Back in the early 70s I was living the bohemian/beat/hippie life on Cape Cod. A close female friend of mine had broken her leg and couldn’t drive or ride her bike, so she hitched around our little town. One afternoon she was hitching into the center of town and got picked up by a stranger. As she closed the door and turned to look at the man, he slammed a knife into her chest with all the force he could muster. Stabbed her 27 or 28 times and then drove out of town and turned the car into the woods. He was going to rape her, but she was so covered with blood that he didn’t want to touch her. Finally, with her slipping in and out of consciousness, he reached over, opened her door, and pushed her out with his foot. Fortunately someone found her within a few minutes and she was rushed to the hospital. She lived, but she was never the same physically or mentally.
I don’t tell this story very often, but recently my SO heard from an old friend of hers who had exactly the same thing happen but in Oregon. There are really really fucked people in this world, most of them men.
I also have my own not as bad story. I was hitching across the country, from Boston to the West Coast. In those days almost everything I owned was in or hanging from my backpack, a considerable investment in camping gear and other stuff for wandering. Somewhere in Ohio I got picked up by a nice guy, and we chatted away rolling down the road. After a while he pulled into a gas station and handed me a few bucks and told me to get us each a cup of coffee. When I came out, he was gone, with everything I owned. I had to hitch back home without even a jacket. That was the end of hitching for me.
I hitched a fair bit in the late 60s - maybe very early 70s. Then life settle down and got more dull, with steadier work and less adventure. My most memorable ride: Returning from the Grand Tetons to California after some climbing. Got dropped off a bit off my preferred route and in a VERY small town and lightly traveled road. I thought I would be stuck forever. After a few minutes, a yellow Pontiac GTO pulled up. Music blared from the open window. The driver asked where I was going, and when I said California, he said “Far out! So am I”. He took me to his parents house in Blackfoot Idaho where we had dinner then left to drive straight through to LA. Nevada in those days had no speed limit on it’s country roads, so we rolled that GTO at well over 100 for long stretches, taking turns behind the wheel. Both of us - surprisingly under the circumstances, were capable and conscientious drivers, so we had a fine time. I remember rolling through Vegas at 1 AM, then into LAs the sun rose.
I still will occasionally pick up hitchhikers - not when my wife is along, as she would disapprove. But I, like others in the thread, feel some obligation to pay back the kindness I received in those long-ago days.
hitched all around Canada for 2 years – went through every province and virtually every city over 20,000, from 1970 to 1972 – it was some of the best times of my life.
Wow, that is truly horrific. And that’s the thing – when it comes to making recommendations to loved ones, it almost doesn’t matter how infrequent the statistics say that sort of thing is…despite my own fairly benign history of hitch-hiking, I would not want my daughter trying it, especially solo. The fact that things like that ALMOST never happen isn’t going to be much comfort if it happens to you or someone you know.
By the way, this is really not very reassuring when you think about it:
A single study, commissioned by the California Highway Patrol in 1974, investigated the relationship between hitchhiking and crime; it found that thumbing a ride was a component in all of 0.63 percent of the state’s crimes.
Given the relatively small amount of hitch-hiking, the fact that more than 1 out of every 200 crimes involved hitch-hiking suggests to me that it’s a risky activity – especially given the likelihood that such crimes are greatly under-reported. Would be more helpful to know how many crimes compared to how many rides hitched, but I suppose it’s probably nearly impossible to come up with a meaningful estimate.
Not that I would want to ban hitch-hiking – I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t even rule out doing it again myself. But I also wouldn’t recommend it, especially not doing it solo, and even more so (and, yes, I know it’s not fair) especially not a female doing it solo.
My hitchhiking days in the US were very limited, but I spent ten months of 1971 travelling through Europe and North Africa, and used my thumb in the UK, France, Italy, Greece, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Spain and the Netherlands without a single negative instance. Though I also relied on trains, buses and boats, it was the hitching days that are most memorable.
I hitchhiked a number of times from college (U of Iowa) to home (Grimes, IA). I was picked up by truck drivers (some with signs in window that they don’t pick up hitchhikers), other college students I didn’t know, one I did know, and just regular folks. I never had a problem. There was one UI student who picked me up that I thought was interested in dating me. But I fell asleep and that ruined it.
For me it was an important mode of transportation. One time my front teeth had been laid flat at wrestling practice. The UI dental school popped them back up, but I hit the road with my thumb out to see my orthodontist 120 miles away in Des Moines. Back then, hitchhiking was just another mode of public transportation.
After I had a car, I used to pick up hitchhikers but now I don’t. But as this article notes, they are few and far between.
Interesting article, and I suspect it is true that the risks of hitchhiking have been grossly exaggerated. But if we are discussing the actual risks to the hitchhiker in the course of hitchhiking, none of the statistics cited in the article are relevant to that point.
For example, the author points to a 1974 study that found that hitchhiking was a factor in 0.63 percent of California’s crimes. That’s absolutely meaningless as a measure of the risk to the hitchhiker. Also, later in the article, the author points to the low number of people killed in highway murders nationwide (.04 per day) versus the number killed by partners or former partners. That may indeed suggest that murders of hitchhikers isn’t exactly the most pressing problem in the nation and that murders by partners and former partners is a bigger problem, but again, it doesn’t speak at all to the actual risk of being murdered in the course of hitchhiking; the low number could merely be a function of the low number of people who actually engage in hitchhiking.
The relevant statistic in measuring risk, of course, is the percent of hitchhiking trips that end up with the hitchhiker being murdered. But since there is no way to track the number of hitchhiking trips taken, it’s impossible to measure. Again, I think the author’s basic premise – that hitchhiking risks or grossly overstated – is quite probably correct. But she muddies her thesis by throwing in all of these statistics that are utterly irrelevant to the argument she is trying to make.
I hitched rides the ten miles to work a few times in the mid 1990s when the only bus in our backwoods town came by earlier than scheduled, etc. A couple of times in driving snowstorms… of course, it helped that everyone knew the prestigious company where I worked. One guy even went far out of his way in the snowstorm to give me the whole ride to work rather than just the segment he was traveling on.
Of course, now that I quit corporate culture and have a bushy beard and hair down to my ass I suspect the story might be different… plus I moved from backwoods NY state to the SF California area… where the look is less questioned, but the fear is greatly heightened.
Too bad about hitchhiking in the States, but it’s demise parallelled the decline of American capitalism (and loss in Indochina), especially the decimation of industry, with its effects on politics, individual lives and mass psychology.
I hitchhiked regularly in LA from 9 until 17, when I got a motor scooter, then a VW bus. We lived in the coastal mountains, but seven miles by road from the beach, so from 13 on I hitched down and back Sunset Blvd six days a week during the summer. Caught a few movie stars and a Heisman Trophy winner along the way - no, not OJ - and only one proposition by a gay guy who figured out it wasn’t my thing. After that, the need was more occasional and typically local, though I did once hitch from Salt Lake City to the Bay Area with a few guys drinking and driving 90 mph. That was scary (but anything to get out of SLC).
Please, Molly, correct your quote! According to the link you provide, it is not “female hitchhikers practically invented rape”, but “female hitchhikers practically invite rape”. The latter is still pretty bad, of course, but is a little bit less deranged than the former.
You also repeat the “invented rape” quote later in the article.
It’s very much alive in Hawaii as well. I hitched a lot in the mid 90s, as I have epilepsy and couldn’t drive at the time. For some reason it seemed natural to do it, even though growing up on the east coast I’d never seen anyone hitching. OTOH, it was 30 miles to the nearest grocery store and the bus only ran during the weekday when I worked, so I didn’t really have a choice. There are fewer now but you still see people hitchhiking pretty often, and I’ve picked up a few to pay it back now that I can drive.
Counterpoint: at about that same time as CSNY were singing “Teach Your Children,” Jim Morrison was singing:
There’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirming like a toad
Take a long holiday
let your children play
If you give this man a ride,
sweet family will die,
killer on the road.
I remain skeptical about much that is said about hitchhiking since so much of what people think is shaped by Hollywood (e.g. The Hitcher) and typical middle America paranoia about crime.
I did a ton of hitchhiking in the 80’s. I heard all the stories about why you couldn’t do it any more. A cop in Texas told me that 90% of the hitchhikers in Texas are found on the roadside dead. But I still managed to log many thousands of miles on several trips around the country and up and down both coasts. In all that hitchhiking, I only had a gun pulled on me once. The one time I faced any potential violence was a rare ride that I took within a major city – a practice which I came to regard as a mistake and stopped doing.
I’m not saying hitchhiking was completely safe. I wouldn’t do it if I were a woman alone and, as I said, I wouldn’t do it in an urban area. But widespread intuitions were not upheld by the empirical evidence.
Instead of being incredibly dangerous, I found that people were incredibly friendly. People did me incredible kindnesses. One guy in Arizona took me and my buddy back to his upscale family house, made us a steak dinner, put us up for the night, and gave us the keys to his brand new car to go out to a bar with!
I rarely even ran into any dangerous drivers. The one notable exception was a guy in Tennessee, who must have been a stunt driver, who claimed to have just dropped LSD and proceeded to drive incredibly fast through the mountains, ending the ride by pulling into a gas station and doing some kind of fish tail braking maneuver that caused the car to flip around the gas pumps from one side to the other ending up perfectly placed on the other side of the pumps!
Hitchhiking may be illegal now in 4 states but it was already illegal on any interstate highway back in the 80s. Nevertheless I logged the vast majority of my hitchhiking miles on interstates. Only one cop in Eastern Washington state really had a big problem with that. Traffic was incredibly sparse, which made hitchhiking very difficult, and this one cop, with nothing better to do, made it his mission to keep me and my hitching partner off that stretch of the interstate. We ended up stuck for a few days hitching on small even less travelled roads. But finally we met a crazy woman who wanted us to help her kidnap her kid back from the bikers who had allegedly kidnapped her. We declined the offer to do so in return for her brand new truck but we did accept the ride that took us out of the uptight cop’s territory.
I think if it is in fact the end of the hitchhiking era that is less because of increased danger and more the declining influence of Jack Kerouac and the romanticism of the 60’s in general. And that is America’s great loss.
When I was stationed in MA way back in the early 1960’s, a member of our company was hitching back to the base on a Sunday when he was picked up by two teenagers. Turns out they had stolen the car. The tried to flee when the police tried to pull them over.
They crashed into something solid. The soldier was so severely brain damaged he would have to be institutionalized for life. I think the one kid was killed, the other severely injured. Remember, this was before seat belts.
i never hitched much to begin with, never did again after that.
I remember those miles long lines of hitchers in Canada in the early 70s, too. One time, a bunch of us got so desperate in Regina that about 75 of us hopped a freight train in the middle of the night.
I hitched from my mid-teens to mid-twenties, never had a bad experience. But I’d like to see actual stats on the danger, or lack of danger, especially to women. Comparing the .04 highway murders per day to the 3 romantic partner murders per day is meaningless, as there are way more women with current or former partners than there are women vulnerable on the highway.
I hitched a bit from 1974-'80. The vibe definitely changed when Reagan was elected. That’s the story of how hitching died: The change in hitchhiking was just one of the myriad ways that our culture grew more shallow, selfish, narrow and fearful.
The was not the case in Germany-- hitching was fine there in 1983 and '85-'86
I love to hitchhike, and still do it at every opportunity (which is all too rare, right now).
A girlfriend and I hitched for months across the US - from DC to Chicago, down the Mississippi on a private yacht, from Miami (where it was raining too hard to stand outside on a freeway) to somewhere north on a private plane, by truck over to the west coast - then around the So Pacific, NZ, AU, and up through SE Asia. That was '82-23. Drug dealers, Hassic Rabbi truckers, pig farmers - you never know who will be kind enough to pick you up.
Back in the western US, I have picked up hitchers for decades who look legit (though they are unfortunately rare now) and still hitch myself on long boat or bike or hike shuttles. I’ve had 99.998 great experiences, met lots of interesting people, and learned the fine art of listening to everyone, even the dull and the ignorant, just to hear their story.
