 Hitchhiking is quickly becoming a lost art. I'm not referring to these apps on your phone and the websites out there that help you find a ride across state lines. What I'm talking about is the old fashioned kind of hitchhiking standing out on the side of the highway out on the exit on the turnpike at rest stops on the interstate thumbs out in the middle of nowhere. No sign except when desperate and even then all you write on it is home. It's the dangerous way, but it's always been dangerous. A stranger taking a chance on another stranger and that stranger taking a chance on them in return. I started doing it in the late 90s. At first hitting the road with my uncle and then by myself. By the time I was 19, I'd been coast to coast after spending the previous 18 years stuck in the same 10 miles of city. Most people hitchhiking don't use the old fashioned method. And I can't say I blame them, especially when I find myself in the rain with my last cigarette. I was smoking that last cigarette next to an exit on I five somewhere in central California. Right before I got ready to flick that last smoke into the darkness, a car stopped nearby. It was a black pickup truck, old and beat to crap, but it sounded like it was in good shape. I grabbed my backpack and my duffel bag and headed over to the waiting truck. I had a couple of knives in my pockets and a gun in the duffel bag. So I really wasn't too worried about anything. I get to the door and through the window, I see an older white dude graying and much to my happy surprise, smoking a cigarette. If you don't mind the smoke, you can hop on in for a stretch is what I hear after he rolls down the window. I find this agreeable and get in the car. He introduces himself as I sit down and put my bags on the floorboard in front of us. Roger, Roger McClintock coming up out of Iowa. How about you? He asks, I'm from here. Well, there, a little bit of time all over, I answer. He laughs at my reply and shakes his head a little fair enough, he says, and we travel in silence for a bit. Eventually we start up on small talk. This leads into Roger drooping slightly more personal stories. I don't reply with anything other than one I deem humorous. I ask for a cigarette when he lights one and gives me one as well. Did you know that once upon a time, stories were basically a form of currency? He asked me, I don't respond. And he continues, well, like if this was 100 or 50 years ago when we met in the middle of the night, you might offer to pay for that cigarette with a story. It seems to me if you're good at telling stories, then you're usually a good travel in companion. If you're good at telling stories, you can make friends in a bar pretty easy. I bet you got some good stories from the road. I hold my silence. My dad used to travel quite a bit for work. He hitchhiked when he was a kid, rode the rails too. He had stories stories like you wouldn't believe he could go all day. Like father like son, I ask he laughs. My dad used to tell me that stuff about stories, how they're important. He pauses for a moment. I'm going to tell you one of his stories. He looks at me, but I stare at the road. He lights a smoke and starts his story. My father was driving from Houston, Texas to Portland, Oregon. This was back in 1968. I hadn't been born yet. He hadn't met my mother yet. He was fresh out of college and heading to Portland to visit some friends. Well, somewhere along the way. He spots a man hitchhiking. What stood out to my father was the way this man was dressed. He was wearing a dark gray trench coat with matching pants. He wore a black cowboy hat with a red band on it. He was outside Texas by this point. He said it was a pretty cold night and the man was not adequately dressed and stood there with a stern yet blank look. He passed him, but the guy stuck in his head and at the next exit, which was almost 50 miles down the road, he saw the same guy. Now, there was no way this guy had gotten ahead of my father. He was sure it was the same man. For some reason, my father decided to stop. He stopped down the road a bit and my father sat there but didn't look back. He thought to himself, if he gets in, he gets in. Sure enough, the man came over, opened the door and sat in the car without saying a word. He turned and without any expression thanked my father and asked him if he could drop him off three exits up the road. There's a bit of silence before my father gets up the courage to ask the man where he's heading. Do you know what he says? Three exits ahead, I answer. He laughs and continues. That was his answer. Eventually, my dad lights up a cigarette, offers one to the man which he accepted. He started to talk to this man, despite him not offering anything at all in the way of talking. Every now and then a yes or no, but his tone was flat. It told you nothing of who he was, how he was feeling. My father said it was like he was blank. He was a blank void in the shape of a man. My father knew that made no sense, but it's what made sense to him looking at this man. When they reached that third exit, my father pulled over to let the man out. Before he got out, the man asked for another cigarette. My father shook two cigarettes out of the pack and gave him to him. One for now, one for the road, my father told him. The man takes the two cigarettes and looks at my father for a moment before telling him this. He says, if you see me again along anywhere along this road before you make it home, don't pick me up. The man got out of the car and my father drove into the night. He stayed in a motel overnight before heading back onto the road. He gets about a hundred miles into the drive when he sees that same man stand in there in broad daylight on an exit. The man looked at him with a blank stare. My father did not pick him up and he never saw him again. I asked for another cigarette. He gives me one and I light it before starting my story. As it so happens, this is also a story my father told me about something that happened to him out on the road. So this would have been about the late 1990s when this happened. My dad was working for an oil company down in Texas as a glorified courier. When confidential documents are payroll or probably bribes needed to be transported, my dad was the man for the job. He'd find himself driving all over Texas. He didn't like to sleep overnight when on the road and he'd push himself on overnight drives to get home to all of us faster. Sometimes he even took me with him, which was great, funniest times I ever had with my dad. We'd eat at roadside diners and burger stands and he'd smoke his pipe when the sun was going down and, well, anyway, he once told this story and he only told it to me once. He said that this happened on one of the trips I went with him on. I was sleeping in the back. He said a pack of wild dogs had started to trail his car, which wasn't uncommon on the back roads or even the interstate at night. He said it was about a dozen and a half of them and they were charging as fast as they could to try to keep pace. And eventually they ended up in the middle of the highway chase on the car. This kept up for miles and he'd never had a pack follow him this far. He tells me at one point he looks up in the mirror and he sees one of the pack stand on its hind legs and start running like a human after the car. This freaked him out and he sped up. The pack quickly was left behind, but as he got farther away, he saw two or three more of the pack stand on their hind legs. It's like humans. He drove all night. And when I woke up in the morning, he told me about what he'd seen. I was about 10. I knew my dad to be a good, honest man. I could tell he was unsure about telling me, but his flat tone told me he'd already rehearsed what he had to say to me many, many times before I'd woken up. I never asked him about it after, but it always stuck with me. He was silent for a moment before he tells me, there's stranger things out here on the road that'll chase you through the night. Not all of them give up that easy either. I don't ask him what he means by that. I tell him he can drop me off any exit he feels good about. We don't say anything else until he pulls the car over about an hour later. He looks at me and I can feel him sizing me up. You've spent time on the road. You've seen things I can tell out here between places. It can be, well, things can get strange in the night. Be careful when you're walking these roads. You might think you're big, tough, and scary, but there'll always be something much worse out there and all the guns and knives in the world won't save you if they lock onto your scent and want you in their jaws. He takes two cigarettes out of the pack and gives them to me. One for now, two for the road. He says, we share a glance. I could feel a brief moment of sizing up, gauging. I thanked him and took the cigarettes and got out of the car. I watched him drive off into the night for a while. I stood there in the darkness. I held up the cigarettes in front of me, one in each hand. I thought for a moment about what it could possibly mean before lighting one and sticking the other behind my ear. I walked to the roadside and stuck my thumb out for the next ride.