Green IslandHitch hiking in the UK - Three Tales of the Open Road
December 8th 2008 12:37
Two ways to improve your chances of getting a lift
Wordsworth in his epic about himself, The Prelude wrote:
My trust is in the God of Heaven,
And in the eye of him that passes me.
Long after forgetting about the rest of the poem these words have remained with me as a mantra to get me through times of despair, especially when hitch hiking. When I feel the situation is hopeless, when the light of day is fast retreating, when the elements are conspiring against me, when few vehicles pass and I can’t think what I should do next, I repeat Billy Wordsworth’s words to myself and I feel a little calmer. And sure enough some stranger stops to help me out. Allah will provide and he works through the agency of Good Samaritans. In this article I’m going to attempt some general words about the cultural significance of hitch hiking and then I’ll relate three short tales of hitching in the UK.
One of the saddest things for me about my country is the present lack of hitchers on the motorways. It represents the victory of Thatcher and the defeat of Jack Kerouac. Ever since the 60s people had hit the road, dropped out, tuned in and attempted in their own small ways to protest against ‘the system’. By the late 1990s the forces of Mordor had seemed to have subdued the last pockets of resistance in the Middle Kingdom. From now on the once free people of Britain must pay tribute to the corporations if they want to go anywhere.
This blessed plot, this earth, this Realm, this England...Dear for her reputation through the world, Is now leas'd out...Like to a Tenement or pelting farm
We must all pay to move and those who have little money are forced onto National Express coaches or stay at home. Travelling for me is like the internet – you can pay to get the information or if you have the patience and a bit of computer savvy you can download what you need for free; just so for travelling: those in a hurry pay to take cars, trains and buses; and for those with patience, and just a little know-how, hitching is the free alternative.
It’s obvious why the right-wing is opposed to hitching. It is direct communalism – a stranger prepared to help another outside the nexus of payment and tax. It takes money away from the transport companies and car manufacturers. Consumerism works on the principal that everyone should own article ‘A’, not borrow or share it. Imagine if just one house in five owned a TV and when anyone fancied watching TV they just popped over the road to their neighbour’s front room. Mr. flatscreen Sony would get mighty pissed off. The tyrant Fidel Castro for all his crimes against his own people at least made picking up hitchers compulsory for those driving government lorries and vehicles with a spare seat.
Perhaps the urge to hitch is in someway related to man’s original existence as nomads. Free from the drudgery of agriculture and its inevitable corollary of ownership of the land, mankind was free to roam and follow not only his instinct for survival but also his penchant for adventure. If the proposition that man was born in West Africa is to be believed then that means that ancient man did a hell of a lot of wondering. Some of those hardcore dudes even managed to get to Australia. And even today a few brave souls still set off without a ticket to see where they can get to. And the variety of ways in which people go about their walkabouts and hitchabouts is testament to the creative side of our nature. Tony Hawks hitched around Ireland with a fridge. Hunter S Thompson claimed the record for the most miles hitched in a pair of Bermuda shorts. Countless people have achieved the feat of hitching colossal distances and to see this tradition dying out or be turned into a purely fund raising activity for charity is to see the death of part of our ancestral heritage.
To combat the ideology of the people helping each other by sharing resources and thus consuming less, the rightwing has used its media might to focus on stories of homicidal hitchers and homicidal drivers who kill those they pick up. The aim is obviously to put the fear of God into everyone to make them fear strangers and view the unknown as a land of hellish possibilities akin to a ‘Saw’ movie.
Rutger Hauer in the Hitch hiker (1986)
Naturally, this is more a rich country phenomenon. In poor countries hitching is not an alternative statement, often it is the only way to get around and often the driver will expect a standardized fee for giving a lift. This is very much the case in Africa where buses regularly break down and many routes just don’t have any public transport connections. The poor cannot afford the luxury of being selfish and wanting their ‘own space’. They simply have to trust strangers and pool resources to survive.
The theme of trust seems to me to be central to this article. It is Wordsworth’s lines that invoke my belief that we just have to trust each other more. I have been picked up by single mothers with their infant in the back seat. I have been picked up by red neck truckers who probably despised all my opinions. I have been picked up by people racing down the motorway as strange cocktails of drugs raced through their bloodstreams. Black, white, yellow, young ,old, rich and poor have all seen my sign or extended hand and had that spark of spontaneous kindness, making them signal and stop before their brains could consider all the pros and cons of their action. It is the leap of faith that comes before thought. Their first instinct has been to trust, not to fear or sneer. This is the very human compulsion to be charitable that must surely come from our better angels. Of course, many stop because they were once hitchers and feel the burden of debt to pay-it-back. Others stop because they need someone to skin up while they drive. A few stop because they are just plain lost and hope you might have a map or clue where you are; but most just stop because they want to help out and they are willing to trust you. For that reason I always carry a bag and wear a clean shirt to assuage my strange appearance.
People pick you up for different reasons
When I was in my 20s and a confirmed dolie, I hitched everywhere, almost as a matter of principle. It was part of my anti-Thatcher credo and a badge of pride to need nothing more than a marker pen, a bit of cardboard and warm clothing to go where I wanted - a form of freedom.
Nowadays I hardly ever hitch. Being in Japan doesn’t help. The people are kind enough but fear any potential displeasuring of the authorities. At a pedestrian crossing in the middle of the night when even nature seems to have abandoned a place, the average citizen will wait for the light to turn green (blue to their eyes) before walking across the deserted road. So what chance of eliciting an act of unscripted kindness? And so I must rely on my fading memories to flesh out this and possibly the next article with some hitching anecdotes.
I will start with my earliest escapades in the UK. One memorable hitch from my novice days was to the mid west of Wales, just south of Snowdonia. My brother and I were young city boys who wanted to give camping a try. We bought a cheap tent, stole a road repair warning sign and stocked up on ganja and magic mushrooms and headed out to the majestic and damp rolling hills of Wales. Not knowing where we were going, we just asked our last lift to drop us off when the scenery seemed splendid and isolated. It was dark. We forded a shallow stream and pitched camp. In the morning the farmer stomped over to our ramshackle tent and instead of balling us out, invited us for breakfast. He wasn’t bothered about us being on his land, he just wanted to explain some simple do’s and don’ts. After breakfast we headed back to our make shift camp site and packed up. We gobbled all the shrooms and smoked a joint.
Oh the joys of fucking around in nature high as I kite. The sun was making a rare appearance and we giggled away. In particular, re-crossing the stream in our incapacitated state had a Chaplinesque hilarity, that I guess only fellow shroomers can appreciate. It’s something to do with the mundane becoming decidedly not mundane, another world of epics and sudden transformations, an intensifying of sensations.
And then all too soon I was forced to re-arrange my contorted features to assume the posture of sobriety in order to hitch hike. It was like getting a bawling baby to shut up. I bit my lip and tried not to smile too much as my brother and I took it in turns to stand by the road and thumb it. After too short a while, a smart blue sedan stopped. An elderly couple was in front. Good, God fearing Welsh folk ready to help out even two suspicious looking English lads. Before getting in the vehicle my brother implored me to keep my mouth shut. Being the poet and the fool that I was (and still am) I just couldn’t heed my brother’s sagely advice. I soon started on a painful prose poem in praise of the quietness of the car. I was just staggered at how the vehicle made so little noise, how it seemed to glide through the green valley like Pegasus galloping across the heavens. My brother groaned and the old couple oozed discomfort. I think it was less then twenty minutes before my brother threw in the towel and asked them to stop the car.
Rhayader and Elan Valley in Wales
I only got a mild chastising because we were close enough to the Rhayader and Elan Valley and besides, my brother could see the funny side of my absurd behaviour. That night it was freezing cold – it snowed and snowed but we didn’t care less. We pitched tent on an exposed hillside, chugged vodka and slid down the snowy slopes on wet bits of cardboard. The next day we were cold and hung over and waited for hours until the girl at the visitor centre closed up and took pity on us and gave us a lift into town. It was a long day before we made it home. And thus began our love affair with hitching, drugs and nature.
Another memorable hitch with my brother was coming back from another mountain jaunt in the Lake District. Night was fast approaching and we had been stuck at a small motorway services for an hour or so. We were considering roughing it for the night on the grass verge to the motorway when an old, beat up vehicle pulled over. Inside were four young blokes. After much re-arranging we squeezed our packs and ourselves into the back. The vehicle wouldn’t have passed an African MOT. It crunked and spluttered in a chronic fashion. We were easily the slowest thing on the motorway. The driver told us how he didn’t have a license and how he had won the car in a card game. He learnt how to drive on the spot as it were, in order to claim his winnings. I’m not sure how they all came to be in the vehicle with the non-driver, but they were all wonderfully dismissive of the laws they were breaking. The lad next to me worked hard making one long joint after another. After freezing our proverbial monkeys off and feeling dejected by the hopelessness of our situation to hear the magic words that they were going to our very home town and that we should get stoned with them was manna from heaven.
Scafell Pike, England's highest mountain
Needless to say, about 40 miles into the journey the car ground to a halt by the side of the motorway. The man in the passenger seat seemed to know ‘a thing or two about motors’ and popped the hood. We all got out. The lad next to me had just completed constructing another monster joint when a cop car stopped in front of us on the hard shoulder. The driver was in the vehicle and the rest of us were about to attempt a push start. I implored the lad with the spliff to put it out. He said fuck the pigs and carried on puffing away. Eventually my brother and I got him to reluctantly put it out and hide it in his pocket. Not a moment too soon as the man in blue appeared before us. He questioned the driver (not the actual driver but the only bloke in the car with a license) and took only five minutes to decide that the patently illegal car and mob of social rejects was too much effort to deal with. He ordered us to move the car and got back in his jam jar and eyed us from his rear view mirror.
Luckily the fates were smiling on us and with a quick push and a hurried dive into the back seats we were off. The cop drove away. The car crawled to the first motorway exit. It wasn’t looking like we would get home until the bloke who was handy with motors had a genius idea. We found a car park and he took the steering wheel. He then revved the engine, put it in reverse and floored the accelerator pedal. We sped off backwards for 20 metres before he sharply applied the brakes. Us folk in the back seats were thrown into disarray but the joint was undamaged and through some masterstroke of Newtonian physics the problematic motor was jolted back into its former sorry but working state. After that we were still the slowest thing on the motorway but we made it back home without further incident.
The final UK hitching tale perhaps isn’t as amusing the previous two, but is memorable for marking an historic event. Just as everybody from the 60s remembers what they were doing when Kennedy was assassinated, just so most of us younger folk can remember what they were doing on 11th September, 2001. Again with my brother, we were on the side of the road in Scotland. The previous day we had climbed Ben Nevis and now were just outside of Fort William trying to hitch to the coast to catch the ferry to the Isle of Sky. The sun was making a rare appearance and for us we were enjoying a return to our younger days of irresponsible adventure. There was little traffic and no other hitchers. Blair seemed to have completed Thatcher’s work on destroying hitching culture in the once Great Britain. Not easily disheartened, we waited on. And on.
Ben Nevis, Britain's highest mountain
Eventually an old Scottish man with curly red hair stopped and gave us a lift half the way. He was playing bagpipe music on his car stereo. So we chatted about that, blithely unaware that at that very moment people were throwing themselves out of the windows of the Twin Towers. He nicely dropped us off at a bus stop and departed in a cloud of croaking pipe noises.
While waiting for the bus we thought it indulgent to not try hitching. We didn’t get a lift, but one man who was driving to the pub pulled up beside us just to tell us about the attack on New York. The news stunned us; we wanted to get to a TV and find out if the world was going to end (although I suspected that we were safe in this remote part of Scotland).
The bus came and for only 3 quid we purchased tickets to our destination. At the port we quickly found out when the ferry was leaving and hit a pub. Three inveterate old drinkers propped up the bar all staring up dumbfoundedly at the TV set above the counter. The image of the plane hitting the skyscraper was being played over and over again as reporters scrambled to get fresh news. A man with an English accent bought everyone a round of whiskey shots to mark history. The whiskey and calamitous historical event roused the afternoon drinkers from their usual stupor and an interesting open debate broke out. I remember no one was blaming Islam in the bar. It was mostly just expressions of shock and horror. I knew instinctively that Osama would be blamed and that this event would spell disaster for the world when America gathered its resources to seek revenge.
Anyway, we drank up, boarded the ferry and continued availing ourselves of cheap Scottish beer. Two hours later we arrived on the Isle of Skye and quickly got a lift to the campsite with two lads playing the South Park CD. With some haste we pitched our tent, cooked some packet food on our trangia stove, had a joint and wondered down the road to the only pub. Thousands had perished in the terrorist attack but nothing seemed different about the pub. It was just the usual bunch of English twats with their trousers tucked into their socks. We drunk until closing time, had a final joint as we listened to the heavens opening up and releasing torrents of rain. It rained heavily all night.
We woke up early the next morning in a waterlogged tent. We had foolishly camped by the river and poking our heads out the tent we realized we were only minutes away from being carried away down stream. There was no time to lose, not even time for a quick one skinner. In the pissing rain we dragged all our possessions to the toilet block and attempted to sort out our kit. The manager of the site came over to the crowd of campers gathering in the toilets (the only dry place around) and said, “There’s a big storm coming, lads. Get out while you can.”
He was one prophetic dude.
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Picture of Rutger Hauer is from
www.obsessedwithfilm.com
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Comment by David Edwards
Sporting Mind
As for Sept 11, I was still at school in Sydney. I remember spending the whole day looking up at the sky, waiting for some fucked up shit to happen.
Comment by b_rad
Comment by Green Island
Trippy Traveller
Nice hitch. Well done for correcting my streotyped view. Even in Japan the hitching can be good if you have the belief to make it happen.