Travelling on the thumb

Travelling on the thumb, it wasn’t hard to do, you took
the rides that you could get with no regrets – let shrinkage
in the mileage to your goal provide your measures of success,
strode the grassy verges thumb erect and cursed the surly
bastards speeding past so close they near to spun you round.
The sight and sound of vehicles slowing down from highway speed
to look you over was profound relief, you were a thief of
driver’s time and yet the kinship of the open road possessed
a code as old as spoken word, and when you heard,
“Where y’ going, mate?” from the stationary car it mattered
not if near or far or anywhere; right there you’d made
a friend. Carefree days, at least for me, and though
I’d been marooned a time or two, I never felt alone.
A traveller on the lonely road is primed to see his fellow
men as kindred souls, inclined to want to share their time,
to speak and hear and laugh about a common cheer
and only those who fear involvement in the simple dignities
of fellowship will thunder past with faces turned away,
I wonder if it is the same today.
© I.D. Carswell

Hitchhiking as a student