After leaving the Central Public Library in Indianapolis, when it closed for the evening, I then walked downtown in the direction of Washington Street, which was also U.S. Highway 40, and, carrying my knapsack, began to walk east towards its intersection to the Interstate Highway which would connect to the Interstate 69 or other highway that led northeast through Indiana and up into Michigan.
After walking east for a few hours in the dark, a long-haired white hippie-freak in his 20's, who looked about the same age as me, passed me and then stopped the car he was driving, opened the passenger side door and asked me, with a smile on his face, as I approached the passenger door: "Which way are you heading?"
"The highway towards Michigan," I replied.
Sill smiling, the long-haired white freak then said: "Hop in! I can take you up that direction towards Anderson."
Like me, the long-haired white hippie driver giving me the ride was also unemployed. And, while we shared a joint in the car and listened to the rock music he was playing on his car's tape deck, we conversed with each other for most of the ride, in the early morning darkness.
"They just seem to want to hire the young chicks around here these days, whenever the companies are hiring," the young white freak driver said in the car at one point, with a laugh. And, still chuckling, he added: "That's what women's lib in Indiana means now. But at least being on unemployment for awhile is still more fun than being stuck everyday on the asssembly line, I guess."
"Yeah. Wage-slavery under capitalism is a real drag for anybody who's hip to the System," I replied. "And being unemployed myself now gave me the freedom to go out to California and then hitch back towards the East like I'm doing."
So many decades later, I no longer recall much else of what we talked about, although I think he pretty much agreed with my rap that the computers and the automation should be used in the 1970's to create an economy in which everybody would only have to work 15 hours a week for 35 hours pay. But by the time he dropped me off by a breakdown lane near an exit on the Interstate around Anderson, the sun was beginning to rise as we said goodbye to each other, with stoned smiles on both our faces before he drove away.
Because there were few cars or trucks yet driving on the Interstate highway so early in the morning and the cars or trucks driving by me at this time did not offer me a ride, I had to wait in the breakdown lane by the highway exit for awhile.
Eventually, though, a car stopped in front of ma after the morning sun had completely risen and I quickly trotted towards the car with my knapsack and hopped in.
The driver was a friendly white guy in his twenties who was then clean-shaven and without long-hair. But he apparently had been a long-haired hippie freak before he had to get a haircut and shave his beard off, in order to get hired for his night-shift job at the automobile factory that he was then returning home from. So he apparently saw me as someone who, by being on the road hitching, was on the philosophical trip similar to the philosophical trip he had been on, before his need for some money forced him to get his night-shift factory job in the automobile manufacturing plant.
The short-haired, clean-shaven guy lived in a rented second-floor apartment in a 1950's built house on the outskirts of Muncie and was friendly. And he pretty much agreed with my rap in the car about our generation having outgrown the materialistic, work ethic-oriented society that the culturally straight work-freak businessmen still wanted to trap us into adjusting to--instead of allowing our generation to create a leisure-oriented society in the USA.
And because he didn't live too far from the Interstate exit near Muncie, rather than just dropping me off on the Interstate breakdown lane near his exit, he invited me to have breakfast with him in his apartment. And then, after he cooked some scrambled eggs for us both to eat while we chatted, and I continued to describe how I had managed to reach Indiana from Los Angeles in so few days despite having to hitchhike back east, he drove the short distance from where he lived back to the Interstate highway later that morning--giving me a lift back to the breakdown lane near the highway exit, where he then dropped me, and my large knapsack, off.
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