I must be good then because I’ve given one ride and accepted one ride.
The given was a Hare Krishna in a rest area in Virginia. He was looking cold in his robes.
The taken was when my brother was taking me to BWI to catch a flight. He had a breakdown and he got on the CB radio. Somebody stopped and took me right to the correct airline’s drop-off area.
On really cold days I will sometimes see people walking from the supermarket to the only section of our very affluent town where there is affordable housing (including a few units of public housing and a trailer park). I will offer them a ride. I even keep a couple of booster seats in the trunk of my car. My wife thinks I’m insane.
The only other time I have picked up someone is a guy walking with a bunch of shopping bags on the road leading out of a shopping mall in Kansas City (Overland Park KS actually). It was snowing pretty hard and it was Christmas Eve or maybe the day before. I was in my late 20s at the time and was generally unafraid of crime.
One summer, my mom took us kids (four of us) on a six-week road trip around the western US. We picked up numerous hitchhikers – mostly while we were in national parks – who were seemingly European or Canadian (often, they’d have a country patch sewn onto the backpack). Perhaps she felt that if someone was crazy enough to get into a van with a middle-aged woman and four kids, they had a lot more to be afraid of than we did.
As far as accepting a ride? My girlfriend and I spent three months traveling through Europe the summer after high school and took a train from Vienna to Rome. Only, there had been an earthquake and the train was rerouted into what was then Yugoslavia and we arrived at our destination more than eight hours late – about 2 a.m…
We couldn’t get into our pensione and the taxis were on strike, so we accepted a ride from a fellow who whom we had shared the train cabin – who took us to his home about 25 miles outside of Rome.
It wasn’t until we closed our bedroom door that we realized we only knew this man’s first name and had no idea where we were! Luckily, he was a gentleman and cheerfully drove us back to our pensione the following day.
What were we thinking? I’m usually extremely risk-averse, but the long trip, delay, and lack of options clouded my choices. (Thank you, Leone, for not murdering us!)
In the 1960s and 1970s, I hitch hiked something like 10,000 miles in the US, New Zealand, and Australia. The longest single trip was 8 days from New York City to Oregon with my girlfriend in 1973. It took us 26 rides and we usually slept under bridges and in fields. But we had one overnight ride with a long-distance trucker. I visited New Zealand and Australia in 1974 and most of my travel was by thumb, although I used the bus for long-haul trips in Australia.
Since then I have occasionally had to hitch to a service station after a flat tire or breakdown in Panama or Venezuela.
I have occasionally picked up people for a ride who were hitching or who were hiking down the road off the beaten track, but not recently.
When I was seven years old, I missed the school bus. I couldn’t find the babysitter so I decided to ride my bike along the local highway in the dead of winter. I was confident I knew the way to school. I was wrong. I wandered into a local neighborhood and became extremely lost. I gathered the courage to ask for help and banged on the door of a nearby house. A random guy answered. He let me in his house to use his phone. I couldn’t get ahold of my mother.
So this random - ass guy threw my bike in his trunk and drove me to school.
Oh, man, did I get in so much trouble for that.
Only on vacations.
It might be good vacation karma. A couple of times, I’ve just given people a ride from point A to B - just around the town. On two occasions, I’ve been roadtripping with a car and ran into people who were kind of floating around from place to place (one was taking buses when they were available or getting rides from place to place, the other was actually riding a razor scooter around the ring road in Iceland.) As they were going the same way I was, it seemed like a no-brainer to give them a ride to their next stop.
On the other side, there was a transportation strike once when I was overseas. I still don’t quite understand how it worked, because I was able to take a bus to the very outskirts of town to see a site - but when it came time for me to head back, the buses weren’t running that direction? (I don’t know. I didn’t speak the language well enough to understand). Luckily, a work crew was doing some construction nearby and had stopped in to the cafe where I was trying to figure out what to do next and one of them offered me a ride back to the city center where I’d have more options to figure out what to do next. I saw the most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen in my life through the window of that pickup truck (and also, I didn’t have to walk 2 hours back to town).
I used to hitch occasionally in my 20s (1980s). One time I’m hitching and a lady with a baby stops for me! I knew I wasn’t a psycho, but thought it was quite odd until I got in the car and she called me by name. Then she went “Wait, you aren’t phs3?!” and I realized what had happened: there was another guy in the same town with the same first name. We both rode motorcycles (not relevant in this instance) and looked like brothers. I had previously had a stranger start a conversation with me about a party I hadn’t attended, and gotten pulled over by the cops once because I was “riding the wrong bike” (his was red, mine was black; apparently he was much better known by the cops than I was, heh).
I finally ran into him (at the motorcycle shop, of course). I introduced myself, noted we had the same first name and kept getting mistaken for each other–and I could even see the resemblance. Weirdly, he wasn’t the least bit interested in this fact.
He has a distinctive last name, and I found him on Facebook recently, showed him to my wife; she agrees that we could be brothers, though the resemblance has weakened over the years.
“It’s a strange world, isn’t it” – Blue Velvet
Does Uber count?
Do taxis or buses?
Maybe because she knows who you married?
BTW, I think what you do and toddler seats is beyond good karma. I want to be like you when I grow up.
My FIL
My FIL had a car rental franchise and asked me to fly 200 miles to retrieve a cargo van, no seats. By the time I got back to town I had eleven hitch-hikers stacked in the back like cord-wood.
My wife and I spent two months in South Africa and hitched everywhere, from Swaziland to Windhoek. Farmer’s wife took us home, invited us to stay for a week, took us to their beach house.
Yeah, that seems really nice.
My company does a big not-only-united-way fundraiser each year, and they often get a few employees to speak about the value of the local charities that are supported. One executive stood up and said that growing up poor, he and his mom would walk to the grocery store, but it was too far to walk back with the groceries. So his job, and the cute little kid, was to hitch rides from strangers. (And some charity gave him a working bicycle, which was life-changing, although he still had to bum rides for his mom and the groceries.) Usually those stories sort of wash over my head, but that one stuck.
You are doing God’s work.
She is concerned I’m going to get in some legal trouble. Someone will claim I abducted them or something.
I have been arrested twice (and jailed once) on completely trumped up charges that amount to “being well dressed and driving a nice car while brown”
I once served on a grand jury investigating allegations of police misconduct. The very ugliest case we listened to was a guy who was arrested for driving while black. They stole his car. It makes me angry decades later to think about the case and it didn’t even happen to anyone i know.
The hitchhiker he picked up might actually have had a joint on him. The driver was guilty of literally nothing more than driving while black.
On a more positive note… I ‘hitched’ almost every work day in the mid-70s. Just out of college, making a whole $9k a year, it was going to be a while til I saved up enough for a car.
But it was a friendlier (or maybe just less careful) time. Never had to wait more than ten minutes; I had a hand-scrawled LATE for WORK sign in my pack if I got desperate.
I got rides from a lot of interesting characters. Like the jolly old guy with a car already full of student-types. He said “I’ll take you anywhere in town, but most o’ these folks are going to the college first. Oh, and you gotta sign the guest book!” An Anthro Grad Student girl handed me a heavy tome, while the rest rolled their eyes.
It all ended abruptly in the '80s. I kidded that I was going to write a book called Hitching In The Reagan Years: The Futility.
But one morning I was late, and had to put out my thumb. Hundreds of drivers ignored me, until a Sam Elliott lookalike gave me a ride out of his way… “Ah never do this, but jes’ had a feeling Howard would want me to.”
“Okay… Howard?”
“Our Father who art in heaven… Howard be thy name.”
It kind of did, didn’t it? I’ve never figured out why. I don’t think the danger actually increased – there had always been some danger involved, in both directions; but most rides ended up fine. And certainly it wasn’t that suddenly absolutely everybody had a functioning car. But up to some point around the 80’s – I don’t remember when exactly – any major highway onramp would have hitchhikers, and hitchers in town or even on back roads weren’t unusual. And then they were unusual; it never quite stopped entirely, but I could drive all day and never see a hitcher.
Once many years ago I was driving through my mom’s neighborhood and I saw a little old lady, carrying a paper grocery bag in both arms. It was VERY hot outside and she was walking slowly. So I stopped and offered her a ride. She was reluctant, I was a stranger after all, but got in and I took her on. She lived about four blocks further down past my mom’s place.
One snowy winter my dad took me to the ER. We noticed and chatted with a woman waiting for a cab. When I was ready to leave the old lady was still waiting. So we offered her a ride and she accepted. I thin she lived alone and was lonely, she asked us in for coffee. We stayed a short while and left.
When I was a tweener my family took road trip vacations. Once, and only once, we picked up a hitchhiker, a young soldier in uniform. My dad did it because in the fifties he did it all the time. We were headed east and so was he, we must have given him a four hour ride, and lucnch. He was very grateful. This would have been in the later 60’s.
I’ve both hitched and accepted, multiple times. Mostly in New Zealand (I was there for a year, and bought a car mid-way through). I actually, for a bet got the whole way round the South Island, for a month, entirely hitching. At one point I spent two days virtually adopted by a lovely Canadian couple, who bought me dinner and paid for me to get into attractions- apparently I was about the same age as their daughter, who was backpacking round Europe, so they were going for a sort of sympathetic magic approach. I also managed to get picked up 3 times by the same guy, on the same day.
Also hitched a couple of times in Australia (once with a folding bed) and once in Malaysia, when I got caught in a downpour and a random lady with a kid I’d met suggested it rather than waiting almost an hour for the bus.
The most memorable pickup was probably a guy who had been misinformed about the bus timetable in NZ- he’d arrived at the stop after a 4 day hike, having eaten the last of his food, only to discover the buses only ran for part of the year. It was a good 20 miles to the nearest town, a dead-end road into the park, and so far out of season I was the only car there that day.
All of these were since 2005, incidentally, and the last time I picked anyone up was last year. Two guys I thought had broken down- they hadn’t, there was something a bit weird going on, I didn’t quite get what, but neither of them murdered me even a little bit, so it was fine.