Hitchhiker's guide to family history

notice: strong language in this post

In reading this post and comments at Althouse, the subject of hitchhiking came up, and it set my mind on a strange course.

I have never hitched a ride from a stranger. I suppose that (a) being female, and (b) being of a generation when we were made more aware of the risks, such occasions never arose in my life. But my dad -- well, Dad was different.

I really don't know very much about my father. He's the sort of man who represents the standard of his generation: intelligent, generous, witty, handsome, and charming enough to keep the center of attention even though he absolutely does not want it because he's painfully shy and reserved. He doesn't openly express emotions, and he doesn't talk about himself (except about what he's recently learned). Also, he's supremely conservative in his use of strong language. He used to scowl when he heard anything more vulgar than "darn". As an example, when we were driving down New England one summer, we passed an old mill with its stream somewhat blocked, a stone wall channelling the water toward the mill wheel, and Dad referred (okay, jokingly) to the low obstruction as "that's not a dam, thats a ding-bust-it."

So it came as something of a shock to me that he sat with a couple of family friends last week and told us about part of his youthful adventures, thumb out on the highway.

He was fresh out of school, and doing what every sensible young American male did: he was seeing America. Previous generations of wealthy young men trekked across the ocean to "do the Continent", but Dad went from South Carolina to the Pacific coast, then back around to Illinois (where he met my mom).

Even back then, was that there was one condition which would guarantee a hitcher would get no lift, no matter how comely his thumb, and that was the presence of a woman. If she drove, she would have had the good sense to avoid picking up a strange man, and if she were the passenger, the man driving would protect her by leaving any strangers in the dust. Condition two which could mean being bypassed was nobody in big fancy cars gave a rat's hindquarters about the fellow on the highway. A Cadillac was a sure pass-by. And, third, hitchers always rode in the back.

And, yet, somewhere on the last leg of Dad's expedition, a big, shiny Caddy pulled alongside him on the road, in the middle of Montana. In its front seat sat a neatly-dressed gent and his genteel missus. Dad says he reached for the handle to the back door, but the gentleman said, breaking unwritten hitchhiking rule three in shocking fashion, "No, son, sit up front with us. I've got all my shit back there."

Dad clambered in, cautiously settling on the big bench seat and glancing back to see only one tidy little box, which wouldn't have crowded him at all. Except that it was, indeed, filled with shit. The man was transporting earthworms in a box of manure.

They rode all the way to town with all the windows down.