Are you going my way?

A true story about children hitchhiking.

The first time I picked up a hitchhiking child was a five year old with a basket of groceries. “I am going to my grandmother’s house, please,” he said, something out of a fairytale. So we dropped him off at the requested neighborhood. “Thank you, Miss,” he said politely, crawling out of the back seat of the SUV—he was too small to get out gracefully.

As we drove off, my husband and I joked nervously: How many people would have gone to jail over this incident in America?

I’ve lived here long enough now that picking up hitchhiking children no longer makes me anxious. Yesterday, I gave a 12 year old a ride to the grocery store and a 9 year old a ride to church. How did they get home after these errands? Well, I assume some other people gave them rides. Maybe these were people the children knew, and maybe they weren’t. Either way, it’s fine; we’re all just neighbors helping neighbors here, not wolves in disguise.

Here, hitchhiking is an utterly normal way for people to get around, and that includes unaccompanied children. I grew up in the United States, raised on MacGruff the Crime Dog, stranger danger, The Hitcher. So when I moved here the freedom of children to thumb a ride seemed pretty foreign.

Once upon a time—I was probably about eight years old—my friend Daniel and I were walking home from school (children were still allowed to walk home from school in America then) and we thought a car was following us. I suspect that, in reality, no car was following us, but that this was an imagination we spirited into existence by sharing it. We ran, hiding behind bushes and walls. I was terrified to ask an adult for help; anyone near would be someone we did not know, a stranger. The sedan with a kidnapper may not have been real, but the fear was.

Where I live now is a Lenore Skenazy fantasy of kindergartners buying groceries, like the Sesame Street taught kids to do in 1972:

Yes, but! my American friends say, 1972 was a different time, and your island is a different place, than the United States of today. And that’s both true and false: Children then and children here, just like American children now, are overwhelmingly most likely to be harmed by someone they do know, not a stranger. Children are snatched by a stranger in far less than 1% of abduction cases. Virtually everyone who acts nice to children is nice to children, and this is true in all times and places. We are neotenous pro-social primates that have unusually helpless babies who take a very long time to grow up. Our species would no longer exist if we had not evolved affection for each others’ kids.

What is different is what we believe about each other: Do you believe that someone offering a ride is a neighbor helping out a neighbor, or a wolf in disguise?

Hitchhiking was invented in the United States, and was a common and safe way to travel there as late as the 1960s, Molly Osberg wrote in The End of the Open Road: The Inside Story of How Hitchhiking Died:

Even etiquette writer Emily Post, who dictated the boundaries of good taste from her mantle at the upper echelons of New York’s high society, once wrote a column giving women advice on how to hitchhike gracefully as part of the conservation effort during World War II.

Through the war and for some time after, hitchhiking may have become less of a necessity as the automobile industry boomed in the United States and more families owned cars, but its status in the public imagination remained relatively benign, at least until waves of a different sort of restless youth began to take to America’s highways. When the expanding ‘60s counterculture took up hitchhiking, it was largely for its ecological and, yes, aesthetic value—clots of Kerouac wannabes taking to the open road in search of the “real America.”

….A 1966 Sports Illustrated article featured a series of fun, punchy stories about thumbing across the country. For a time, relying on the good vibes of strangers seemed like a pretty rad idea.

A brief from Popular Science, October 1939.

In the late 1950s, Osberg continues, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation started to act to discourage hitchhiking. By the time the animated girl in the Sesame Street clip skipped off to buy milk, bread, and butter for her mom, the narrative that hitchhiking was dangerous had fully taken hold. By the time I was a child hiding behind the bushes with my friend, hitchhiking in America was turning into something dangerous. Because only someone untrustworthy would hitchhike, only someone untrustworthy would pick up a hitchhiker. A self-reinforcing cycle of distrust arose, and now the United States cannot break out of it.

Meanwhile, across the Caribbean and in many European countries hitchhiking is commonplace and safe. Because in these places, we never decided it wasn’t.

I worry that something similar is happening to interactions between children and adults in the United States now, where there’s practically an industry in viral stories about how someone probably barely avoided abduction because someone they didn’t know said “hi” to them at the grocery store. I worry that a danger is being spoken into existence, because if we have all decided that only weirdos talk to children, then the only people who will still talk to children will be weirdos. And a society where strangers do not look after other people’s children is not a society that is healthy, or even safe.

(It goes without saying that, where I live, adults talking to kids in grocery stores is seen as normal and good.)

The kidnapper Daniel and I believed was following us when I was a child almost certainly was not real. But our belief that we were surrounded by dangerous strangers could cause real harm: If one of us had been hurt, to whom would we run for help? We were just kids. Kids need adults to help them, and thus need to believe that adults will help. It is not Pollyanna or naive to believe that virtually everyone who acts nice is nice; it is simply true. Until, of course, enough of us believe it is not.

So I will believe in the goodness of strangers, and I hope you will, too. I will be grateful to live in a community that shares this sentiment. And the next time I see a child by the side of the road, I’ll offer them a ride.