Have thumb, will travel. Lisa Scott on the art of getting a lift.
Ain’t got much drive, lately. Feel like I’m going nowhere. And if I do want to go somewhere, I need to beg a lift from other people because I am a criminal (please note: I wasn’t making light, the situation is too tawdry for levity).
Despite this, my friends still talk to me: the Tamster comes out to Purakaunui every now and then and takes me for a drive so I can remember the internal combustion engine. My life makes her feel awesome; and, quite frankly, if you can’t be a cautionary tale for your friends, what good are you doing? However, my friends live in town, my daughter lives in town, my work is often in town (plus I tend to go completely barking in the country after a couple of days), so it is to town that I must go.
Mostly I hitchhike, also called "lifting" or "thumbing", which sounds a bit rude but is "a means of transportation gained by asking people, mostly strangers, for a ride in their automobile, used by itinerants for the better part of the last century", according to Wikipedia.
The Beat generation hitched. The hippies hitched. And then nobody did. Fear of hitchhiking was spurred on by movies such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and more recently Wolf Creek but I am simply too annoyingly chatty to attract the attentions of the murderous. Even the most sadistic, kidney-eating killer would think twice about sharing a confined space with someone who goes on and on about composting toilets. They’d just slip that boning knife back in their pocket and wait for it to be over.
Plus, Donald Trump is actually the President of America. Like really, for real. So, there are plenty of much worse things to be scared of.
Hitchhiking is an interesting cultural/economic exchange whereby the liftee enters an unspoken covenant to be interesting/witty/a good listener for the duration of the ride offered. Before that can happen, though, I always get a bit nervous about the placement of my thumb. Too high and you seem arrogant; too low, listless and unconvincing. Hold your thumb upside down and it looks like Caesar is displeased. In some countries, the signal is pointing your index finger at the ground. In Africa, you hold your palm out: in Port Chalmers that would just be asking for a handful of seagull incontinence.
Gesture perfected, positioned roadside, wearing an optimistic smile, now comes the awful bit: people drive past you. It’s hard not to take this personally. They clearly saw you (their heads turned your way), yet decided you weren’t good enough to let in their car. Invariably it is the well-off who do this. I throw judging looks at the back of their vehicles: Range Rovers, Audis, Volvos.
The people who do pick me up have hitchhiked themselves at some point, and even if it was years ago, they respect the car karma. They drive dreadful shitty rust buckets with clattery exhausts. They know what goes around comes around; the corner, in a blue Daihatsu with a crumpled fender. Some are rough-looking, have neck tattoos, black ripped jerseys, back seats full of cobwebs and occupations that don’t stand much scrutiny. These people are usually the nicest.
I’ve only come across one creep so far. He shuddered to a stop as I stood by the cemetery, driving a car that looked like it was made in eastern Europe from tinfoil. His mouth was all wrong. Floppy, like there weren’t any teeth behind it.
"What are your plans for tonight, Darling?" he said, leaning out the driver’s window and touching me on the arm. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that uninvited contact is not within the accepted social framework of hitchhiking. Hitchhiking works upon the notion that a personal space bubble exists despite your inhabiting the personal space of others. The subsets do not interact.
Of course, what I should have said, according to my friend Alistair, was, "I have choir practice at 7pm at Knox Church followed by kickboxing," but polite to the point of hysteria, I waffled on senselessly, flustered, ending with an unconvincing fib that a friend was picking me up in a few minutes. The tinfoil car choked off its handbrake, wheezing with displeasure. I kept walking. A wood pigeon fell noisily into flight from the tree above: "whoop whoop". I could see the sea from the top of the hill, and the wet valley of Long Beach. My footsteps made a rhythm like a heartbeat that went on.
