The art of hitchhiking

Interest will get you a long ways when it comes to living

I was waiting at the bus stop as usual. It was a warm summer day, sticky, dusty and drained of colour thanks to the pavement, the stone houses, the sheen of the afternoon. I’m not sure what exactly prompted me to stick out my thumb but it was probably impatience and mostly a desire to leave, leave my skin, my life, my situation. I hope this resonates because it’s part of being alive, shedding, metamorphose. And I was part of a culture that has lost the words and ritual and community around such ceremonies. So instead of waiting for a bus, handing over my pennies, lying about my age to get the cheaper fair and then siting in my own lonely soup of a mind I started hitchhIking. I stuck out my thumb for something different. I became engaged with something bigger than myself. I intentionally opened the door to synchronicity. Part of the bizarre aspect of the whole wonder, mystery and unknown of the universe is that you often dont know what’s going down.

It wasn’t a proper bus stop in the sense that there was a bench or a shelter or even people. This was one stop of many before you landed in a moderate size city 40 mins later. A stop delineated by a post with the bus time table on it at the corner of a cross road. A place where I began a five year stint into one of my most magical practices, although I didn’t know it at the time. So of course it was a crossroads. And I was, at fourteen years of age, standing on the corner sticking out my thumb looking to the winds of change to bring something, anything from where I was.

Five minutes at a run away stood my childhood home which was now an empty echo because I was an orphan. I still feel shame when I write those words as my need was so big. And needy. Needy not be an orphan, needy not be in such dire emotional straights. So needy I was the most independent thing around. But it’s the fulcrum of the story, had my mum been around I would not be waiting at the bus stop, I probably wouldn’t be smoking a roll up and I wouldn’t be quite as keen. Honed. All raw feelings and very little complacency.

I didn’t wake up and decide thats what I was going to do that day. I simply felt into the necessity of my desire and let myself choose to do something. It was the card of the Fool, the fall and it’s guarded by angels. I had no words for any of this but I felt it.

The second car that passed me pulled over and gave me a ride all the way to the city. Turns out it’s actually quicker to hitch hike than use public transport! More comfortable and I even seemed to manage conversation, silence, politeness, rudeness, outbursts, deep interrogation, completely inappropriate personal dumps and the occasional mind blowing conversation and joyous connection. I was in another persons world, a fantastic respite from being in mine. Turned out I was interested in other humans and could, even at 14, handle them pretty well.

Interest will get you a long ways when it comes to living and that was what I needed. I needed to feel engaged in a way that wasn’t grounded in disaster, tragedy and despair. I needed to feel alive because of the now.

Naturally I was hooked. I began to hitchhike on a regular basis. I became somewhat of an expert and also I just plain adored hitchhiking. I loved how effective it was and how easily I got rides. It blew my mind that just an inch of material placed in a different place on my body would produce predictably different experiences. I was aware of the context and could control the outcome, if I wore a certain thing people would respond a certain way which meant I could code my experience. I got to be playful because the rules were easy.

I was mainly getting around between towns in my little rural area, from my now defunct childhood home, to my friends house where I spent all my time, to where I ended up going to college and occasionally to the big city. I didn’t think about it too much, it wasn’t something that occurred to me to think about, it was just something that I experienced on the weekly, this walking to the A1, out of Stamford or Grantham, always a couple of miles or so, pointless to try and hitchhike from the center of town as everyone is going different ways and probably just up the road. You have to put in the prep. endure the slog. Set the mode, there was no just switch from one thing to another no click click and reset. I had to get up and no matter what the weather start moving. And of course within 10 minutes my resistance to the work would transform into anticipation. Getting ready for the mystery of the unknown, what was next? Even though it was a simple as getting to the next town it was still a huge what next. Half an hour or so later to get to a place where people could easily pull over. That became apparent pretty early on, you got to build the fire for the spark to land, you got to meet the universe half way, you have to consider the other and invite it in. Set and setting. Its a thing.

I got to be really good at hitch hiking. It just added to the joy. After a while it became less about escaping my situation and more about the act itself. I became more interested in the people, more aware of what I was doing and how I was perceived. More aware of how to trust myself. Here was the crux of the practice, a year or so in, here was the true lesson because I was learning to hone my instinct. Something I know that we would do as hunters. Something that is so lost to us in this world of convenience.

It was life and death, which car I would get into. Which person I would sit next to next. There were a couple of rules I created for myself. No matter if it was the pullover on a motorway or the edge of a country road I would always ask first where the driver was going to. Not for the information but to buy me time. Give me that 3 second window where I could feel into myself, hear the resounding NO or the lack of. So I could blithely say, if I needed, oh sorry thats not the right town but thanks anyway and shut the door, walk away even if it made no sense, like on a one way motorway. I decided early on that I wouldn’t carry a knife. I simply couldn’t use it. I dont have the gumption to physically break through all that gristle of reality in the first 5 seconds. And if I wasn’t able to use a knife immediately and intelligently, with skill and confidence, I might as well just hand them an extra weapon. I sometimes sat in the back if I felt a maybe so that I could strangle them with the seat belt if they veered off path or down a strange road even though it never happened but gave me a weird sort of upper hand. I never wore a seatbelt unless told¹ so that I could easily pitch myself out of the car which also never happened just as I would off happily pulled the hand-break in an emergency but knew that was a last ditch tactic. All of these teenage imaginings, full of drama. Mainly I focussed on honing my instinct. This was what I was truly learning and was also absolutely the best way to being sure of a good ride.

And 98% of my rides were good rides. Some were incredible, the highlight of my week where I met fascinating people who gave me really cool affirmations, rolled spliffs, had great taste in music, some were men I would have loved to have dated, family’s I would have loved to have been part of, artists who I would have happily run away with. Lorry drivers were incredibly reliable and safe. It took me a moment to get over my prejudice that felt like fear, to enter an unknown world of the fully working class, this realm of big greasy men, rough but who listened to opera or audio books, who knew jokes or were happy with silence. They were the road kings and we shared a camaraderie of being part of that world, workers of the road ways. They would get on their radios and have lifts lined up for me, I would jump out at one roadside to be swept up on the next leg, it was fluid. We had style. We worked it.

There were quite a few guys who attempted to live out some kind of fantasy and take advantage of the fact that I was “offering” myself to them but most never had the nerve to mention it. It just fell over the ride like someone had left old cheese on the back seat. A kind of funky atmosphere where nothing lands, where the unspoken is much louder than the polite mundane conversation. I reconised this early on and although uncomfortable I could handle it for the 30/40 minutes drive. If sexual innuendo spilled out, was expected banter, this was the ride I tended to close the door on and the car I choose not to get into, the good old guy just having a laugh leer. It had its own smell and the hunger would hit you as soon as you made eye contact. Common predators. The tactic of deflection doesn’t take long to escalate into provocation and then aggression and things tend to spiral from there so I best avoided it. I didn’t resent them, they were who they were, I just found it best not to engage. Just like if I was off to a party I would pack my sexy dress rather than put it on for the road, false advertising always pisses people off.

There were a few times where it got really uncomfortable so I honed and honed my instinct. Usually though, the longing just started to seep out towards the end of a ride, before they missed their great chance and I would escape the confines of the car and their power over me. In these circumstances I just started to act like an idiot. That usually was enough of a damper, besides I could see the effort that was involved to try and approach me. One man offered to take me all the way into town for a blowjob and off the cuff I innocently replied that yes that was a lovely shade of blue². I found it a lot easier to redirect with my mind rather than force, after all that was my strength in these circumastances. The poor guy was completely flummoxed, and all the wind left his sails. It had taken him 30 minutes to pull up the courage, convince himself that he was offering a really good deal and now I obviously hadn’t heard him. Or had I? and was I just mad? Or a really clever joke and I was actually flirting with him but he was too thick to get it? His mind and enthusiasm got lost in the confusion. Either way it was to much and he just let me out as soon as he could.

There was only one time that I ever met a true psychopath in my 5 years of hitchhiking and luckily I managed to get away. I had to run for it though. And I’ll never forget seeing his cold dead fish eyes as he tried to grab me as I leaped over the meridian rail. For my part I looked like a street person, I was hitchhiking form Portugal and this was Belgium, I was tired, having just had an epic 13 hour ride through the whole of France in a Volkswagen van which involved a discrete quickie with one of the musicians. My care for coding had gone out the window, I was covered in mosquito bites that looked suspiciously like some kind of bad disease, dirty and smelling ripe to say the least. At best I resembled a throw away person, easy for abuse. Meanwhile he was not home in his head. Pretty scary thing to see but part of the learning curve. Had I been paying attention I would not have got in the car. Had I been paying attention I would have taken a moment to code my experience differently and gone for a wash up at a petrol station.

Of course people love to focus on that anomaly rather than the thousands of heart warming, heart felt rides that took me from 14 to 19. I eventually stopped hitch hiking because I was done and it had got old and there was very little left to learn. It was hard to find the unknown in all the known. People had started to fall into categories, basically I was becoming cynical of the process and the people so it was time to do something different.

It wasn’t until I was much older that I realised the greater implications of exactly what I had been up to. Not until I started intentionally working with the unseen. That my hitchhiking was part of an initiatory process, that flow came easily because of the great work that I had done. That I had good instincts and knew to follow my instincts and could listen to that little voice. That the little voice was central to how I moved forward in life. That I had faced adversity with both hands thrust forward. that my heart was willing. That I had learned how to move through mystery. But more than anything I knew my truth, I knew the voice. I trusted it and I could hear it clearly. The connection was clear.

I spent most of my 20’s and 30’s dancing in and out of ignoring and listening but I still had firm connection to my voice, my truth. I danced in and out of other learnings, some more painful, like bad relationships or more meaningful like motherhood but there was something distinctly magical about that time of being young and pitting myself against the unknown.

I look at this age of internet and AI in the same way as how we navigate our landscapes, how we hunt and how we come through the life and death of adult initiation. Our kids, like us will only have their little voice, their gut to tell them which way to go. There are many traps, a lot vying for their attention but this process will hone them into knowing what is theirs. What to close the door on. What’s a back seat ride and a bang up front bumper ride. They will have to get used to the really sneaky misdirects and learn how to choose where they want to go and what for. There is nothing, in the infinite sea of chaos that is machine learning but their truth to guidepost their way. And its coming quicker than we can imagine.

I dont know if hitchhiking is the same kind of initiation now as it was then back in the late 80’s and early 90’s. I hitchhiked before the internet, everyone was on slow time, slow porn, slow tv, slow values allowing my instinct and maneuverings in real time to be on tempo. Im not sure what initiation via hitch hiking looks like in a social media age. I do know that it wasn’t recommended to me then and it probably wouldn’t be recommended now so it shares that commonality.

That is, after all, the inescapable aspect of humanity, through death we come alive and it takes that edge for us to understand our selves. It’s no wonder that AI resembles this menacing life force that will take over us as it is the new adversary. Our new predator prey. At least back then I had to seek it out. At least back then I had many places of respite. At least back then it wasn’t the first thing I reached for. At least back then I knew when I entered the slipstream, I was braced.

We have all been orphaned from our mother, mother earth. We can go days and weeks without really engaging, more actively not engaging, controlling temperature, air quality, peoples stories streamed in on netflix rather than the side of a road. We can be in comfort in the stagnancy of our home environment. We can feel safe not breathing a cohesive living air teaming with life, with chaos. We can pretend that life without death is safe.

I wonder about our kids honing their little voices in the machine void and wonder what will it bring and wonder what will bring out their edge.

For anyone who picked up a really quirky teenage girl along the Stamford to Graham road in the late 80’s thank you! You made my day.

May we all find our true way home

1. we are talking 30-40 years ago……

2. thats why practice is important.