I first came to California in 1966 shortly after my first year at LSU ended. Two male friends had decided to hitchhike out to California and thought that traveling with a girl would make it easier to get rides. It did.
Leaving Louisiana and trading cars across the country opened my eyes to a vast new world. I had with me the clothes on my back, a friend’s sandals, and a smile, little else, certainly not a cent in my pockets. Yet in those early days, there was no better way to travel. At nineteen, one only has time, and what would have taken a few hours by plane, was traded for days on the road where it was possible to feel the land, know the colors of the earth, the differences in rock and terrain, the variety of wildflowers, and meet new people with their accents and stories.
Strangely, there was also something exhilarating about being impoverished—a kindred union with those who struggled, often generationally, against a system designed to use them, a sharpening of wit to survive, a sharing of the little you had with others to make that Stone Soup, a sense that you were part of the great source of life and humanity and that the life force was boundless and beautiful.
During that remarkable time, I never felt poor or afraid, rather I was a counterculture missionary, preaching that the earth’s bounty should be shared with those less fortunate, that all men held the spark of God, and that respecting human life and the earth that sustained us was enormously important.
From that first trip and arrival in Berkeley, we found extraordinary Americans willing to share whatever they had with the young who were clearly on a mission of adventure and altruism. On the first evening in Berkeley, lost and wandering on Shattuck Avenue, the address we carried with the name of a friend only a storefront, a passer-by took us home. We hitched the Bay Bridge to San Francisco and back again. Sometimes we got a ride with a friend, and panhandled the fifty cents to pay the bridge toll to cross back to Berkeley. On the way back to New Orleans, a driver stopped for us on the freeway in southern California and offered a barbeque dinner and a bed. A county sheriff’s wife in Arizona put us up in an extra trailer for the night. Drivers offered us a lunch, and shared gas and time and a story.
That journey across country was only the beginning of many transcontinental excursions. It became easy to simply stick out a thumb and travel, from the East Coast and the South to the San Francisco Bay, and short distances, Berkeley to San Francisco or New Orleans to Baton Rouge. Even at so young an age, we understood that some day, we would be the ones who gave back to another generation. And indeed, as we began to settle in, we always gave rides to thumbers, and paid attention to the call: “Sisters, pick up sisters.”
Although hitchhiking is frowned upon today, thumbing had long been a favored mode of travel for Americans. During the thirties, it
was quite common. In the forties, picking up a serviceman or woman was considered a patriotic duty.
Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in “It Happened One Night”
The beats took over the hitching routes in the fifties, looking at the great underbelly of humanity and writing edgy stories of life on the road. In the sixties, hitching became a primary mode of hippie travel, longhairs off to see the world and make conversions to peace and love, often meeting others on the road and flashing a peace symbol.
In Mad for the Road: Hitching America in the 60s & 70s (published February 1, 1972), John Darling writes:
“Hitchhiking in America, back when ‘thumbing it’ was safe and fun and you met scads of fascinating people and often ended up getting to know them or having loving intimacy…was a magical world in which I traveled many tens of thousands of miles all over the US, Canada, Europe and even a relatively safe Mexico…[I] saw amazing vistas and natural wonders, had so much time to think, reflect and develop a philosophy during my late teens and twenties. It was an altered state in a parallel dimension…‘part 2’ of Kerouac’s ‘On the Road,’ but in a vastly more interesting and exciting time in which a whole generation turned the rudder on modern civilization and created spiritual depths that probably saved the world.”
In the prophetic words of Jack Kerouac:
