Learning a Lesson On Kindness

In my early twenties, I hitchhiked from New York to California. It was both an adventure and an education.

Many years ago I hitchhiked across America. In those days, before litigious aggressivity had really gained the hold on the human psyche that it has today, truckers were the hitchhikers' passport to long-distance travel.

I can’t even count the number of times the driver of some huge rig not only hauled me and my backpack for hundreds of miles but even threw a meal or a cup of coffee into the bargain.

On one occasion I begged a lift from a driver who spent the summer months driving a huge milk tanker and the winter months teaching people to ski. After dropping off the taker at some industrial depot we jumped into his Porsche and he drove me into the city through heavy traffic so I would be spared having to catch a bus.

Despite the lashings of kindness bestowed upon me by these long-distance hauliers, it was someone completely different who left the most lasting impression on me. Leaving Los Angeles with a German fellow traveller, we decided to head to San Francisco along the scenic Highway 101. It never really occurred to us that the truckers, on whom we had become so dependent, would prefer to use the more direct inland route, thus saving themselves both time and having to deal with the twists and curves of the famed coastal drive.

We reached the outskirts of Santa Barbara with no problem but after that, we were stuck. Hitchhikers learn to choose their pitches carefully. You need a position where motorists can see you well in advance to ascertain that you aren’t a likely axe murderer and a further stretch where they can pull over and stop without getting rear-ended by the following traffic. We found the perfect site but car after car flew past without even slowing down.

We both kept at it for two days. Each night we would scramble down to the nearby beach and sleep beneath a conifer that was clinging to a narrow strip of earth between land and ocean. After two days of being ignored by what felt like every motorist in America, we agreed our chances might improve if we split up. In just fifteen minutes, I was waving goodbye to my German friend as he peered back at me through the rear windscreen of a departing Chevy. Clearly he looked less like an assassin than I did.

Two days later I was still there and desperation was setting in. The more time I spent living rough, the more crusty I started to look and the less chance there was of any discerning driver taking pity on me.

I was generating plenty of self-pity and I felt it was high time someone else came on board to share the load.

Each evening I would make my way to a small roadside burger joint where I would splash out on a cheeseburger. It would be my daily treat to myself as well as a way for compensating the burger joint for the fact that I was secretly cat washing and brushing my teeth in their bathroom.

For forty-eight hours I had spoken to nobody except the waitress. I quickly learned that it is very easy to become lonely, even in a crowded restaurant.

I would drag my meals out as long as was reasonably possible. With no light down on the beach, I couldn’t even read when I returned to what was rapidly becoming my home away from home beneath the lonely tree. On the second night on my own, the fourth day of fruitless waving my thumb at all and sundry, I was writing up my diary in the burger joint when an old man came up to me and asked where I was from. With my backpack slouched on the floor beside me, it wouldn’t have taken Sherlock Holmes to figure out I wasn’t a local.

We chatted for a while, both with our inner radar switched on and highly tuned to detect whether or not the opposite party was working on a scam of some kind. Eventually, the old man seemed to reach a decision and he asked if I would like to come home with him and meet his wife and sleep in a comfortable bed for the night. It was clearly a decision he hadn’t taken lightly and, given my alternatives, it was an offer I was quick to accept.

At his small but comfortable home I was shown the caravan I would be sleeping in and introduced to his wife. She was a delicate little woman who, though polite, was clearly nervous of me. It was a strange situation to find myself in. Sitting at someone else’s dining room table desperately trying to come across as gentle and harmless. Soon she headed off to the kitchen to prepare us a meal.

I had already eaten but the hitchhiker's rule of never ever turning down free food coursed powerfully through my veins.

As she busied herself in the kitchen, the old man apologised to me for his wife’s attitude and explained that a couple of years earlier their neighbor had brought home a traveller who had subsequently robbed him. In the process, the traveller had beaten the man so badly that he died the next day. Suddenly I understood the reason for his wife’s fear. I also realized just how much courage it must have taken for the old man to invite me into his home in that way.

The next morning, showered and far more fragrant, my host dropped me back in the perfect hiking spot and an hour later I was admiring the view from a fast-moving car. I never saw the couple again, though I did write several times during what remained of my voyage. Poor compensation for such generosity, I am sure.

The interesting thing is that that act of kindness has never left me. I have travelled on five continents as a freeloading hitchhiker and I now routinely pick up hitchhikers whenever I see them. Some of them have gone on to become friends, and yes, once or twice I have been ripped off.

It is not a mode of travel that is much utilized anymore. We live in a world where distrust seems to permeate much of how we live and hitchhiking requires an act of trust on the part of both parties involved.

An old man, whose name I am ashamed to say I don’t remember, taught me that kindness and courage are two sides of the same coin. I only hope I can live up to the legacy he left me.