With The Lifts

Another of my new collection of 20 autobiographical short stories entitled
 Kill Me Now.

If you’d like to read another, leave a comment.
Enquiries to: charlieadley1@gmail.com

Thanks to Allan Cavanagh (at allancavanagh.com) for his fantastic artwork.

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With The Lifts. 

The art of Going With The Lifts relies on the first exchange of words.

When a car stops, it’s vital to keep your message simple.

The driver asks where you’re going.

Now you must respond in a calm and assured way, that sends out no dodgy signals.

“Wherever you’re going, if that’s okay.”

They will, quite naturally, be suspicious; maybe shocked and confused.

It’s your job to convince them you are neither a psychotic killer nor an obsessive stalker.

You’re simply enjoying an overdose of freedom.

Trying to reassure by enthusiastically exclaiming

“Don’t worry! I’m not a dangerous weirdo!” tends to prove counterproductive.

Some, driven by fear, make swift their escape, yet astonishingly many trust you and take you with them.

Right now you’re on a deserted road on New Zealand’s North Island.

Route 2 from Tauranga in the north to Gisborne in the south dissects the East Cape, cutting out the need to travel all the way around.

Anyone on the cape is here for a reason.
Your reason is to be here.

Blue bag - your loyal lifelong companion

You stand alone in a magnificent wilderness. From Tikitiki to Te Araroa steep gorges and lush valleys are lit up by the exploding yellows of flowering gorse.

Then you’re by the gentle sweep of azure coast to Hicks Bay, where once again you plunge inland, into the crumbling grandeur of this cascading landscape.

Now you’re somewhere between Potaka and Cape Runaway.

There’s not been a single car for half an hour.

You walk a few paces up the road, stop to look at the view from a new perspective, and wonder whether anyone ever saw that view from there.

You wait for your ears, heart and mind to calm to the sound of silence.
Then you take another look, and see much more.

For you hitching is about way more than moving from A to B.

Some drivers are happy with silence.
Others need to pour their hearts out to a stranger who they know they’ll never see again.

Some want to convert you to their belief system, be it religion or racism. You learn to spot their mildly crazed evangelical eyes, and wait for them to start their spiel. They used to mainline heroin and then the Baby Jesus came into their hearts.

Sometimes, when the car you climb out of disappears down a tiny side road, you find you’ve been dropped off in the middle of nowhere.

That you love.

From the age of fifteen you feel a strong desire to stick out your thumb at the side of the road. You quickly discover that you are good at getting lifts.

Over the next decade you hitch to school, pubs, jobs, and all over Europe. In the Summer of ’79 you hitch to Israel.

In the ‘70s hitchhikers are still a common sight; groups of longhairs clumped around motorway service stations, lounging on top of guitar cases, relaxedly unperturbed by inertia.

While they sit, passively waiting hours for someone to stop, you walk a little further up the slip road.

A minute later you climb into a Jag, accompanied by distant hippy wails.

Like much in life, empathy is the name of the hitching game: if you want a lift think like a driver.

Stand still, where drivers can see you from far away. Give drivers somewhere safe and easy to pull in.

You'll never understand why some people hitch while walking along the edge of the road. If they can walk to where they’re going, why are they hitching?

What good will walking do them? Drivers won’t stop because the walkers’ faces are hidden from them. The car that passes them on that tight bend, that’s the one which stops for you, because you’re standing in a good spot.

Always make an early start and then walk out of town. Walk and walk until buildings are far behind you, yet the traffic’s not speeding up too fast. Find a good place and stand there until you get a lift.

Carry no signs, because you’ll miss out on the shorter lifts that might bring you somewhere better.

Often people ask if you’ve ever been stuck. If you were stuck, you’d still be there.

Faith is an essential ingredient of hitching. Every time you put out your thumb you enjoy a thrill of excitement, born out of the assured knowledge that you will reach your destination. 

A friend of yours used to try hitching up the M1 to Yorkshire from Brent Cross.When he left your Golders Green flat he told you he’d give it three hours, and then go to the station and get the 3:30 bus. 

With that doubt in his heart he was doomed to failure.

After a lifetime of hitching you can spot the rides as they approach.
You know this huge Holden saloon will stop.

Crawling along with ancient rusty sills scraping the road, it’s crammed with an extended Maori family.

The old Holden creaks to a halt just past you. Children of all ages, parents, babies and grandparents empty out from the back seat, carrying crates of tomatoes, bags of fish and boxes of beer.

The sides of the saloon car visibly lift several inches. You climb in and find yourself wedged between smiling chilled-out Maori generations.

The salt and pepper haired male driver reaches across, flips open the glove compartment, and hands you a bag of green.

“S’only cabbage, yih, but hilp yoursilf mate, eh. Where ya hiddin?”

“Dunno. Wherever you’re going.”

“Okay, ya wanna come home with us, eh?”

“That’d be great. Wow, thanks! Yeh, great."

You spend a week with the local crew, drinking jugs of beer each night beside fires on the beach. They play guitars and sing and fool around with pretend drunken brawls that end up in giggling fits.

On your last night they cook a Hāngi, to honour your visit; by god you feel special.

Over the next several weeks, all over New Zealand, you achieve a rare and blissful state of hitching nirvana.

Going with the lifts allows a profound state of calm.

You let go of everything.

Stress becomes a stranger.

You develop a deep trust in humanity, alongside a faith in the process that influences you still.

North of Opotiki you’re picked up by a woman in a white cotton dress, that contrasts with her mahogany tan. She has silky long brown hair, so dark it’s almost black. Her skin exudes scents of jasmine and sandalwood.

Turning off the main road she drives to a long white sandy beach, where she dances, alone, with a white silk scarf flying from her hand.

She whirls her body, and twirls her arms around with pure joy.

You know she doesn’t dance for you. She dances for herself, paying homage to life and joy.

It’s a moment that stays with you all your life.

Months before, when you arrived in Tahiti you were shocked to find the French still operating an empire all over the South Pacific. They are furious when David Lange, New Zealand’s Prime Minister, offers a berth in Aukland harbour to the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior.

The ship is on its way to protest France’s nuclear weapons testing. When it blows up, two French secret service agents are caught, convicted of the manslaughter of a Greenpeace activist, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. 

For the first - and last - time in your life, you watch local demonstrators marching outside their parliament in favour of their government. 

“Go David! Yeah!” they cry with pride.

For months you sleep rough, two nights out of three. On the third night you enjoy the comfort of a Kiwi motel room, with a waterbed, power shower, TV and little kitchenette.

That way you avoid hostels and other travellers. You don’t travel to listen to other travellers.

You travel to listen to silence, or locals in their cars and trucks. 

Over the decades, on three continents, you share innumerable one-to-one talks with drivers from every walk of life. 

After the Bahamas, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco, LA and Polynesia, you fly into Auckland, accompanied by the lovely Cory, a Californian Amazonian Space Cadet, who you met in a dank thatch Tahitian shack, infested with mosquitos the size of tennis balls.

She has legs the length of Chile and skin of hazel brown, but her beauty is tempered by her need to share inane observations. 

In the lobby of an Auckland Youth Hostel, Cory attracts a retired local school teacher, who invites you both out on Celeste, his self-built 38 foot yacht.

Cory and Maurice onboard 'Celeste'

You enjoy a blissful fortnight of yachting wonder, for which rich people would fork out fortunes. Sailing around the Hauraki Gulf, your host shows you how to forage and fish for your food, sharing his vast knowledge of local flora and fauna.

 

Catch fish, cook 'em, Maurice foraging veg before we'd ever heard the word 'forage'.

Back in the city, it’s time to part. You want to hitch, see where the winds send you. Cory analyses aloud your desire, using much psychobabbly crap.

You are, apparently, egocentric, selfish and self-destructive, ‘cos, like, she wants to take the bus.

Everyone at the hostel insists you must go to Rotorua and Queenstown. Now you know two places to avoid.

Instead you spend three months going with the lifts.

After New Zealand you fly to Noumea where you’re placed under house arrest. There’s a crazy three-way civil war raging.

After five days they let you fly to Sydney, where you enjoy time with your good friend Catherine.

Everywhere you go in the world, people tell you it’s unsafe to hitch, so you ignore Catherine’s emphatic advice to take the bus, and insist on hitching to Melbourne.

Turns out Australia is not New Zealand.
Who knew?

Every Australian creature that crawls or flies bites or stings. While waiting for your first lift out of Sydney, Blue Bag is assaulted by bull ants, and as you try to slap them off it, your arms are bitten to buggery and back.

Pathetically unprepared for sleeping out in Australia, you hitch night and day.

This road that has brought you half way round the planet ends here, in this plush leafy Melbourne suburb.

You're a few yards from Tony’s doorstep.

At last you see your old friend’s family home. It looks huge and altogether luxurious, which is fine by you.

You hope he's not away somewhere.

The year you both left school, he returned to Melbourne with his family. You told him that one day you’d turn up on his doorstep.

Now, seven years later, you’re about to turn up on his doorstep.
He has no idea you’re on the way. 

Over the next few months you learn how incredibly unlikely it is that Tony is home that day. His job in TV has him working shifts long and many.

Yet that day your journey ends perfectly.

You ring the bell.
Tony opens the door.

The last time you saw each other, you looked like an anaemic beached whale.

Now, after nine months on the road, your skin is the colour of a fine cigar.

After three months living rough and healthy in New Zealand

You are as slim as you’ve ever been, and ever will be, so he takes a few seconds to realise you are indeed his mate Charlie.

He looks almost exactly the same as he used to: lanky, with long straw blond hair and a dry grin, stretched by pronounced cheekbones.

“Fuck me. Wouldja look who it is.”

Tony and myself when he visited Galway 12 years ago

©Charlie Adley

28.01.2023