Thumbing a lift and learning the nuances of life were once an intertwined part of young people’s lives. Malachi O'Doherty reports
MY FIRST experience of long-distance hitchhiking in Ireland taught me some of the basics.
I was travelling with my friend Jim from Belfast to Dublin. We were both about 19 years old and had not done this before but what could be so difficult?
You stood at the side of the road and extended an arm to the passing traffic. Sooner or later someone would accept the invitation to stop and pick you up and take you another bit of the way to where you wanted to go.
You learnt in time to make eye contact with an approaching driver to make him feel guilty if he refused you. You also learnt to turn down some offers, if they weren’t going far enough, if there were people in the car you didn’t like the look of.
Just beyond Banbridge we took a lift from a milkman doing his rounds. He took us off the main route, through small villages and past farm gates assuring us that if we helped him with his deliveries he would take us to a great spot for catching the long distance lorries.
Now there are neither hitch hikers nor milk floats on Irish roads anymore, so that is a story that will be barely intelligible to some people.
Before the Dublin trip I had often thumbed a lift home in Belfast after the last bus had gone.
My girlfriend was a student nurse and I would leave her to her accommodation at the City Hospital and take my chances with the late night traffic on the Lisburn Road.
This was in the early days of the Northern Ireland Troubles but I never came to harm.
I got to know the gay men who cruised that road looking for amorous opportunities. It surprised me, after a time, that they didn’t give up on me but would perhaps give me a little pat on the knee as I said goodnight and got out.
Since then I have hitchhiked round much of Ireland, up and down the English motorways more times than I can count. I have hitchhiked in Belgium, Holland and France and further, through Germany and down to Austria a couple of times.
I even hitched through the night and through snow storms when I still had hundreds of miles to go and nowhere to sleep.
I once hitchhiked in India with 25 bags of cement. That’s perhaps a story for another day.
On my first European trip I was hitchhiking with a friend out of Lancaster, heading for Amsterdam. We got a lift with two girls in a camper van. They were going to Amsterdam too and we ended up spending the whole holiday together.
An Austrian friend once left me off at a service station outside Vienna with the advice to get into a long-distance lorry and go to sleep, but I always felt the due payment for a lift was to keep the driver company and talk to him.
Now I’m wondering how and why the whole tradition of hitchhiking has died out. Are people more wary of making themselves dependent on strangers? My experience was that a driver would often tell me things he wouldn’t tell a friend and the most extraordinary connections were made between people.
Around the time of the prison hunger strikes in Northern Ireland I was living in Donegal but often hitchhiked back and forth to Belfast.
Yet, even as people in the city were being murdered in back alleys, drivers would spot a young man with a rucksack at the side of the road and immediately trust him not to be a terrorist or some kind of sinister undercover operative of the state.
Why was that?
There was every likelihood that the car I got into would be stopped further along the road by a police or army checkpoint. The driver would not then be able to vouch for me nor I for him, that we were respectable citizens, unarmed and with no drugs on us. Women picked me up too, as keen as any man for company on a long drive.
And, no doubt some drivers passed me by, unprepared to take the risk, yet there were always enough to rely on to get me to my destination.
Sometimes a driver would want to interest me in Jesus and the prospect of saving my soul. One might even have been out on the road for no other purpose than to find someone to proselytise to.
Fair enough. They get to preach. I get to Belfast — or Glencolumbcille, wherever.
I don’t think it would be as easy to get a lift today.
In rural Ireland, with poverty and poor public transport many often depended on lifts to get about. The country people didn’t stick their thumbs out like travellers. They probably didn’t think of what they were doing as the same thing the backpackers did. They would just stand at the side of the road at the edge of town and trust that, sooner or later, a neighbour would recognise them and pick them up.
Picking somebody up and taking them on their way was a neighbourly thing to do. The disappearance of that custom suggests we are a more fearful people than we were even when we had more reason to be wary.
Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book
How To Fix Northern Ireland
is published by Atlantic Books
