When I was a youngin’, I used to do an activity that most young folks either don’t get a chance to do, or they determine that in today’s world that it is a stupid idea. Actually, the hitchhiking idea may have been dumb even when I was young. However, it seemed to be a good idea at the time and none of us had anything happen that made us regret it. For example, when I lived in Harrisville, PA which was a vast community of 600 and we wanted to go to a movie or swim in a pool, we had to get to the large city of Grove City (10,000 pop) which was about eight miles away. Now even though I had to walk to school a couple of miles uphill each way through Pennsylvania winters, walking eight miles to go swimming was a little much.
Therefore, we would get our grubby little bodies out on Rt 8, and stick our thumbs out. Usually after a short while, some nice person would stop and we would have our ride to the big city. We would do the same action to come back home, which we made every time. The whole time we lived there, there wasn’t one person who came out in combat boots, armed to the teeth and tried to shoot someone. OK, we did have some who looked like that, but they were hunters seeking deer or some other unfortunate critter. Thus, our parents didn’t think twice about letting us hitchhike. Hitchhiking stayed prominent for many years in my section of Western Pennsylvania. In fact, that is where I went to college. I joined a fraternity and one evening the actives took us poor pledges, blindfolded us, and made us eat something awful – and which smelled worse. They then took us 30 miles away, dumped us off, and we had to figure where we were and then get back by morning.
It was a little difficult, especially since we smelled. We also decided we would follow the North Star, but had an argument about which one it was, so we just put out our thumbs. Eventually a car stopped. The guy looked at us for a minute, grinned and said to hop in. We did and asked him where he was headed. He was going more or less where we wanted to go so, we rode with him for a while. We kept hitchhiking until we made it back. We all agreed that was a dastardly thing for the actives to do to us poor pledges. However, it must be admitted that when our sophomore year came around, we did the same thing to that year’s pledges.
It’s amazing how you can fall into the mores of the society in which you are traveling. However, it did show the value of hitchhiking!
I can think of only one time when hitchhiking got me in trouble. However, it was done in conjunction with our other primary method of getting around – the bicycle. My good old Roadmaster bike took me to many places. It had New Departure brakes which everyone knew were better than the Morrow brakes. Back then, bicycles were one speed and there wasn’t much to argue about except which brakes were the best. In any case, a friend was going into Grove City to meet his girlfriend for a movie. Well, the girl had a friend and they wanted to know if I would hitchhike in too and the four of us would go to the movie. Well, I hardly knew the girl, but I did know that she was a cute blonde, so I said sure! The problem came when I rode my bike into town. I was pedaling along merrily when a car I hadn’t seen honked because he thought I might pull out in front of him. It startled me, I fell off my bike and landed on my right arm. It hurt so much that I couldn’t hitchhike. Never did go out with the girl I was to meet. Even good things can go awry, I guess.
I miss those carefree hitchhiking days. I suggested to The Blonde in the house that maybe we could hitchhike on Rt 42 through Paisley, Altoona and Weirsdale as they remind me of my old haunts. For some reason she said, “No!”
Barry Evans is a columnist for Villages-News.com.