con­trol of public spaces. And they did. It was the end of the vision­ary and hopeful 1960s innocence. It was a prelude to the fearful years of serial killers and rapists, disappearing children whose faces beamed from milk cartons, evening news showing dark basements where enslaved people were kept chained for years: the horror movie of the dark side of a society gone mad, instead of the Eden that was promised by the power of love revolution.

My father thumbed his way cross-country to New York, before running out of money and flying back to Italy after six months on the road. By that time, I had learned to walk, and he had become an expert hitcher, privy to the secret techniques on how to hail a free ride, which he was now teaching me under the Yugoslavian sun

Share this on

On a sunny day in May 1977, the car of a 20-year-old girl from Eugene, Oregon, simply wouldn’t start. But she wanted to get to her friend’s house in Southern California, so she put out her thumb while standing on the shoulder of the road, and soon got a ride with truckers hauling grape juice who let her off an hour-and-a-half from her destination at a gas station. When a van with five guys stopped, she said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” But when a blue Dodge Colt with a young couple and a baby offered to take her on board, she said yes. That’s when Colleen Stan was kidnapped by Cameron Hooker and his wife Janice and turned into a tortured sex slave who spent seven years living in a wooden box under the bed of her captors. She eventually managed to escape, and her captor was sentenced to 74 years in prison. “This is why people shouldn’t hitchhike,” Stan said in an interview for a Freakonomics podcast in 2011. “When you get into a car with someone, you are literally handing your life over to them. It’s just not worth it.”

Only three years before that infamous kidnapping, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released, a gruesome horror movie which starts with kids going to visit a graveyard and picking up a scraggly looking hitchhiker who has a knife. You can imagine what happens next.

The fear of the dangers of hitchhiking eventually won over the romanticisation of the beatnik and hippie way of travel. One of the worst true-life horror stories surrounding this mode of travel happened in Canada. From 1969 to 2006, dozens of Canadian women and girls, most of them indigenous, disappeared or were murdered near Highway 16, a remote strip of asphalt cutting through British Columbia. At least 50 hitchhiking young women vanished or turned up as corpses along the road locals call ‘The Highway of Tears’.

It is the epitome of a deep-seated fear now rampant around the world, which connects the tales of my skiing friend who had missed the bus in Italy, to Colleen Stan’s tortures in California, to the Highways of Tears all over the world: getting in a car with strangers most likely will end badly.

However gruesome and disgusting these tales are, I couldn’t find any statistical evidence proving that hitchhiking is more dangerous than getting run over by a car as you walk along the side of the road. There are only two reliable studies on this phe­nomenon. In 1975, the California Highway Patrol concluded: “The results do not show that hitchhikers are overrepresented in crimes or accidents beyond their numbers”. In 1989, a German federal police study found that the actual risk in hitchhiking is much lower than public perception.

Hitchhiking is perceived as extremely dangerous because of our contemporary fear of strangers in an unmediated context. But data shows that 75 per cent of murder victims actually knew their killers, 60 per cent of rape victims knew their attacker, only 1 per cent of child kidnapping is done by real strangers. Meanwhile, because of this fear with little statistical basis, we have blown out of proportion our suspicion of travelling strang­ers. And this has somewhat dehumanised the quality of our relationships with what we now perceive as a gloomier society than what it may actually be. Solidarity and generosity rarely make the news or make for TV series material.

In it happened one night, Clark Gable boasts he can teach Claudette Colbert how to hitch a ride. But he fails. All Colbert has to do is fix her silk stockings to the garter belt to get a car to come to a stop. This vignette makes me think of the male narration around women and travel

Share this on

Surprisingly, the strongest factor affecting the decline of hitchhiking is not fear: it is the growth in affordable car owner­ship and cheaper mass travel. Automobiles last longer and are comparatively cheaper. And low-cost flying provides an affordable alternative to long-distance travel by road or train. Thumbing your way across the land costs more than hopping on a low-cost flight. But gone is the magic, and possibly the danger, of a chance encounter based on trust.

THE DEATH OF RANDOM INTERACTIONS

In Hawaii, some locals believe that the shape-shifting fire goddess Pele travels in incognito as a white-haired hitchhiker rewarding travellers who give her a ride. If you don’t, next time a volcano erupts your house will be covered with lava. This insular mythol­ogy encourages trust and hospitality, understanding the impor­tance of fostering our dwindled capacity to see good in humanity.

Mythological tales, including the eerie ‘Vanishing Hitch­hiker’, a centuries-old urban legend of a traveller disappearing from a moving vehicle or that later it’s discovered was a ghost, usually aim at ingratiating hitching riders with the drivers. It is a remnant of a world in which hospitality to strangers was of the utmost sacredness before so many of us got stuck in the hostile environment of over-populated cities. It digs into the holy roots of the concept of strangers as divine visitors which manifests itself ecumenically in many religions and traditions. Urbanisation and the digitalisation of our lives have packaged our experience of reality in a stifling context. Our interactions are designed to pro­vide us with all that we ticked in a box. Dating apps, social media, blogs, comments sections… we are automatically herded into familiar surroundings, excising alien opinions and worldviews.

We live the bubble life. By restricting our freedom to have chance encounters we are sanitising interactions and limiting our capacity to accrue knowledge. The slow evanescence of hitchhik­ing contributed to locking us into our own safe space, seated in affordable cars, onboard low-cost flights where we may securely disappear into our screens without having to engage with strang­ers. The protected life feeds our ignorance, we communicate more but we grasp less of the meaning of what is being communicated. It is a way to avoid unpredictable experiences which could make us wiser persons and more understanding of the reality beyond the screen. And it is based on the sad disappearance of trust.

How do I feel, today, when I look at a hitchhiker on the side of the road? I’m repulsed. And afraid, like most people. Not only of violence, but also of bursting my safe chamber, having to put up with a stranger who might have a different mentality. This is what I’ve become, and I suspect there are many of us. But to share means to give something. Like a ride, for example. Trust is the basis of a real citizenry: if we can’t share, we have nothing in common. For too many of us, the concept of community has become just a social media marketing gimmick hardly related to the real meaning of the word.

We look more and more like those human larvae wallowing in an amniotic pod in the movie The Matrix. All grouped together, but separated into our own private obsessions, thinking that vir­tual interaction with people, which could actually be bots, is real life. It is not. It is a surrogate. And an ultimately alienating one.

A HITCHHIKING RENAISSANCE?

Hitchhiking could save the planet as sharing a ride is more eco­logical. Those strangers travelling together in the faster and less busy High Occupancy Vehicle lanes on congested American highways and freeways are saving money, reducing road jams, and polluting less. But ‘slugging’ is impersonal, as all those com­muters in their business suites and ID tags hopping on strang­ers’ automobiles have to follow an etiquette: don’t talk to drivers unless they talk to you; don’t touch anything in the car unless you ask permission; don’t eat or drink in the car unless you ask. It’s all efficient, sterile, and transactional, just like with taxi apps’ ride-sharing where everyone’s isolating on their phones.

On streets with high by-traffic, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria have in recent years installed the Mitfahrbänke or a subsidised ride-sharing bench, something between car-sharing and hitchhiking. More modern, controlled, but yet preserving the gratification of partaking of the experience of travelling. Considering that many middle classes around the world are hurting economically, saving on transport by sharing rides might no longer be a choice but an obligation. The wall of mass distrust might crumble in the wave of necessity. A hitchhiking renaissance may be coming.

I found out it is closer than I thought while discussing with my 19-year-old son the topics of this essay. He told me that last summer, not finding a taxi while trying to get to a train station on a coastal road near Rome, he and his girlfriend tried the ancient practice of exposing the thumb to oncoming traffic.

How do I feel, today, when I look at a hitchhiker on the side of the road? I’m repulsed. And afraid, like most people. Not only of violence, but also of bursting my safe chamber, having to put up with a stranger who might have a different mentality. This is what I’ve become

Share this on

I don’t know what got into him. I never encouraged him to do such a thing. Never took him on hitchhiking trips. It’s dan­gerous! Could he have inherited some hitchhiking DNA from his globe-trotting late grandfather? If my dad were still alive, he might pull up his thin cheeks in that tense grin of his that I still remember clearly. Behind my father’s hitchhiker mental­ity lay the adventurous readiness to pack everything in a bag, prepared to change city, country, or continent in a heartbeat. A life skill passed on to me, whether I like it or not. So, in the end, I suppose I’m still somewhat of a hitchhiker. And now it seems my son may be one too.

I pictured him and his girlfriend on the side of the road near Rome, not that far from the beach where my partner and I had gone for a drive with a stranger when I was my son’s age now. He said that on that day, on the side of the Italian road, with no taxis in sight and an urgent train to catch, a young man eventu­ally stopped to pick him up. Did my son snap a picture of the licence plate and send it to his friends, I asked. He would do so if there were to be a next time, he answered.

The young driver told my son that he learned a lesson in Asia. For a few winter months he had been living in Bali, Indonesia, where strangers always gave him rides when he hitchhiked. That’s how he discovered the rewarding and brotherly pleasure of helping a traveller in need. He just wanted to pay back the kindness. Karma, dude.

About The Author

Carlo Pizzati

Carlo Pizzati is an award-winning multilingual author of ten books of fiction and non-fiction. He has worked as a foreign correspondent in several continents since 1987. He lives with his spouse and four dogs near a fishing village in Tamil Nadu

•