Hitchhiking

Guest Post by Maggie

Fred Reed has a wonderful article about the hitchhiking phenomena of the 1970s. I was privileged to be able to see that same phenom from a slightly different perspective than his. I hope you enjoy my little story to precede his most excellent essay

When I was 14, I had the honor of being taken from my home to Virginia Beach and home again, traveling the long way both ways with a woman whom I will call Aunt Martha. She’d been widowed in her early twenties, just a year or two after her husband had returned from WWII with an aneurism in his brain that would burst one day while she watched from the kitchen sink.

My cousin, her daughter in India now living in an ashram called Pondicherry, told me she was seven years old and remembered the day vividly. She saw her mother gasp and holler for her husband to get up from the ground when he’d fallen so she would know that he was alive. He did not move. The aneurism, a full bleed, killed him on the spot and my aunt was left to raise two children, another was just four years old. He lives in Prescot Arizona now and sells metal detectors after spending a large chunk of his adult life in Australia, hunting Roos and Gold.

She farmed that stinking little farm until her daughter and she started college down in Murray, Kentucky. Pat graduated and married; Rusty joined the Navy and started his life of adventure and opportunity that eventually took him to Australia, then Thumb Butte… both places seeming to have unbelievable promise as exotic visiting locales I might someday get to see. I lived on a different stinking little farm and, unfortunately, my father, Aunt Martha’s brother, thought that little farm was all anyone needed to see after spending three plus years of his life in a Japanese POW camp accidentally.

HE did, however, think it fine for me to take off and travel with Aunt Martha. She and I went from arts and crafts festival to artx and craft fair here there and everywhere across Virginia and greater New England that summer. We slept in her Ford station wagon and spent mornings on beaches with metal detectors borrowed from her son’s metal detector shop he’d set up in Virginia Beach to support his family after his shoulder was crushed in another adventure in Europe. The U.S. Navy had deemed him physically maimed to the point of being unable to serve in uniform, so my cousin Rusty turned a passion for metal detecting into a sustainable employment opportunity. He has been very successful with his metal detecting business from the very start, so has not been a drain on US Navy or VA resources. He was raised by a woman who looked reality in the face and did what she had to do. Just like she taught me to do. She handled it.

When we were driving on the open highways, we would keep bags of ice in our cooler, with bread and meat and maybe a few apples available for munching. One traveling day, she and I talked about how hot it must be for the poor hitchhikers walking along America’s highways. Some of them looked a bit hippieish, but Aunt Martha was part of a Bohemian lifestyle herself so was not as critical of those “lazy birds” who just wanted to hitchhike and find themselves. But, I was her ward and even were she the type to let hitchhikers ride a bit in her old car packed with paintings, calligraphy tools and other things bohemian artists and their nieces from flyover country hauled around with them on summer’s days during the Bicentennial Celebration of this country. And I started taking little plastic sandwich bags and filling them with ice, tying off the bags with bread ties and tossing them out the window to hitchhikers with little notes attached.

We know you are tired

We know that it is hot

Our car is packed full

But ice we got.

Have a cool drink on us and enjoy the view!

Sometimes the verse would be different (maybe it was raining and the pun had to be modified), but we did that the whole way home in 1977. I liked to think that some of the hitchhikers out there picked up my little bags full of ice and appreciated the simple gesture of kindness from a couple of crazy marthas enjoying their own trek across America. I guess, looking back, I should have tossed rolls of duct tape out the window and told them to shut the fuck up.