It was noon on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I was supposed to be in McKenzie Hall hearing a lecture on the economy of colonial Mexico, but instead I was standing in the rain on the on-ramp of Interstate 5, smiling, my thumb in the air. When it started hailing, I laughed aloud.
Hitchhiking, a legal pursuit in Oregon, is superb both as a pastime and means of travel – it’s a rush, everyone should try it.
I got three rides that day, one from an old farmer in a pickup who said he’d take me to a great spot he knew from his days hitching just south of Eugene. It turned out to be dead. I ran across the interstate and got a ride back to Eugene in a late-model Audi, and I found myself in the same spot where I’d started an hour before.
But I wasn’t discouraged. Soon, a middle-aged woman in a minivan overflowing with brooms, suitcases and billowy plastic bags stopped and said she was going to Medford for work and would drop me off in Grants Pass.
Making conversation, I asked her what work she had down there, and she said, “I don’t want to talk about work, I’ll talk about anything but work.”
She seemed weird. I didn’t want to foul up a straight ride, so I figured I’d smooth it out with some of my patented Midwestern charm.
“That’s fine, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ma’am,” she snapped. “You can call me anything, but don’t call me ma’am.”
Damn, I thought, I’ve got a real mutant on my hands here.
But by and by we got to talking, and although she was weird, she turned out to be all right. She said she’d hitched from Guatemala to Eugene “gosh, more than 30 years ago now.”
It wasn’t until she let me out that she told me her name is Mary.
I’ve only hitched a few times, always to and from Grants Pass to visit my only family in Oregon – my mother’s best friend’s youngest brother and his wife and six kids, but it’s taught me some things.
1. Pick your rides.
I didn’t know this the first time I tried hitching this past summer, so I rode with everyone who stopped, getting seven piecemeal rides down the interstate. The first ride, from a friendly-as-hell high school kid, left me sitting thumb-up for two hours in Cottage Grove, a boil on the map about 20 miles south of Eugene badly in need of lancing.
Another couple of rides took me to a gas station near the Seven Feathers Hotel & Casino Resort. I stood there for a few minutes before a Ford Probe rolled up in front of me with a couple guys in the front wearing overalls and possessing a handful of teeth between them. They offered a ride south a couple exits, and I was all about it, so I hopped in the back and we got running.
It wasn’t until we got on the interstate that they cracked open their beers and started giving the finger to truck drivers and slamming on the gas pedal. I clicked my seat belt on, and they passed me back a cigarette. I pulled hard on it, clamping my teeth onto the filter. The little prayers I half remembered from Sunday school started racing through my head.
Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with you. Forgive us our trespasses and deliver us from evil, now and at the hour of our death.
They swerved through turns, and I thought of my roommate Cody who was hitching in California last spring when he got picked up by a guy whom Cody didn’t know was drunk. The guy smashed his SUV into a concrete embankment, sending Cody to the hospital and leaving him with scars and nerve damage.
When they let me out my hands shook, but when I looked up the sky was bluer than it has ever been and the heat felt like mother’s love.
2. Use a sign.
When I told my family friend in Grants Pass that I planned to hitch back to Eugene, he told me to write a sign saying “UO Student Eugene.”
“That way alumni will pick you up,” he said.
I had stood at the Grants Pass exit for no more than 15 minutes when a Honda stopped and the guy in the driver’s seat said, “Well, normally I don’t pick up hitchhikers, but I went to U of O and I’m heading up there. And you seem like a regular guy.”
3. Know your audience.
In my limited experience, if you look straight-laced, more blue-collar and country-folk types will pick you up. If you’re more freaky-looking, then the hippies and organic farmers will. On my first trip, I was clean-shaven and wearing a T-shirt and shorts, and I got a ride from a journeyman electrician who told me about meeting “colored folks” for the first time and how the goddamn hippies from California came up to Oregon and ruined the logging industry for decent, hard-working Americans.
This last Saturday I had a scruffy beard and an old jean jacket, and got a ride in the back of a pickup from a bluegrass musician from Ashland, Tom, and his own scruff-bearded son, Sebastian.
4. Be open, you’ll meet good people.
I was riding in the bed of Tom and Sebastian’s truck, writing the first draft of this article, when we pulled into Canyonville, a little nowhere south of Roseburg. We got out and met a couple friends of theirs named Mark and Adam at a hippy grocery store. We sat at the only table, and they laughed and laughed about old times over coffee. Mark and Adam offered me a ride to Eugene, and on the road Mark told me they worked on commercial fishing barges in Alaska, Mark as a ship’s biologist and Adam as a chief engineer.
“He’s the evil capitalist pig working for the fishing corporations and I’m the environmentalist trying to keep everyone alive,” Mark said.
Mark was one of the best shit-talking storytellers I’ve ever had the privilege of meeting. He talked about the leather-tough guys who work the boats, guys who work 40-hour shifts fueled by pills, cigarettes, coffee and candy bars. Guys who get their shoulders broken by 40-pound blocks of frozen fish that slide around the cargo holds. Guys who get washed away into the sea.
Mark talked about how on the day they first met, Adam walked deep into a ship’s innards and, “finding the most intimidating place in the bowels of the boat, loud as a war theater,” crawled down a tube he barely fit into to fix a gas leak.
Mark remembered Adam calling back to him in his thick Polish accent, “If you don’t hear from me in five minutes, don’t come down, but tell the captain.”
Talking about Adam’s mechanical genius, Mark said, “All solutions can be found up Adam’s butt.”
He talked about philosophy, history and politics with the same ease, lambasting the Bush administration and the war in Iraq, ruminating about the motivations of Roman emperors and pondering the nature of experience in the same soliloquy.
They dropped me off at my house in Eugene and sped away. I don’t think I’ll ever see them again, and I don’t think I need to. Neither Mark, Adam nor any of the other generous souls who have given me rides could possibly give me any more than they have already.
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