Hitchhiking the 20th Century, Hijacking the 21st
From Thumbing a Ride to Thumbing the Phone
Dorothea Lange's photographs for the FDR Farm Security Administration documented people on the move during the Great Depression. Their jalopies had broken down. They had no money. So they walked. Hopped a train. Or hitched a ride.
My mother told stories of hitchhiking the East Coast in her youth. She would stand on the shoulder with her thumb extended, she said, while her boyfriend and eventual husband (my father many years later) hid in uniform behind a bush or a road sign ready to jump out and join her should a driver stop to give her a lift.
I never traveled with a hobo's bindlestiff. I owned a blue Reinhold Messner "Sherpa" backpack (I still have it, somewhere, I think). Reinhold Messner is a mountain-climbing legend. He has climbed the highest Tibetan mountains alone and without oxygen. He has ascended the peaks of everywhere in the Alps. He has lost multiple toes to frostbite even as he continued climbing the mountaintops.
I am not into mountain-climbing. But with Messner's signature pack and a rolled up sleeping bag I hitchhiked here and there, now and then. I did this for a week in the U.S. and for many days in Israel. I did it once in Greece. And over a fortnight, throughout England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
Those were different times and, at least in Europe, hitchhiking was neither unusual nor dangerous. At least, it was no more dangerous than driving. My wife and I have survived a car-to-truck collision at 100 km/hour in Spain to attest to that. More about that adventure another time.
I was a teenager in West Berlin during my early hitchhiking years. Later, as a university student, I lived in Munich. I didn't thumb rides in Berlin. Berlin has a highly developed urban transportation system, complete with extensive, fully integrated and inexpensive light rail, subways, double-deck buses and dedicated urban bicycle roadways. Besides. When I lived in Berlin, the Cold War (so called) was still a thing and there was no way to hitch a ride from there to anywhere else. More about that another time as well.
Nor did I hitchhike when I went to the university in Munich. Munich, too, had an advanced public transportation system. Unlike Berlin at the time, I didn't need any special dispensation just to leave city limits. There was also no need to hitchhike from Munich. I could travel 2nd class by train to nearly anywhere I wanted to go. By that time, too, I owned a used VW Variant - a "Squareback" in American auto parlance. Although it could barely keep up with the speeding Mercedes and BMWs on the Autobahn, my Volkswagen was stalwart enough to get me to France and Spain... if I had the patience, and my magic carpet "Official Business" red U.S. passport. More about that, too, another time.
The British Isles
I remember that one summer I flew from Berlin to London for a month-long solo trip. I remember landing at Heathrow Airport and falling in love with a young uniformed woman working the customs desk. No, I don't know her name or anything about her, but teenagers are apt to fall in love on first impression. Then we grow up, and only the impression remains. Besides, at that time I was still looking for my eventual wife who I wouldn't even meet for nearly another decade or so; but I do, at least, know my wife's name and a thing or two about her.
I think I spent a few nights in London learning how to speak the language, discovering by trial and error what food I could eat, and how to walk on the left-hand sidewalk of the street. Then I rented a Puch moped and headed south.
Mopeds are great for short inner city trips. They are not so good, however, for long distance travel on the motorway. Soon after beginning my two wheeled excursion to Salisbury, Oxford and beyond, I had to buy a sheet of foam rubber to cushion the hard plastic seat. By day three, I was completely frazzled by traffic round-abouts that go round-about in the wrong direction, and by getting passed on the right by honking cars and heavy trucks impatient with my slow-moving putt-putt. So I circled back to London and ditched the motorbike. I stuck out my thumb and hitched rides.
I got as far as South Wales uneventfully. Along the way, I stayed mostly in youth hostels in small towns with unpronounceable names. Sometimes I stayed in bed & breakfast houses. Thumbing was easy in Wales. I caught a ride in the north with a trucker whose only quid-pro-quo was that I had to help him unload his sacks of sugar and beans at various stops along the way. I thumbed my way into Scotland, learned to eat fish and chips from a rolled up newspaper, and then thumbed back south again to catch the ferry to the Republic of Ireland. In Ireland, I caught rides around the island's southern tip and thence up to Limerick.
In Limerick, I repeated my moped mistake. But instead of a motorbike, I rented a bicycle and headed west toward the westernmost tip of the Dingle Peninsula. I don't know whether there is something peculiar about Irish bicycles generally or this particular bicycle, but the damn thing coasted slower downhill than pedaling uphill. Worse, it had strange mechanical brakes that pressed straight down onto the crown of the rubber tires. Worse than that, it took so long to pedal to where I was going that I ended up biking uphill in the dead of night on a dark back country road that seemed to go on and on and on even unto the Caribbean like Columbus crossing the Atlantic. Well past midnight, I ended up at an Inn where I collapsed into bed. I woke up very late in the day, and immediately had to turn around and bicycle back again to Limerick even more slowly (and painfully) than the outward trip to Dingle. Like the moped before it, I ditched the rental bike and stuck out my thumb.
It was late by the time I started for Dublin.
I stood by the side of a major motorway outside of the city of Limerick, but nobody stopped. That was probably because, at the time, I looked rather like Rasputin, John Lennon, Karl Marx and Arlo Guthrie rolled into one. Eventually, well after dark (and, more than likely, precisely because it was well after dark), someone did stop and gave me a ride. I remember the car well: it was a small red Renault 4, the kind with the stick shift that protruded L-shaped from the dashboard. The speedometer only went as high as 100 km/hour. I know we were moving faster than that and the needle was pegged at the top of the meter the entire trip.
Speaking of "high," the driver had already quaffed a beer or two. Five or six actually, so he told me, even as we stopped for a few more pints of Guinness at a local roadside pub. I bought, of course. The driver told me not to worry. He assured me that he knew this stretch of road like the back of his hand and that he could drive it blindfolded. To prove his point, the driver closed his eyes while flooring the accelerator, took his hands off the wheel and turned his red, boozy face to me for at least a full minute. The experience was something like riding in a Tesla self-driving car on the Interstate or taking a Waymo autonomous taxicab in San Francisco. At 60+ mph. With no human backup.
Needless to say, I survived hitchhiking in the British Isles. Needless to say, I didn't learn from my experience not to do it again. Traveling, in those days, was not exactly a tourist experience. The adventure lay in how you got somewhere, not where the somewhere was.
Greece
Perhaps a year later I was on the road again, this time to Greece. I took this trip with a co-ed friend from college (because, after all, I was still looking for my eventual wife who I wouldn't even meet for another decade). We traveled by very slow train down the boot of Italy. This is what used to be called a milk run. If it was possible to travel 3rd class back then, then this was it! We disembarked at Brindisi, then traveled by ferry to Corfu, thence to Piraeus and finally Athens. Athens - where we were crammed into a dingy youth hostel and we couldn't wait to escape the throng of other young folk from America and Northern Europe who were also bumming around on $1/day. There was a line of hippie tourist books by that name. How mighty the dollar used to be!
Eventually, we escaped to the island of Crete where, as best I recall, we thumbed around most of the time. The locals were very nice and hospitable. The beaches were very nice. I do remember being picked up one day by a carload of true believers who took it upon themselves to evangelize us with Seventh Day Adventist literature (as I remember). Nice people, but no, we weren't the types to be converted.
I recall that our last ride in Crete deposited us back at the ferry terminal where, once again, we encountered local custom officials. No, I didn't fall in love with anyone as I did at Heathrow Airport, but the Greek guards were very friendly (if not with me, then at least with my traveling companion with whom they were flirting). The custom guards bought us both tiny cups of Greek coffee. To show our gratitude for their hospitality, we chugged our small, strong drinks to the dregs, including the thick black coffee sludge at the bottom of the cup. We didn’t know any better! This so shocked our gracious hosts that, as I recall, they let us board the ship without wanting anything more to do with us.
Israel
It was, perhaps, a year after Greece that I was hitchhiking again, this time in Israel. I spent six weeks or so in Jerusalem living with some very kind families who I didn't know. Soon, however, I realized that I needed to get out. It was becoming clear that I was being groomed to marry my host's sister. Oh oh! I explained that I was still looking for my eventual wife who I wouldn't even meet for nearly another decade. I quickly retreated to the highway with my trusty blue Reinhold Messner backpack and stuck out my thumb.
Hitchhiking in Israel was a piece of cake back then. Or so it seemed. I am sure my experience would have been a lot different - in the summer of 1973, just on the eve of the Yom Kippur War - had I been Palestinian. Once, on the road to Hebron, I recall that my "ride" played a high-speed game of chicken on a twisty desert road, passing and getting passed by a Mercedes stretch limousine occupied by locals wearing robes and sunglasses (in the sense of "locals" going back to before the Anglo-American colony of Israel had been founded).
There were no seat belts in my car. I remember bracing my hands against the glove compartment and, terrified, preparing to sink my teeth into the dashboard. "No need to worry," my driver told me as the Mercedes passed us again and our speedometer lurched past 200 kilometers/hour. "If God wants you to die, then you die. If not, then you don't." I guess that He/She/It/They did not want me to die. Not just yet. But it was like my Irish trip from Limerick to Dublin again. The drivers in both cars were not literally drunk, but quite intoxicated nonetheless. The next war was just a month or two away.
I made it by thumb to Tiberius where, adjacent to the Sea of Galilee (which is more like a fetid lake than a sea), I spent the hottest, most humid, most mosquito-filled night of my life in yet another youth hostel. I fled the heat and humidity of Tiberius for Safed and later Haifa and eventually back to Munich. No I didn't thumb my way from Tel Aviv to Munich - I flew.
I haven't been back to Israel since 1973. Nor would I go. I am boycotting everything Israeli. With good cause. And with a deep, personal sense of embarrassment for what it is, and for what it does, and for the grotesque barbarian state that it has become.
See the USA
The cure for the hitching-itch had to happen in America, of course.
The Vietnam War was winding down when I returned to the United States to do my final year of college. It was like visiting a foreign country.
I didn't understand American culture. I still don't.
I didn't know who the latest movie and baseball stars were. I still don't.
I not sure where in the sentence the verb to put was.
I didn't even know how to use an American pay phone. Thus, at JFK airport, a representative of New York's finest wouldn't even answer me when I asked him, Mr. Police Officer, sir, could you please show me how to use the pay phone booth so I can call my brother in Pittsburgh. Perhaps the policeman was going on break. Or perhaps he hadn't heard me. Or, perhaps, he ignored me because I looked like Rasputin, John Lennon, Karl Marx and Arlo Guthrie rolled into one.
America was so foreign to me that during term break I resolved to visit the Rocky Mountains. So, once again, I packed my Reinhold Messner backpack and stuck out my thumb. I caught a ride with another college student who wanted someone to share the cost of fuel as he drove home for the Xmas holidays.
I made it half-way across the United States with a single ride. Then my driver dropped me at the St. Louis, Missouri Greyhound bus station just before nightfall.
OMG!
This was my first real experience traveling in the United States on a shoestring. The St. Louis Greyhound station was unreal. It appeared as though half the people there were drunk or on drugs. The other half was lurking about waiting to mug anyone who wasn't drunk or on drugs. And there was I looking like Rasputin, John Lennon, Karl Marx and Arlo Guthrie rolled into one, carrying a blue Reinhold Messner backpack and obviously some kind of nut case. I quickly decided to take the next bus out of there, anywhere. I ended up at a truck stop in... Leavenworth, Kansas.
Leavenworth is known for McConnell Air Force Base, for Fort Leavenworth, and for its high security federal penitentiary. I planted myself next to the on-ramp to U.S. Route 70, stuck out my thumb... and was promptly surrounded by Kansas State Patrol officers.
Kid, if you step one foot onto the highway, we're gonna bust you!
Kid, if you don't have any money on you, we're gonna bust you!
Kid, if you don't have THREE PIECES OF POSITIVE IDENTIFICATION on you right now, we're gonna bust you!
The police tapped their batons on their palms as they interrogated me.
Well, I hadn't stepped even a foot onto the highway, I had plenty of cash and travelers checks in my wallet, and - to the State Patrol officers' everlasting disappointment - I actually carried not three, but five pieces of positive identification, including a university student ID card, a military dependent's ID card, a Pennsylvania State driver's license, an international driver's license plus my magic carpet "Official Business" red U.S. passport. All of them with photographs that showed me looking like Rasputin, John Lennon, Karl Marx and Arlo Guthrie rolled into one. That left them flummoxed and kept me out of jail so that I could spend a long, sleepless night at a Leavenworth truck stop trying to catch a ride out of there.
But it only got worse.
In the late night, maybe around 2 or 3 a.m., when I was barely able to keep my head from thudding onto the Formica diner counter-top at the truck stop, someone offered me a ride west. I was groggy, barely awake. I said okay. I don't remember anything about what the guy looked like or how old he was or what he was wearing. I only remember his voice. It was a creepy voice.
The guy led me to his car in the far corner of the truck stop.
He opened the door and I got in. I put my backpack on my lap. The guy turned the ignition key and let the motor idle. The guy started to talk.
I was falling asleep in the passenger seat while this schmuck droned on and on and the car engine idled and we weren't going anywhere.
I remembered the guy asking if I was going to college. I mumbled that I was. He then started to talk about college students having it so easy because they can do whatever they want, whenever they want to do it.
They can do whatever they want. Whenever they want. Whatever. Whenever. Whatever. Whenever...
Alarm bells started ringing in my slumberous brain. Scenes from Alfred Hitchcock movies and Stephen King horror novels began to replay in my mind. If Radiohead's song Creep had already been composed and performed (it wasn't released until 1992), I would have heard the music playing. I didn't hear the music, but I was definitely sitting next to some kind of creep. He continued to rant:
They can do whatever they want. Whenever they want. Whatever. Whenever. Whatever. Whenever...
I reached across, turned off the ignition, pulled the key out of the switch and tossed it out the window. Without a word, I got out and trudged back to the truck stop. I don't know what happened to the creep in the car. And I really don't care.
I should have called it quits at that point, but I was stuck in Middle America kind of like the Conestoga Wagons, westward ho! I decided to keep going.
Later that day I got a legitimate ride as far as Denver. Legitimate, more of less. The driver liked to tell bawdy stories, which was hard listening because, as he explained, he had lost half his tongue to cancer. His speech was barely intelligible, which is probably just as well. All the way to Colorado, we glimpsed tornadoes passing to the north or to the south of us. The whole time, exhausted, I was nodding off to sleep. It was an unsettling ride. By the time we got to Denver, he was as glad to be rid of me as I was to be rid of him.
It had taken a long time to get to the Rocky Mountains, way too long. It already was time to turn around and go back to school. I caught a ride with a lady friend who would take me as far as Chicago and another Greyhound Station. That was long ago, however, and I was still looking for my eventual wife who I wouldn't even meet for nearly another decade.
My ride's car was a 1962 Chevy Bel Air. The chassis was severely rusted and, but for the rubber floor mats, my feet would have scraped the asphalt. All four tires were as slick as Jeff Bezo's head. The car had serious electrical problems. The headlights would short out every so often. We were chased by a blizzard all across the plains. Around midnight, somewhere near Crook, Colorado, in the middle of nowhere, we decided to pull off the road and get a weather update from a service station. At the bottom of the off-ramp, the car's spark plugs stopped sparking. We were dead in our tracks.
There was no traffic. The nearby gas station was closed. The temperatures were already below zero and dropping. Wind blown snow was starting to drift over the car. There we were: two young strangers (one of whom resembled Rasputin, John Lennon, Karl Marx and Arlo Guthrie rolled into one) stranded in the dark and cold night sitting alone in a bald-tired, rusted out old Chevrolet on the side of the road.
Out of nowhere, another car appeared. A middle-aged woman got out and asked if we were in trouble (because, I guess, the locals weren't likely to sit in a dark car on the off-ramp of the highway in the middle of a snowstorm). We explained that the car's electrical system had failed. The woman - she was the local preacher's wife, she told us - was not at all concerned that we might have been Bonnie and Clyde, or Charles Manson and Squeaky Fromme, or space aliens from Area 51. She seemed to know exactly what to do. She popped open her hood, connected a set of cables from her car to ours, and jumped our Chevy's battery back to life. The woman told us that the snow was supposed to abate later in the morning; that we should get back on the road and not stop until we got to where we were going. Which we did.
America at its best, I thought to myself, and it almost made up for the rest of my American hitchhiking misadventures.
Almost.
Hitchhiking in America cured me of the bug.
Almost.
There was one last trip, from Washington DC to Boston. But that wasn't really a hitchhike because I knew some of those in the truck I rode with. The truck - an old green Ford F 100 pick-up with a manual transmission - had a bench seat. All four of us - myself and three young women - sat side by side in the front.
Those like myself who knew how to drive a stick shift took turns driving. What I didn't know was that those I knew on this trip had conspired to set me up with someone I didn't know. And so it happened, by chance or design, that in the crowded front cab of the pick-up truck I tried to shift the kneecap of the young woman who was sitting next to me (I thought her knee was the floor-shift transmission stick, I explained disingenuously). That knee belonged to the one who turned out to be my eventual wife. Who I had finally met after many decades.
* * * * *
I still do a lot of thumbing these days. Now, however, I thumb my cell phone.
We are 25% into the 21st Century. I wouldn't dream of hitchhiking in the United States. Nor in Europe for that matter. I am older, of course. But the world has changed, too.
We are just six months into Donald Trump's second administration. I am weary of seeing his face and hearing his voice. I am tired of his broken promises and his thuggery masquerading as patriotism. I am bored with his narcissistic boasts and impulsive bullshit. I am tired of people who monetize everything and everyone.
I look forward to the House of Representatives flipping parties in the 2026 mid-term elections - not because I am enchanted with the Democrats, but so that the long train of articles of impeachment can roll again. Never have I seen a politician squander so much political capital so quickly. It took me at least twice as many months to become disillusioned and disgusted with the previous Democratic administration.
I am also sick of seeing the mugs and hearing the smarmy voices of the usual suspects: The Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky, South Carolina's Senator Lindsey Graham, France's Emanuel Macron, the U.K.'s Keir Starmer, Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu (and his cabinet of lunatics), Argentina's Javier Milei, the EU's Ursula von der Leyen, NATO's Secretary General Mark Rutte, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. It is no wonder that so many ordinary folk prefer viewing funny animal and TikTok videos to watching these war-mongering dissemblers on the nightly news.
Israel. It is apparently state policy - fully supported by my U.S. tax dollars and encouraged by both feckless, politically enfoeffed parties - to wage aggressive war on Iran (and everyone else) while starving and massacring Gazans. We stick our heads in the sand and refuse to see. Israel follows in the hoof-prints of the 19th Century U.S. Cavalry that burned Indian villages in the West and massacred women and children so that Indian lands could be depopulated, stolen, colonized and monetized.
Meanwhile, France dreams of recolonizing North and Central Africa even as Africans in the Sahel strive to keep them out. Even Germany, with the rise of Bundeskanzler Friedrich Merz, has determined to rearm itself, apparently in preparation for yet another fascist war of aggression against Russia and God knows who else.
We've seen this movie before. The original was pretty awful. We won't like the sequel, either. The brocade of Euro-American civilization has been rent and behind its tatters stands the beast of 500 years of unrelenting Western colonialism. Iran has vindicated North Korean: no state can claim sovereignty today without an autarkic economy, nuclear weapons and a credible means of delivering them against aggressors.
There are a few bright spots.
I am cheered by a 33 year old's victory in the Democratic Primary for Mayor of New York City. I don't agree with Zohran Mamdani on everything, but there is agreement enough that I am moved to send him a campaign contribution.
Besides, Mr. Trump has labeled Mr. Mamdani a "communist" and will investigate whether he can be deported. Coming from Mr. Trump, I regard this as a ringing endorsement for Mr. Mamdani.
If only for amusement's sake, the political system needs younger folks to irritate and annoy the old farts of the current regimes - in the U.S. and in Europe. By election day, Mr. Mamdani might have been eaten alive by the corrupt, monied political monsters that still rule the Big Apple. But I'll root for him as long as he has the energy and the will to fight with dragons.
I was dismayed by the imminent passage of the President's "big, beautiful budget bill." By the time you read this, it will have likely survived the reconciliation process and will have been signed into law. This bill is certainly "big," but there's nothing beautiful about it.
I was elated in small measure, however, because, in the Senate, they stripped out a grotesque provision for a 10 year moratorium on state and local regulation of "artificial intelligence." The Big Tech oligarchs knew that if they could prevent state and local regulation of the hydra-headed AI... then the federal government would not regulate them at all.
That would have meant that we could have been forced incrementally... but inescapably... to use, depend and rely on more and more "artificially intelligent" applications, whether we want them or not. This is happening as personal and proprietary data continues to be scraped at breakneck speed for AI's insatiable large language deformative models and agentive applications.
All of which brings me back to hitchhiking.
Twenty years after I bought my first (and heretofore only) "smart phone," it no longer could keep up with the torrent of apps and updates. I had to buy a replacement, if only for business use.
When it comes to digital devices, I wanted the bare minimum with the fewest bells and whistles. All of these "intelligent" digital devices - no, not the Chinese made devices, but the "Western" ones approved for domestic American consumption - come loaded with government and commercial back-doors, kill-switches, data harvesters and surveillance software. That is precisely why they are 'approved.'
I was shocked when, barely two days into my new digital phone, my operating system was "updated" automatically. Hitchhiking along with the new operating system was Google's AI agent, Gemini. I didn't ask for it. I didn't want it. It didn't ask permission and I couldn't say no. Its humongous, almost unfathomable "terms of service" and "privacy policy" leave users completely naked, literally and legally. Gemini simply came along with everything else in the upgrade. Like a hitchhiker virus, it entered and glommed onto the nerve cells of my phone.
The "welcome" page for Gemini told me all I needed to know about the data leech, albeit couched in the disarmingly chirpy lullaby of market-speak:
* * *
When you use Gemini, Google collects your activity, like your chats (including recordings of your Gemini Live interactions), what you share with Gemini (like files, images, and screens), info from websites you visit with Gemini, product usage information, feedback, and info about your location. This data is stored in Activity (if it’s on), reviewed by trained service providers, and used to improve and personalize Google services, including generative AI. You can review & delete your activity and manage how it is used anytime in Gemini Apps Activity. Don’t enter info you wouldn’t want reviewed or used.
* * *
How's that? “Don't enter info you wouldn't want reviewed or used?”
What?? Say again! Who, exactly, is reviewing and using my information?
I decided that I shouldn't use this thing at all!!
I tried to remove Gemini.
I couldn't.
For that matter, Google told me that I couldn't even turn the damned thing off without using Gemini's voice command (thereby involuntarily giving Google a personal voice sample for their digital dossier). Finally, after much research and effort, my wife figured out how to disable, if not entirely expunge it. Now, the artificially intelligent app resides quiescent inside my phone, a kind of herpes zoster poised to emerge in a moment of weakness like an attack of Shingles.
Artificial intelligence has become the ultimate nasty hitchhiker. It comes along for the ride.
Then it hijacks you and stays forever.
You can never get rid of it.
I hitched rides in the 20th Century. I could stop and I did. In the 21st Century, the parasites have hitched a ride with me. I can't get rid of them. I can’t make them stop
* * * * *
Good stuff, Steve. I needed a reminder that fifty/fiftyfive years ago, we were invincible. 🤓 In the early ‘70’s, I, too, had a couple of hitch hiking experiences that cured me of ever doing it again.