Talking With Strangers – Then

Position: 54°26’33.6″N 1°40’11.3″W

Talking with strangers isn’t something that came to me naturally. As an awkward teenage boy with eczema and a 1970s-style dysfunctional home life (see Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm), I graduated high school with what seemed like a bare minimum of social skills. All was not lost, however. My after-school job as a bagger and later a check-out clerk in Hyde Park’s Co-op grocery store required me to deal with the public.

On busy Saturdays, the lines stretched interminably with impatient customers whose brusque frustrations I refused to take personally. The bottlenecks were not my fault. In 1977 barcode scanners were a pipe dream of the distant future. The store’s clunky, stiff mechanical cash registers slowed things to a crawl. Eventually, they were replaced by fancy electronic registers linked to a computer.

My five day-a-week part-time job meant I had enough savings on graduation that I could run away to England. Which I did with my friend Rick. We bought bicycles and panniers and set forth to ride from Land’s End to John O’Groats. When we reached Oxford I fell sick with mononucleosis and spent 10 days in bed. Once back on my feet, we agreed we needed a faster form of transportation. Believing we did not have enough money left for railway passes, we took to the roads and started hitchhiking.

Mini CountryWoman

Perhaps one of our most memorable lifts came in North Wales when a young woman pulled over in an early 1960s Mini Countryman. Rick and I grabbed our backpacks ran up to the car and opened the door. We both did a double take, silently thinking this generous, attractive woman might be out of her mind. There was a small baby in the back seat and the boot was full of stuff.

Growing up American, we knew picking up a hitchhiker in the States was one step away from a violent death at the hands of a serial killer. Picking up two large, scruffy Yanks with a baby on board seemed, well, outré at least. But it was a busy road and we’d been waiting and weren’t about to refuse. With the kind of physical origami that only the young can manage, we squeezed in and with our backpacks on our laps made small talk for the next 40 miles or so.

A couple of months later, Rick and I had gone our separate ways, and I was heading south from Scotland (see: Ladybugs, Bird Poop, and Karma). Late September rains had brought cold weather to Scotch Corner and I was mighty happy to clamber up into the warm cab of a big Leyland pantechnicon. (Note: Pantechnicon is worth at least five dollars on the open word market these days. Back then it was common parlance in Britain. I learned it through osmosis.)

Talking

The lorry’s driver was a heavyset, middle aged Yorkshireman whose thick accent was unmistakable. Here was a man who probably never aspired to greatness, but never aspired to driving trucks either. I was a little older than his sons and at one point I proffered the question, “What do you think your boys are going to do [with their lives]?” “I don’t care what they do,” he replied, “as long as they don’t drive bloody trucks!” In that moment, the invisible hand of parenting became clear to me.

Both experiences encapsulate the generosity of spirit that hitchhiking depends on. They also speak to an expectation of social engagement. For most lorry drivers, picking up a rider was a way to help pass the time. After a few weeks, I had honed my story and learned to ask questions that kept the conversation going.

95% of my lifts were with men and my easiest rides were with chatty fellas. I would give them a little personal information to break the ice, then ask an open-ended question and they were off and rolling. Despite being a captive audience, I loved hearing their stories. Occasionally the burden of talking fell on me and I had to overcome my innate shyness and borrow lessons from the chatterers. Given the implicit transaction of getting a free ride to someplace, I made it my goal to be as pleasant a temporary companion as possible. Besides, there’s nothing like shutting up and listening to make people think you’re intelligent.

Privileges

Being tall, white, and fairly clean cut gave me all kinds of privileges that I took full advantage of, too. It was a rare day’s hitchhiking when I waited more than 30 minutes for a lift. Back then hitchhiking in the UK was an entirely acceptable form of transportation. Like having a telephone in your home, car ownership was anything but universal. Everyone hitched if they couldn’t afford a train or bus. Delivery drivers would move a truck from one side of the country to the other and hitchhike home. Holding a temporary license plate as a sign, they’d wait no more than a couple of minutes for a trucker to pick them up. Meanwhile us kids had to remain patient. But, as I said, rarely for long.

Years later I compared notes with an English friend about his gap year experiences hitchhiking across America. He never met an axe murderer, but lots of people tried to convert him to their form of Christianity. His stories and reading Kerouac’s On the Road helped revise my prejudices about hitchhiking in the United States, but not so far as to hit the interstates with my thumb out. By the time I’d returned to live in America full time, I could afford a car and a house to keep the kids safely caged up. I had also learned to talk with strangers.

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