by Jim Hindle
“When all else fails, hitching can get you there”
Sometimes it feels we are living in two worlds; all of us in one if not the other. For many, holidays and travelling abroad still beckon with all the surety of a dream that sometimes seems nothing if not enduring. Our roads are still crammed with an endless stream of tiny metal boxes carrying their parcels of humanity while trains remain cramped and coaches are packed to the gunnels with all those opting for a kind of second-best long haul.
In transport it seems that, despite the recession, life continues much as it ever did. But beneath apparent appearances, there is a growing understorey of society for who all of this is rendered unobtainable. The modern dream of slick, affordable and frequent movement along the highways and airlines and tracks of industrial life is no longer an option for many or something done so rarely that it is impacting on vast numbers of people who are witnessing horizons shrinking back to an age that we all thought would never come again.
And with oil prices set to continue to rise, it only seems likely that less people will travel in the months and years that come. But at times like these, we’d do well to remember that we have other options, that we don’t have to buy into the dubious dream of one car per person, or to submit to paying ever more exorbitant fees to travel on public transport. Because, for as long as people have been travelling by wheeled transport, there have always been those able and willing to flag down a ride.
From hobbos to hippies, beatniks to punks, hitching has always been there as an option for anyone on the cultural and financial fringes (as well as anyone at all with enough of a sense of adventure). It open ups horizons in a way that beautifully subverts the idea of private car ownership and an over-individualised society. In other ways too, it could not be more relevant to our times; in the UK the number of miles currently driven per year outnumber those travelled by car passengers by nearly two to one and are more than four times those travelled on any kind of public transport. With emissions of transport still on the rise, hitching fills up seats and reduces the footprint of each and every journey made per person.
In an ever more homogenised, sterilized, predictable world, hitching breaks down barriers and challenges our expectations. There’s no way of knowing when and where your lift might come, who you might be getting a ride with and exactly what route or timescale you’ll be undertaking. It reintroduces something that all the reliable timetables and super slick services have taken from us; that the journey itself is part of the experience, that travelling ought to open our eyes to landscapes, to deepen experiences and test our resourcefulness – all of this anathema to what we often see as a god given right to comfort and convenience.
It hones your powers of conversation too, lumping you with strangers who you may have little in common with but a stretch of road or further destination, a fuel bill and a sense of human decency. In a way it acts as a kind of natural social selection; that it filters out your encounters with all the hundreds and thousands who will pass you by, meaning nine times out of ten you’re likely to be travelling with the best person on that stretch of road as they were broad minded or simply generous enough to stop and pick you up. At the very least it will throw you into a situation with someone whose views you may not share and who exposes you (in a way we tend to experience less and less now) to something outside the habitual bubbles of containment we tend to stay within.
There are the natural provisos of course – to check out the legality of hitching where you live or where you might be travelling to, and the law on exactly where you can hitch. In Britain for instance, hitching is legal but you aren’t allowed on motorways themselves, meaning you can only catch lifts from verges on sliproads and even then standing the wrong side of a sign can earn you reprimands or get you moved on. As a man, it’s usually best to travel alone or with one friend – three can seem like a mob, making people reluctant to stop – especially if they have already another passenger or two. As a woman, for obvious reasons, hitching with someone else is probably advisable.
Perhaps the best thing hitching can encourage is a better sense of how to trust your own instincts. If that means occasionally turning down a lift because you don’t like the behaviour of whoever’s offering it, it pays to listen. But it also improves all those other points of instant judgement familiar to any traveller; where to stand in any given situation that will improve your chances of getting a lift, where best to get dropped off, whether it’s wise to sometimes go a little off route in order to take you to a better place. Being dependent on serendipity and luck gives ground for the development of idiosyncratic superstitions and articles of faith in how best to go to go about it – and some of them actually work.
Setting out on a long hitch always has the air of the unknown, the world itself as a consequence seems a little larger, life seems a bit more lived. And all that’s needed is a good map of the roads, some weatherproof gear, some cardboard and a big black pen. Then get ready to experience the incredible rush of that first lift and the sense of freedom that travelling at speed for little or no money brings.
See the open road become more than just a route from A to B. See it as a great teacher too.
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About the Author
Jim Hindle is a traditional musician and writer with a background in environmental campaigning, outdoor education and archaeological reconstruction projects. He is the author of ‘Nine Miles: Two Winters of Anti-Road Protest’ and lives in England in the lee of the Sussex South Downs.
