Nobody Rides for Free

A Hitchhiker's Memoir

From the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, I was an American hitchhiker. I hitched across the entire United States and back twice. Once I made it from Portland, Oregon, to Baltimore, Maryland, in four and a half days. On another trip, I hitched from Birmingham, Alabama, to Baltimore in twenty hours. I hitched down the East Coast and up the West Coast. I rode across Nebraska in the back of a pickup truck with a driver who wouldnt stop for anything and spent the night in a school bus in Bodega Bay, California. I endured a continuous stream of homosexual advances from drivers in the Bay Area and was terrified by a pack of wild dogs while squatting on Crow Indian land. I hopped a freight train in Portland, Oregon, and spent the night under the famous Space Needle in Seattle, Washington. I almost got busted in Montana for smoking pot out of an empty beer can and was hassled by cops in New Orleans and Texas. I narrowly escaped injury at the hands of commercial fishermen in Boston, who caught me sleeping in their boat, and had the bejesus scared out of me by a sixty-five-year-old Massachusetts woman who used her 1963 Rambler as an offensive weapon. I met a bunch of gay guys, truck drivers, stoners, petty thieves, ex-cons, heavily armed rednecks, and some very nice people too. I was a lot younger then, but I wouldnt trade those experiences for the world. You hardly ever see hitchhikers anymore, but a few years ago, we were everywhere. But before I launch into my story, a brief history lesson is in order.