Hitchhike, Baby

Going my way? photo by I, Drozd

The tires of the pickup crunched in the gravel as it pulled over for us. My climbing buddy and I hoisted our rucksacks and ran along the shoulder. The driver stuck his head out his window and looked us over. He was wearing a white Stetson.

“Where you dudes headed?” he asked.

“Smith Rock” replied my partner, Max.

“Climb on,” the cowboy said. “I can drop you off at the entrance to the State Park.”

Max and I swung our packs over the tailgate into the cargo bed, then stepped on the back bumper of the truck, and clambered aboard. As I stepped over the tailgate, my knitted wool cap somehow fell off, and my shoulder-length brown hair swung free in the wind. I had hidden my “freak flag” in hopes of getting a ride. My partner had short hair anyway.

The three people in the cab looked surprised, and started laughing when they saw they had picked up a couple of hippies. The driver shook his head, the blonde girl in the middle rolled her eyes, and the guy on the right, in a black cowboy hat, leered at us, and made a scissoring motion with his hand.

With a lurch, and a spray of gravel, the pickup was headed east on the Columbia Gorge highway. Max and I looked at each other apprehensively. In the early 1970s, cultural battle lines had been drawn. Even though I had been raised on a dairy farm, and Max had come from a ranching and logging family, we had long since chosen the hippie way over the redneck way.

We had both heard stories of climbers getting jackknife haircuts at the hands of cowboys in Wyoming. Through the rear window of the cab, we watched as the three cattle country types laughed and occasionally looked back at us. This didn’t look good.

The guy in the black hat banged on the door panel, and gestured come here with a finger. Max moved forward to the passenger side window. When he came back, a big smile on his face, he held a cold can of Coors in each hand.

We needn’t have worried.

There are more hitchhiking stories in Lightbulb Coffee. You can read about the time my teenaged wife disposed of the evidence, and we were acquitted in court because I could draw.

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