Does Anyone Still Hitchhike?

Nowadays, it is rare for me to engage in conversation with a stranger. Long gone are the days of talking to random people in bars—or even taking up a new hobby. It all seems far too exhausting. But am I missing something? Andrew Fedorov thinks so. In this essay, Fedorov extols one of the main advantages of hitchhiking: meeting new people. Enclosed in a political echo chamber, Fedorov sees hitchhiking as a way to “encounter with someone whose perspective I could hardly have imagined.” A piece that will make you think as much about your closed-off world as the way you travel.

On jaunts around the country, I’ve gotten to see the variety of people who give rides. The drivers tend to be about evenly split between men and women, young and old, and are of all different races. The only deviation from the general population is that a lot of the drivers have previously hitchhiked. “Most people give lifts for two reasons: to repay past hitchhiking debts and because they want company,” Purkis writes in his book. The first reason helps explain the demographics of hitchhikers, too: If a diverse group of people have karmic hitchhiking debts to pay back, the pool of hitchhikers will generally remain diverse. Women may be seen on the roadside less often than men—but they’re there. When Elijah Wald was on tour for his 2006 book, Riding With Strangers, he was surprised that most of the readers telling him hitchhiking stories were women. “The assumption we all make is based on who we see on the road,” he told me. “When women stand out on the road and stick out their thumb, they get picked up very quickly, so you don’t see them.”