For an anthology* I recently wrote an essay about why the practice wasn’t cool in my Berkeley family — even though our 1969 Volkswagen bus was a hitch-hiker’s dream, even though it seemed everyone in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s was hitch-hiking. My parents were big city people who didn’t buy the hitch-hiking compact. Plus, hitch-hiking was at the heart of serial killer lore for this California kid – the Zodiac Killer’s San Francisco, the Hillside Strangler‘s Los Angeles. One September 1978 day my family’s mindset — and a half a mile — separated me from a teenage girl who was mutilated after sticking out her thumb.
*In 2005 Tom and Simon Sykes produced No Such Thing As A Free Ride? in the UK, serialized by London Times and named Travel Book of the Week by the Observer. The new volume aims to capture what hitch-hiking means to Americans, and America.
What did hitch-hiking mean to your family (and your community) when you were a child and how did it affect your practices when you reached adolescence/adulthood?
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Hitchhiking was always something risky and my parents certainly never approved of it. Living in Dublin city it wasn’t an option at all. I did a little with a Finnish friend but that was a five minute drive into the town we lived near so there wasn’t much chance of anything happening.
I did flag down a minibus going to the university here in Canakkale. I had the two kids with me so I think the driver felt sorry for me. It was fun on the bus with a load of agriculture students and we even got a trip to the university’s goat farm on the way!
Hitchhiking in Turkey generally only happens out of necessity. The idea of hitchhiking for fun or for an extended trip would be ludicrous in most Turkish families (most especially for women). In my family hitchhiking would be considered dangerous and asking for trouble.
I tend to be cautious with people when traveling personally and perhaps this influenced my own limited experience with hitchhiking.
I suppose hitchhiking doesn’t have the same lore in Turkey, it’s seen more as a mode of transportation than anything else. Maybe it doesn’t have the same mystique in Turkey and other parts of the world as it does for Westerners.
Still, I’m very inspired by those who’ve taken long hitchhiking trips – but not sure I would do it myself!
Thanks for your thoughts Catherine and Anil! Trust, sympathy, necessity: these are reasons to hitch-hike or pick up a hiker…
We no longer believe we can rely on the kindness of strangers. TEDGlobal audience members last week who admitted to hitch-hiking lowered their hands when cyber-lawyer Jonathan Zittrain asked if they’d done it in the last ten years. However, Zittrain pointed out that the Internet is changing both our behavior and our expectations for the behavior of others — for the better. Craigslist’s Ride Share board is buzzing even if hitch-hiking is dead and “It’s not because killers don’t plan ahead!” More on his talk: http://tr.im/uzro