TRANSCRIPT
How to hitchhike.
The first time I ever hitchhiked was in Yellowstone National Park in 1992, and I was asking myself that question: how do I hitchhike? The answer is very simple. For starters, you walk over to the side of the road, and you find the way that traffic is going. You decide where you want to go, and you stick out your thumb. In Australia, people often use their fingers like this. There are different ways to do it, but basically, the thumb is the universal symbol. So that’s the easy part. That’s just the nuts and bolts of how to do it.
The first thing, I think there’s also the emotional component. Many times in my life, for me, it has been very, very scary to hitchhike, especially if I haven’t hitchhiked in a while. Because my fantasy gets going: the next ride could be the one that picks me up and sticks a knife at me, or pulls a gun on me, or somebody beats me up, or steals my stuff, or, you know, a person’s drunk. I’ve actually never been robbed when I was hitchhiking. I’ve had drunk people pick me up. I’ve had people using drugs pick me up. I’ve had some people that I consider to be fairly dangerous pick me up, but I’ve never really been, like, in any way seriously hurt and very rarely even threatened. But I know when I don’t hitchhike for a while, that terror can really, really build in me, and it can become something that can become a preventative for me going out on the side of the road and sticking my thumb out.
So how do I get over that fear? Sometimes it’s a strange thing. It’s like put on my coat, zip up my jacket, put on my gloves or whatever it is if it’s cold out, or just put on my shoes and lace them up and stop thinking about the fears. Just do it. Because I also realize, yes, as a guy, I’m much more safe than as a woman. I’ve seen women hitchhiking alone on the road, and I’ve also hitchhiked with women before. It’s a different thing with women because there’s a lot of scummy guys out there who, you know, really are predatory. But for me, it just helps me a little bit to just think of the statistics. It’s like it’s very unlikely you’re gonna get hurt if you’re a guy, especially if you’re halfway intelligent about how you’re going about it and you’re, you know, not hitchhiking with an iPhone that you’re showing to everybody that goes by. Do you know what I mean? It’s just like I don’t dress super fancy. I guess nothing special. I don’t have a lot of valuable stuff on me when I’m hitchhiking. And so for me, it’s just getting over that fear and saying I’m gonna do it.
Sometimes it also is like putting myself in a position where it’s kind of difficult not to hitchhike. But that happens a lot when I am hitchhiking. Sometimes I’ve slept on the side of the road. I can’t get a ride, and it’s dark, and no one’s gonna pick me up. So I go and camp on the side of the road. Summer, and come morning, I think there is no bus to take me, there is no airplane to find, there is no taxi, I don’t know anybody. So guess what? I don’t have to worry about it and think of all the fears because I’m here, and there’s no choice. So I go out and stick my thumb out.
For me, other ways, like I took a big hitchhiking trip, I think it was four years ago. I took a bus from New York City to Wyoming, to near Yellowstone. I wanted to repeat a situation that I’d been in almost 20 years earlier. And so I ended up taking the bus as far as it could take me, and then I was kind of left with a void. If I want to move forward, I have to hitchhike. And so I was scared, but I also, like, by manipulating the situation a little bit, I ended up finding that here I am, and it was beautiful out, and the sun was out, and I could see the Grand Teton Mountains all around. And then I was like, here I am. So I started hitchhiking, and I find often once I get to the side of the road, I’m no longer scared. At first, though, I was a little bit embarrassed because I remember the first time I hitchhiked, and it’s happened at other times. I think people sometimes thought I might had—people are gonna think I’m a real loser standing here, like who is this loser homeless person who, like, has no better way to travel than hitchhiking? And those are fears that I’ve had to get over.
Actually, that’s a lot of it: as my parents’ voices in my head, because I was criticized a lot, and in my life with other people too for not being what I was supposed to be, not being mature enough, not being this or that. So it’s like some of those old voices do come back. But I find once I started hitchhiking, the magic happens, and then I get wild. There’s something that just, like, the freedom of being on the side of the road that just opens me up in a way that I have not experienced in other ways of traveling.
So how to? It’s always good to find a place that has a good shoulder. The road has to have a good shoulder. There has to be a place for the car to pull over. I’ve had shaked in places where there is no shoulder, though that’s very complicated. What do you do when you need to hitchhike and there’s no shoulder? Another thing is, it’s like that can often be illegal in a lot of places to hitchhike without a shoulder. But what you got to do then is you got to really try a lot harder. Like, okay, there’s the thumb, but I’ve also done this: please, please. I hitchhiked a lot in Australia. I was in the desert a lot, and there was very little water. Sometimes I would, like, hold my water thing upside down to make a face. People could realize I was joking when they drive by, but they also could see that I really wanted a ride. And I’d hold the water bottle upside down, and people would laugh. Often humor would get me rides.
Another thing that I found really fascinating is, so I traveled with a guitar a lot. A lot of people would see the guitar, and they would like that. They would feel safe that people like picking up a musician. And I’ve picked up hitchhikers. When I see someone with a guitar, I always pick them up. Actually, in general, if I ever see a hitchhiker, I pick them up regardless. But a guitar certainly makes it more palatable. There’s something about a person with an instrument that I think is very endearing. But I’ve had checked a lot without a guitar.
Something else that I noticed because I took, I think, about a 15-year break or 10 to 15-year break in hitchhiking. So I was in my early 20s, and then I started hitchhiking again in my late 30s. A big difference I noticed is that when I was a lot younger, and I looked very young when I was in my early 20s, even younger than early 20s, I looked like I was a teenager. I was picked up almost exclusively by men—straight men mostly, sometimes gay guys, but mostly straight men. But when I was in my late 30s and into my 40s, I noticed that a lot of the people who picked me up were women. And it wasn’t that they were coming on to me, so it was really curious to me. It’s like you think women would be more likely to pick up a younger guy rather than an older guy. But what I discovered was when I asked people, “Why are you picking me up? Why are young women sometimes—I’ve had teenage girls pick me up when I was hitchhiking in my late 30s. I was like, why are you doing this? This doesn’t seem safe.” And I heard the same response again and again: they could see that I was a safe person. They could see that I was nice. They could see from my smile. And what had helped me to realize, because it was something that gave me a lot of validation for the last 20 years of my life, is it actually in the…
Last 20 years, I’ve become a much nicer person. I’ve become a safer person, a kinder person, a more generous person. And even from the side of the road, driving by at 60 miles an hour, or a hundred kilometers an hour, people could see that. People could feel that really quickly. And it’s weird how much communication there is between a person hitchhiking on the side of the road and a car driving by.
One thing that I always try to do when I hitchhike is to make eye contact with the people who are driving by. Even if it’s only a tenth of a second, in that moment of eye contact, there’s a huge amount of information exchanged. I’d sometimes get passed by 30, 40, 50 cars, and I would make eye contact with every single one because they always want to see. They want to see who you are.
What I noticed is when people make eye contact with me, they give all sorts of information to me. I see some people, they look at me with distaste. Distaste! They look at me with this look like, “Ooh, I don’t want you.” I see some people, they drive by, they want to pick me up, but they’re too scared. I could see it in their eyes. I can also see that some people want to pick me up, but they’re maybe too busy, or they feel guilty. I think guilt’s a lot when I’m hitchhiking. People feel guilty that they don’t pick up somebody who’s in need.
But then I can also see often, it’s like, it’s amazing. People drive by, and so you just see it in their eyes. In a split second, I’m like, I can feel that they’re gonna pull over, and then they do. And it’s like, wow! It’s really quite amazing, especially if you’ve been standing there for four hours trying to get a ride, and that person pulls over. There, it makes it so worth it because there is—it’s like I’m not into the God thing and religion and all that, but when someone pulls over after I’ve been standing there for four hours or six hours, it’s like I have faith. I get this amazing faith in the amazingness and the specialness of humanity.
Because the people who pull over and pick up hitchhikers are the best people, the most wonderful people. And I’ve often thought all over the world that the people who pick up hitchhikers should be the ones who, if there is such a thing as a government, and a government is valid, those should be the people who run the government. Because they’re the people who open their heart, and they do it for free. They do it for nothing, and there’s something about that.
Also, what I found is when I was younger, I really had much less money, and I was much more a kid. I was more, you know, I didn’t really have my jobs weren’t as good. I didn’t have as much access to stuff. So when I hitchhiked, it was in part because it saved me a lot of money. As an adult, I was like, I realized I didn’t need to hitchhike in quite the same way. I could have traveled, could have flown in airplanes. But what I saw was that I had something much different to offer.
I’d been a therapist for 10 years. Once I started hitchhiking again in my late 30s, it was actually quite amazing. When I would tell people this, often they didn’t believe me. Like, “You’re a therapist from New York City, and you’re hitchhiking in the Yukon Territory of Northern Canada? Why?” If you’re a therapist, it doesn’t make any sense. This connection, and for me, it did make sense. It was like, it was just a very raw way to connect with people, random strangers.
I noticed that the therapeutic gift and skills that I had developed, the skill set that I had developed over those years, actually translated to hitchhiking. I found that the conversations I had in my late 30s and into my 40s went much, much emotionally deeper than they did when I was in my early twenties. People told me all sorts of stuff about their lives that they used to never tell me. And I think that they realized I was safer. And I think a lot of times people just saw that from the side of the road.
So that was something that made me feel really good about hitchhiking because then I realized, okay, I may be getting a free ride here, but I’m also giving something back. A lot of you, I had this happen a lot more in my late 30s and 40s, and it’s happened all over the world that when we’d get into a good conversation, the people who picked me up didn’t want to let me go so quick. I got invited home all the time. It became very normal. Also, people would drive me quite a bit out of my way. I had sometimes many people drive me an extra hour out of their own way to take me where I needed to go.
Now, the other big difference between hitchhiking in the early 90s and hitchhiking in 2014 or 15 is that now there’s the internet. People have Facebook, people have telephones. There were no mobile phones when I started hitchhiking. There was no internet. So I basically never kept in touch with anyone I’d hitchhike with, that I got picked up hitchhiking with. Now it’s like a lot of the people who have picked me up hitchhiking, we stayed friends. We’re friends on Facebook, we email, stuff like that. We talk on the phone sometimes. Sometimes I’ve gone back and visited them. That never happened twenty-something years ago, or very, very rarely.
So any other hitchhiking tips? Bring a raincoat. It certainly is no fun to get rained on. Bring a lot of warm clothes. It’s no fun to get snowed on. I’ve been snowed on and rained on. Bring a sleeping bag. It’s nice to have a tent. It’s no fun to have to sleep under the stars. You know, I used to hitchhike with a knife, and I don’t do that. I haven’t done that in 20 years. It’s a funny thing that by not having any sort of weapon, I actually feel more pure. I feel safer. I feel kinder. It’s just better energy. So I don’t want to travel with anything that’s bad energy. I don’t travel with a lot of expensive stuff.
But actually, I was hitchhiking last year in Norway, and I actually was hitchhiking to a psychology conference. And I hitchhiked with my camera, and I hitchhiked with my computer. Like, “God, I can’t believe I’m hitchhiking with all this expensive equipment!” But mostly I hitchhike with nothing, just a few changes of clothes and food and a lot of water. Water is always good, but food is nice, and dry food that lasts a while. I also bring a lot of string, string and rope. I sometimes need to tie stuff up in trees, like if there’s bears around.
Of course, it’s really nice to travel with a phone now. But how else to hitchhike? Another thing is I talk to everyone when I’m on the side of the road. I go to gas stations. If I can’t get a ride, I’ll go and ask people at the pumps, you know, “Can you give me a lift?” And I just talk to anyone, even if I don’t think they’re gonna give me a ride. Because there’s something about good energy that I feel like if I put out a lot of good energy, inevitably it comes back to me, and I will get rides.
I also think about hitchhiking. I don’t any longer get in the car with people who are drinking alcohol. I did that some when I was younger, and it was terrifying. I also have asked people to pull over if they’re driving unsafely. I once, I’ve picked up, I’ve been picked up by a lot of gay men, and probably would say 50 guys have picked me up who made it pretty clear that they were gay. And only one of those was rude to me in any way and kind of stepped over the line. And I asked him to pull over and let me out, and he did. But he didn’t put his hand on me. He was just a little too suggestive. Basically, the kind of thing that I think women have to deal with a lot more than men. People don’t do that so much. But I’ve also, I don’t know.
So, so basically having boundaries has been very important to me.
Me to say no sometimes, but I very rarely said no to rides. Another thing that I think is really good for hitchhiking is a willingness to learn foreign languages. Because I’ve had checked in a lot of places where they don’t speak English, and it surely helps to speak something of other languages. And certainly, a lot of other languages, people love it if you can talk with them. It’s really not very much fun to hitchhike when you can’t talk with someone.
And just a few weeks ago, I was hitchhiking in Kenya, and the people did speak a little bit of English. But I was hitchhiking with a young woman, actually, and she spoke Swahili and English, so that made it more fun. And actually, she was the leader of our hitchhiking group because she spoke Swahili and I didn’t speak.
So let me think. I’m just gonna pause for a second to think if there’s any other hitchhiking lessons. Well, one other thing for me that I find actually advantageous when I hitchhike is I don’t use a map. It seems a little crazy, like why would you hitchhike without a map? And my phone is just an old, not a smartphone, so it doesn’t have maps on it. And part of what it is, is I don’t hitchhike with maps, and I never really have, or very rarely, because it forces me to talk to people. I have to ask lots and lots of people and local people, how do I get here? How do I get to this highway? How do I take this bus to get to the end of the line so I can hitchhike if the place where it’s legal?
And people talk, and they tell me stuff. And they often, what happens is because they don’t have a map and I’m required to interact with people, they can see that I’m nice. And then what they do is they see, “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll just drive you ten miles out of the way. I’ll drive you to the edge of town.” So it’s actually, and then a lot of times I’ve gotten just by having to talk to people. People have taken me home. People have told me fun stuff to do in the area. “Oh, do you know there’s a hot spring if you walk like five miles that way? Nobody knows about it, but somebody like you who’s hitchhiking would probably enjoy it.” I’m like, wow, natural hot spring for free! Things like that.
And one last piece of advice that it’s a little sad that I would even have to say this now, but I didn’t have to think about this when I was in my early 20s because the laws were a lot different. And because I was younger and I didn’t care about rules so much, now I have to care about the rules on the licensed therapist, etc. I don’t want to get in trouble. I don’t wanna get arrested. So now I search on the internet. There have been differing websites. Sometimes they go down and new ones come up that tell about the laws in each state of the United States and each country in the world. And I like to know the laws because for me now, I’m 43 years old. I don’t want to break rules. I don’t want to get arrested. It’s just not worth it.
I’ve been bothered by the police many times, but I pretty much have always known I’m being legal, so they don’t really do anything to me. They come, I’ve had them search my bag. That’s another thing when I hitchhike. I don’t do anything illegal, no drugs, you know. I don’t carry any drugs or anything like that. I don’t have anything that’s like stupid on me, and I always make sure I have a passport. I’m in a country legally. And so actually, the police has sometimes been a little bit rude, but mostly they’re actually pretty nice, and they’ve left me alone. Sometimes they’ve even given me a lift, and sometimes they’ve driven me to like the next place I need to go.
And so I think for me, yeah, that’s the last thing is I really like to know what the law is so I can be on the right side of it. Now sometimes, yes, unfortunately, hitchhiking puts people in positions sometimes, but they can’t always follow the law. The main thing is when people design highways, the highway engineers, they don’t design highways with hitchhikers in mind. They design highways with cars in mind to make sure cars can get places quickly. So sometimes there’s nowhere for you to stand, and you have to do things that are a little bit outside the rules. I do that. I like to minimize it. It makes me uncomfortable. Again, I don’t want to get arrested, but at least I know when I’m breaking the rules.
And sometimes when I know I’m breaking the rules, I hitchhike with a little bit more energy because I always put a lot of energy out when I hitchhike because it works. It makes it easier to get a ride. But if I’m new, I’m doing it wrong, I’ll be like, “Please, please, please!” And then I usually find it quickly to get a ride.