2004-04-22 Features

Many years ago, there was no greater freedom than standing on the side of a highway with an extended thumb, hoping (and sometimes praying) that the next vehicle roaring past would stop to transport me a little closer to my destination. Hitchhiking was pretty exciting, fairly reliable, and an expense-free method of going from town to town when my car was deemed not road-worthy.

I was initiated into the world of hitchhiking during the summer of 1975, when bumming rides became my only mode of getting to work each day. I was selling Bible reference books and study guides door-to-door in the summer student program for Southwestern Company out of Nashville, and the company had assigned two students and me to the Athens, Ohio, area. They had automobiles, but I didn’t. Each day, I was up at 6 a.m., walking to a nearby county road where I hitched rides through a three-county area to peddle my Bible wares.

We arrived at a trailer in the middle of the south Mississippi woods where the drummer lived. The guy had hooks instead of hands, but he drummed like a champ.

On July 4, I got my one and only ride from the law. An early ’70s Opel Cadet with a municipal tag pulled over, and a man in a floral-print shirt and Bermuda shorts climbed out and flashed a badge. He was the constable of Nelsonville, Ohio, and he asked to see my peddler’s license. Not having one, I was placed under arrest and taken to the mayor’s house, where a barbecue was underway. As I stood in the mayor’s kitchen watching her stir a pot of beans, she informed me that if I purchased a peddler’s license I would be “set free.” I forked over my $25, the mayor wrote out a license on the kitchen table, and I was pointed back toward the road without so much as an offer to join them for lunch—or a ride back to the road.

The brother of my best friend in Selma died of leukemia later that year after their family had moved to Dothan. I got a ride out of Auburn the morning of the funeral, but getting picked up on the Montgomery bypass is an arduous endeavor. Dothan is a good two hours from Montgomery, and I found myself 120 miles away from a funeral that was scheduled to start in 90 minutes.

I had almost abandoned my plans and decided to head back to Auburn when a black Trans Am pulled over. I told the driver of my predicament, and suddenly I was frozen in my seat as we zoomed south at 100 mph. He dropped me off at a traffic light just inside the Dothan city limits, with the service scheduled to start in 15 minutes. From out of nowhere, I heard my mother shout my name. The church I had attended with my best friend in Selma had sent a van with my mom and a half dozen others to Dothan for the funeral, and it was waiting at the stoplight three cars behind the Trans Am. Mom always insisted that God had arranged the Trans Am ride, but I had my doubts.

By spring 1975 I found myself mesmerized by English sheepdogs after seeing the movie Serpico. A week later, I grabbed a couple of weeks’ pay saved from my dorm cafeteria job and went to the highway to come to Birmingham to purchase a sheepdog I’d found in the “puppies for sale” section of a Birmingham newspaper. A guy in an old pickup truck stopped for me after I had gotten on the north side of Montgomery, but 10 or so miles later he started asking intimate, suggestive questions. I yelled at him to let me out immediately or else, so he pulled over near the Millbrook exit. I bolted.

 

 

Half an hour later, another man offered a ride, asking, “Can you drive a stickshift?” He was carrying a gun, and a parole officer identification badge was mounted on his chest. I got behind the wheel while he dozed for 45 minutes. When he awoke, we began to chat. He told me he had spent the weekend in Dothan. I told him I had friends in Dothan who once lived in Selma, and he asked in shock, “Their name wasn’t Hartzog, was it?” I said yeah, it was, and, sure enough, he had spent the weekend with my Selma buddy and his family. We marveled at how tiny the world was before he dropped me near the farm where I bought an eight-week-old English sheepdog puppy.

The return trip was a breeze. Instead of sticking out my thumb, I merely had to cradle the puppy I’d named Sebastian in my arms. Four rides later I was back in Auburn. Two of the rides had been from women—the only time that has ever happened on my hitchhiking journeys. I later told my mom about the guy who had stayed with the Hartzogs giving me a ride, and she insisted that it was God who told the guy to stop. Again, I had my doubts.

Among my fondest hitchhiking memories are several rides that took me from Birmingham to New Orleans to visit my brother. On one such trip, my first lift got me to the Mississippi state line. I had taken a guitar along, as I had a theory that a guy toting a guitar case looked relatively harmless. It began to drizzle, so I made a mad dash for an overpass that I could see about a half mile down the highway. There I found another hitchhiker with a guitar, so we sat and played together for about a half-hour until the rain stopped.

Eventually, I walked further and got a ride from a drunken middle-aged man in a car loaded with six young children. He explained that he had kidnapped the kids from his alcoholic ex-wife. The children stared at me wide-eyed as the fellow sipped from a bottle of Thunderbird. He offered me a drink, but having experienced a Thunderbird hangover once in my life, I declined. Finally, he started crying and began to confess how screwed up his life had become. Suddenly, he told me that he knew he couldn’t take care of his children and he had decided to take them back to their mother. I thanked him when he let me out and contemplated calling the cops at the exit where I had been dropped off, but decided it was not a good idea because I might be implicated in the kidnapping.

An 18-wheeler stopped for me around mid-afternoon—the only time in my life I was ever picked up by a trucker. I’ll never forget sitting in the cab of a tractor-trailer, high above the highway with a commanding view as we bounced down the road. After stopping at a McDonald’s where the trucker bought me lunch, we were again headed west when we spied a young couple and their three children stranded beside a broken-down automobile. The family climbed into the cab with us. The wife sat in the husband’s lap in the passenger seat as I crawled into the sleeper behind the driver with the three kids. The couple thanked the trucker profusely, and repeatedly told us we were “angels sent from God” to rescue them. We dropped them off in Laurel, Mississippi, and went on our way, but half an hour later the trucker began to chat with a woman on his CB radio. “What you haulin’, Mexican Cowboy?” the woman asked. “A big ol’ load of smelly fish,” the Hispanic trucker replied (which he was indeed carrying). The trucker pulled off at the next exit for a rendezvous with the woman, who promised to meet him at a local motel, sight unseen. “This is as far as you go, boy,” he told me with a grin, adding that he “really liked her voice.”

I jumped down from the towering cab and headed toward Hattiesburg, 20 miles down the highway. It was getting dark by this time, and a fellow in a pickup truck stopped for me. He was immediately interested in my guitar and told me he had just gotten off work and was going to a band rehearsal. He invited me to come play with his group, and for some reason, I foolishly said yes. We arrived at a trailer in the middle of the south Mississippi woods where the drummer lived. The guy had hooks instead of hands, but he drummed like a champ. I felt as though I’d been dropped into an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” We played for a couple of hours, and since they appeared to be decent folks, I felt no reason to fear for my life.

The guitar player who had picked me up invited me to stay at his house with his wife and two young sons for the evening, as it was now after 10 p.m. When we arrived at his home all hell broke loose, with me cast as the villain. He had gone into the bedroom with his wife, and I could hear her shouting, “What the hell are you doing bringing this stranger to our house? He could be a serial killer!” The guy emerged from the room to tell me his wife was terrified of me and that I was welcome to sleep on an air mattress in the back of his truck unless I wanted him to take me back to the highway. I opted for the highway at midnight, three hours from New Orleans. Two hours went by and no one stopped, so I climbed a fence and tried to sleep in a field. Back on the highway, I walked several miles before getting a ride to Slidell, Louisiana.

It was an hour before sunrise when an offshore oil-rig laborer picked me up on his way to work. Talking nonstop in a thick Cajun dialect, the toothless fellow began to preach to me about Jesus and the many sins that the Lord had removed from his life. He had once raised champion pit bulldogs, which had ruled Louisiana dog-fighting rings, and had been a heroin addict for 10 years. Detailing the desperation of his life as a junkie, he told of his daily struggle to score enough dope to feed his addiction. He spoke of how badly his wife and children had suffered, and how he had lost all of his friends. Then one day Jesus appeared to him while the junkie oil-rig laborer was lying in bed going through withdrawals. He never wanted heroin again.

“Praise Jesus!” he began to shout as we rode over Lake Pontchartrain, the sun coming up in the rearview mirror. Suddenly, he grew very quiet and serious as he turned to me and said, “You know, buddy, there’s a lot of bad things in this world that Jesus don’t like, things that Jesus will save you from if you’ll only invite Him into your life.” As I nodded in agreement, he grinned and whispered, “But there’s one thing that Jesus don’t mind.” And with that, he pulled a joint from behind his ear. All I could think about through the cloudy haze and lovely sunrise was that perhaps my mom had been right all along about the Lord and the kindness of strangers. &

Staff writer Ed Reynolds currently drives a 2001 Dodge Stratus.