Hitch-hiking

This feels great, being out on the open road again. Hitch-hiking. Haven’t done this for what, twenty-five years? Wasn’t sure you still could. Feels great though. Like salvation. I’d been feeling that my very soul was screaming for release. Fifty-two years old and still I don’t feel settled – far from it. Every day, attending the office, dealing with people’s problems. I barely like people enough to say hello to them at a bus stop, never mind dealing with their interminable problems.

Fifty-two years old, jobless and hitch-hiking. Heading south. When drivers ask my destination I just say ‘London’. Everything heads toward London it seems. London or thereabouts. Like a great maw, it gathers everyone up, then maybe it spits a few back out. It holds no novelty for me, I’ve lived there on and off over the last near forty years. Moving away and then moving back. Now I seem to be drawn to it again, leaving another past behind.

The open road is where I really want to be though. I don’t want to arrive, the travelling is the buzz. It’s when you arrive that things have to be arranged. Somewhere to live, a job to do, a dole office to visit. The shitty things of life. I wonder if it’s possible to just keep on travelling.

Mind you, I’m no Bear Grylls. First sign of discomfort and I’m distinctly discombobulated. This ‘freedom’ thing is great as long as the weather is clement and there’s food enough to eat. Wouldn’t take very much for me just not to be arsed with it at all. I guess I’m now technically homeless. A liberating thought at the same time as being a terrifying one.

I’m not a very brave person, but a restless one; endlessly restless, like some callow animal that can’t be calmed. Easily startled like an old deer left to fend for itself. I’ve run away this time due to the same old feeling of being trapped. Bit late in the day to be feeling this way I know, but there we have it. It’s done now. Bridges have once again been burned.

Got a lift from a Christian guy earlier on. He told me that Jesus had told him to take me fifty miles further than he was going, so he had. Glibly I told him to ‘thank Jesus very much for me, tell him I’m much obliged’ but he took it in good stead. We had that sort of relationship by then. I could be jokey and kind of smart-arsey with him: he wasn't a bad sort. He did though sort of insist that I listen to him sing some songs he’d written about his relationship with Jesus. We ended up on a sort of lay-by outside Rochdale with him banging out these songs on his guitar. I experienced a sort of pleasant ‘displacement’; as if I was looking down on myself in the middle of this somewhat comical scene. Had I been a less mature individual I may have burst out laughing, but I respected the man’s commitment to his faith. Maybe there was a lesson here for me.

It reminded me that it was quite a common thing in the hitch-hiking game for born-again types to pick you up. Captive audience I guess.

Ex-servicemen too. Want to tell you their war stories. Tell you all about the camaraderie they missed. Ex-servicemen can be very lonely types.

I got a lift once from a truck-driver who was a great lover of ball-room dancing; he had all his glitzy duds hanging in the back of his cab. Wherever he ended up of a night he’d visit the local Palais de Dance and away he’d go. Said it was a great way to ‘pick up the ladies’. Not a bad life eh? Out on the open road all day, then smooching the night away. Good on him.

Stuck at this service station a good two hours now and twilight is setting in. I’ve got my sleeping bag with me and I may have to bed down in this imitation woods affair (feeble attempt to blend in rustically with the surrounding countryside). Service stations can be the loneliest places in the world when you’re hitch-hiking; a bit like train station bars, the population is essentially transient. Strangers who will never meet again. They’re also fantastically expensive. You get the feeling that someone blind-folded sticks a pin in some price-tags of a morning and aims towards the high end. 

‘Fish and Chips – twelve quid. That’ll do!’

It doesn't do to have to face yourself when you’re running away, sort of defeats the purpose. I’m even risking walking along the grass verge beside the hard shoulder to avoid introspection. This is of course not legal but I seem to have gone beyond such considerations in my determination to keep on the move.

I swear I once got a lift from a truck-driver who had me and another bloke sat on the small ledge between his cab and his load. The wind was so strong that it matted my hair into knots. Hard to believe that actually happened.

Once also got a lift from a lorry-driver who took the concept of ‘drink-driving’ somewhat literally as he performed both functions at the same time – half bottle of Bell’s in one hand, steering wheel in the other. In true Glaswegian tradition he ascertained that my favoured football team was not the same one as his and promptly bid me leave the vehicle in a dark Cumbrian wilderness where I attempted to sleep in the eaves of a motorway bridge.

You have to be tough to be itinerant; tough and very resilient. It’s not an easy game. The rat race tends to create the conditions under which the socially disenfranchised are created and then openly despises them for becoming such. ‘Criminalisation’ is a subjective process. Look at the prison system in America (and, pretty soon, here in the UK) where it’s run for private profit. What does such a system depend on to turn a coin?

Prisoners!!

Simple supply and demand. Not enough prisoners? Create more crimes.

They say the saviour of the construction industry in the U.S. has been the building of prisons; big fuck-off super-prisons the size of towns.

Go figure.

Hitch-hiking is, of course, illegal.

Why is it illegal?

Walking up the grass verge gets you nowhere and is a pointless exercise. Firstly; it’s taking you away from a service station where a lift is more likely to be secured (car-drivers won’t stop on the hard shoulder to pick you up, for fear that they themselves may be pulled up by the police) and, secondly; how far are you going to walk? Thirty miles to the next service station? All the way to London?

As I say, I’m doing it to escape myself and my own thoughts. There are voices ready to scream in my head. The principle one is a hard and shrieky ‘What have you done?’ and it’s followed closely by a dismayed and distressed ‘What are you doing?’ These questions need avoiding and are now, anyway, largely redundant. ‘What’s done is done, please give me some peace’ is a voice I’m trying to bring to the fore but it has a tendency to be overpowered, hence the walking.

Walking in the dark night under the glare of motorway lights, cars and lorries zooming by. Maybe some drivers glance over at this lonesome figure trudging through the unkempt grass, probably guessing it’s the driver of a broken-down car trying to reach a phone (do people still have to reach phones these days?). It gets a bit scary out here. I remember watching a really bizarre TV programme about two Scandinavian twins simultaneously running out in front of traffic on the M6 (they’d travelled over from Ireland to add further incongruity to the tale). One managed to get herself badly smashed by a truck and the other sustained an injury but not severe enough that she couldn’t assault and attack the motorway police who were trying to help her. This was all caught on camera and made for quite distressing viewing. One of those things that stays with you. The police-assaulter was taken into custody and released a couple of days later when she went out and murdered some poor fella with a knife.

‘Folie a deux’ – a moment of madness between two twins was one of the psychiatric summations at the trial.

Certainly takes some powerful motive force to compel someone to throw themselves into speeding traffic. A powerful force indeed.

I remember once, to amuse myself, I adopted a broad ‘Ulster’ accent when accepting a lift from a chap who, on first impressions, appeared to be middle-class and English. Turned out he was a native of Belfast. The more I tried to prove my mettle as a countryman of his the more I started speaking like Ian Paisley. I very quickly told him that I had to shorten my proposed destination as I was feeling car sick.