Not long after I reached the breakdown lane between the exit and entrance of the Interstate highway that crossed the middle of Pennsylvania and took you into New Jersey, a car stopped soon after I stuck out my thumb.
The driver, a white guy, without a beard and with short hair--whom most women would have still then considered good-looking--who wasn't wearing a suit or tie, pushed the front passenger door of his compact car open and motioned for me to hop in with my knapsack. He looked like he was around a little over 30 years of age.
After we began to converse with each other, he mentioned to me that he was a vacationing off-duty police officer, who was now returning from wherever he had spent his vacation; and that he was now driving all the way back into New Jersey and north of the Lincoln Tunnel. So I then happily realized that this was the ride that would enable me to reach the end of my journey back to theeast coast by the early evening.
The white police officer wasn't a wannabee hippie-freak or a particularly disillusioned cop, But he also wasn't particularly right-wing politically or some guy who seemed to be into being a police officer because he enjoyed bullying, controlling or brutalizing people (such as young black men, etc.).
He apparently just worked for some small suburban or rural town or county's police department. In a place where "being a cop" pretty much just then meant only having to give speeding or parking tickets to drivers, being more like a social worker on the street or acting as a traffic director; rather than having to use your club or gun against local area civilians or arrest many people. And it seemed like he was just working as a police officer because it was a well-paying, easy job without much personal risk for him; or it could be that someone in the older generation of his family had been some kind of a cop?
Perhaps because he was now divorced, though, this apolitical, off-duty white poliice officer of the 1970's did not seem like a jovial or a loquacious kind of fellow. And my impression was that the main reason he picked me up. was that, as a cop, he was used to driving around as part of a two-person "team;" and that he also felt it would be less boring to drive across Pennsylvania with somebody to converse with that day than it would be to drive across the state all alone, listening to the car radio to music or verbal chatter that he had no interest in.
Another reason he may have picked me up was because--like the white guy who had picked me up when I was on the road leaving Los Angeles, he likely had hitched himself when he was in the U.S. military, years before. And picking me up was, for him also, seen as a way of returning the gift of the free rides that he may have received from some other drivers years before, when he was traveling on leave, to or from the U.S. military base he was stationed on.
In the car, I told him about some of my experiences on the road back from California. And he seemed to find it interesting that I had reached where he picked me up in Pennsylvania in so few days by hitching alone. And, naturally, a lot of our conversation in his car was spent discussing my vision about how a leisure-oriented society in the U.S. could be easily created in the 1970's.
While the white police officer in his early 30's who picked me up understood that U.S. society needed to be transformed--and, until it was transformed, the quality of life the USA would continue to deteriorate, compared to how it had been for most people in the placed he had lived within the affluent U.S. society during the 1950's and early 1960's--he was skeptical that much could change in the USA, at least during the Seventies.
Neither of us, however, foresaw that, by the 1980's, so many U.S. factories in the Midwest and Northeast would be shutting down. Or that the kind of economic affluence that so many white working-class people had enjoyed during the 1950's and early 1960's would vanish. And that by the 1980's, most white working-class people, along with most African-American working-class people, would again begin to experience a decline in their real income, living standards and chances of any more upward mobility under the U.S. economic system.
So many years later, I no longer can recall much else of what we discussed before finally reaching the road to the Lincoln Tunnel in New Jersey in the early evening. Perhaps because of his divorce, I have a vague recollection that--although not being particularly anti-feminist, male chauvinist or misogynist--the off-duty white police officer felt that many U.S. women were too self-centered. And, perhaps because he was a cop, I do recall that he was a skillful driver who drove slightly above the speed limit until we reached the road to the Lincoln Tunnel--where he dropped me off during the last period of the evening rush hour.
Within 15 minutes, a beardless white guy in his early 20's, with long brown hair, who looked like a hippie-freak, stopped his VW van in front of me as I stood on the breakdown lane alongside the road in New Jersey which takes you eventually into the Lincoln Tunnel.
And after I hopped in the van's front passenger seat with my large knapsack, I discovered that, besides being a hippie-freak like me, he was also, like me, a musician. And, in addition, like me, he had grown up in Queens.
Despite the heavy Jersey-NYC traffic, we made good time as he drove towards the Lincoln Tunnel, through the Lincoln Tunnel and Midtown Manhattan and across the East River and onto the Long Island Expressway in Queens; where he eventually dropped me off at some bus stop--before he continued to drive east to the neighborhood in Queens where he lived.
Because we were both into music, we pretty much conversed the whole time I was in the car with him. And although I was into folk music and he was just into rock music--and not at all into using music to protest against the wrongs of U.S. society like I was--before he dropped me off, he wrote his name and phone number and address down on a slip of paper. And he invited me to come jam with him and his band sometime.
I actually did stop by at his house in Queens a few weeks later and jammed a bit with him and his band. But, because he was more into making rock band music than into singing lyrics of songs like I was, he didin't seem to want to attempt to work with me, as some kind of back-up band leader of a rock band that accompanied the lyrics to all the songs I had by then written.
His musical goal was more about just rehearsing with his rock band enough so that he could earn money as a musician whose band played cover songs of pop rock hit songs in clubs, where people danced with each other. Whereas my goal, at that time, was still pretty much just using music to encourage revolutionary left activism and radicalize U.S. working-class political consciousness--by getting the folk songs and lyrics I had written onto some vinyl record album distributed by a label like Vanguard Records or Elektra.
Thus ended my first coast-to-coast journey on the road in the 1970's. There would be two other coast-to-coast trips on the road hitching later in the decade with the woman I loved. But the first journey was the only coast-to-coast bus ride and coust-to-coast hitchhike on the road that I did alone in my life--many decades before the "Age of Uber" arrived..
And my first coast-to-coast hitchhike on the road took place not too many years before, as in the 1950's, U.S. drivers again became more frightened to pick-up hitchhikers. It also took place not too many years before U.S. hitchhikers began to find that a lot more of the drivers who did offer you a free ride on the road had some kind of predatory or ulterior motive.
Perhaps as a result of the way the post-late 1970's U.S. corporate mass media and Corporate Hollywood film industry programming had manipulated and perhaps dstorted some of these neurotic drivers' minds, sub-conscious or values?
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