Hitchhiking - possibly one of the only words that will still draw dramatic reactions from our desensitized generation. We grew up playing Mortal Kombat and Doom; however, we also grew up watching terrible B-level horror flicks like The Hitcher and Rest Stop. On the one hand we're depraved; on the other we are still wary of the unknown, which happens to strangers on the open road. Whenever I told my friends about my intent to hitch they all had the exact same reaction: You'll get raped.
The idea to hitchhike started when my friend Ted decided to drive his sister from California to her new apartment in New York and pick me up in Ohio on the way. I went and saw the Big Apple and after a week, Ted flew back to Cali and I decided to hitchhike back to Athens.
I had talked to some of my friends who had done this sort of thing before and got some tips. One of them had hitched from Cali to New York and back again. He did this with the help of CraigsList.com and CouchSurfing.com. There is a link called Rideshare on CraigsList, and he used this to plan ahead so that whenever possible he could have a ride waiting for him where he would just have to throw in a few bucks for gas. He would stay either at friends' houses or he would couch surf. CouchSurfing.com is an online community where people open their homes (read: couches) to travelers and in return are welcomed at others' homes around the globe. The community is growing and users can review their hosts (just in case they are rapists).
Another one of my friends took a more traditional approach. He just wrote the name of the next city he was going to on a piece of cardboard and stood along the highway. He noticed that people didn't pick him up very often, so being the genius he is, he bought a dry erase board and wrote the city name followed by God bless you underneath. To top it off he wore a dress shirt and cut his hair. With this new tactic he was picked up in no time by kind hearted Christian families concerned for his welfare. By the end of his trip he had even doubled his travel fund by donations from these families.
As great as these ideas were I decided to go a different route entirely and avoid both the Interweb and the religious plea. I did wear a dress shirt, though. I was lucky and got a ride all the way from New York to Pittsburgh from my friend Parker, but then I was on my own. I told him to drop me off at a Pilot truck stop off a highway exit. From there, I went up to every trucker there and asked if they were on their way West or to Columbus. I soon learned that truckers who aren't self-employed will be fired if they pick up a hitchhiker. An especially burly trucker said to me, No
we caint do that no more you gotta look for da huge cabs with all da lights on um. Them are the ones dat own their own cabs and kin pick you up.
Translation: Independent contractors who own their own cabs can pick up hitchers, and their cabs are usually bigger (because they live in them), and have large running lights. But this didn't even help me because no truckers I talked to were going my direction. So I decided to start asking people who were getting gas. I wouldn't go up to girls who were alone because I didn't want to scare them, so I would ask couples mostly and guys who didn't look much bigger than I am. The incredible thing is that I never waited more than 20 minutes for a ride; I got to meet a lot of interesting people and made it home in no time. Also, I wasn't raped (note: I had a can of Bear Mace from my last trip to Alaska, for protection).
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Opinion
Lucas Bechtol
