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Maiden Voyage By Katherine Williams Environmental awareness is not a new concept. Even thirty years ago, the message was being broadcasted, although from atop a soap box rather than a blue one. The promotion of environmental responsibility was transmitted to the public through various means including popular media and educational outreach programs. As with all forms of indoctrination, young minds are a particularly absorbent target and students are a captive audience. I was one of those children who learned to decry the evils of air pollution; of course, I'm sure it was an easy sell to tell elementary kids to take their bikes instead of cars. By the time I was ten, my awareness of the concept of air pollution had increased, however I was not so ideological that when my dad got his first motorcycle, a 1977 4-cyclinder Honda 550, I would forgo a ride with him. After a preliminary motorcycle safety lecture, I donned the new blue helmet, glittering in the early summer sun, while my dad rolled the bike out of the garage and into the driveway. He flipped down the passenger foot pegs with the toe of his boot then straddled the bike. I put my left foot on the peg, swung my right leg over and squished up to the back of his new leather jacket. When he felt my arms tighten around his waist, he shouted, "Here we go!" We rode around town, a hamlet in northern Alberta, for about twenty minutes then headed out on the single-lane country highways. Although we were travelling fast, scenery did not rush by. We were afforded long vistas of red-winged blackbirds bobbing on bulrushes, mustard fields waving like yellow sheets in the wind flowing into the haze of rippling blue alfalfa, these two primary colours on a prairie palette lifting up to the tall green fields of corn. As is usually the case when travelling with kids, sooner rather than later, someone's gotta 'go'. We pulled onto the wide shoulder bordering a field of mature wheat. We both took advantage of the tall grass; first me, then my dad. When I came back to the bike, my dad walking into the field, I didn't know why the ignition was still running, but I had recently learned there was a correlation between exhaust and air pollution, even if I didn't know the word 'correlation' at the time. I reached over the tank, towards the ignition and took hold of the key. My dad saw me, but the staccato, "No, no, no!" came too late. He trotted back to the bike, grass crushing loudly underfoot on the now quiet roadside. This silence was not golden. At least the motorcycle's engine would have drowned out my dad's cursing. It turned out that this relatively new bike had a bum battery. Knowing I had to right my wrong, I decided to take on the responsibility of getting us home. It seemed illogical to walk the I-have-no-idea-how-many kilometres back, but I don't know how or why I thought hitching was the best option. Years later, I met a woman whose mom had hitchhiked with her when she was a little girl because the family lived in a rural area of Germany and didn't have a car. She hitchhiked as an adult because she was accustomed to the normalcy of it. That wasn't the case with me. I live in Canada, a country with an area of 9,984,670 km2; a country that could fit Germany into it 28 times; a country with a whole lot of distance between where you are and where you're trying to get. Before my dad could stop me (this phrase is the introduction to many of my childhood adventures), I had my small right thumb hanging into the road, pointing the way home. This was my first time hitchhiking, the first car to pass, and I got my first lift. I was euphoric, not nervous, but having my dad with me probably assisted my bravery. The elderly couple who picked us up were nice and dropped us right at our door, something that, out of safety, I rarely let future lifts do. Because we lived outside the city, hitching became a common mode of transportation; it began as a way to get from one adventure to another, but sometimes became the adventure itself. Most of my experiences riding with strangers have been good, some great, some hideous. I discovered that hitching in the downtown area is a ploy used by hookers to meet potential customers. This may explain why most of my hideous rides occurred when I hitched out of central city areas. Unfortunately, sensationalism sells and even though there may be 1,000 hitchhiking stories with happy endings, it will be the violent ones, the bad rides that end or destroy life that will be publicized. This bad public image has pretty much squashed the hitchhiking culture in Canada with the exception of small places like some of the islands off the British Columbia coast and within some of Canada's national parks. Even then, I see mostly men, not women, on the roadside. No one ever reads about the young female hitchhiker whose ride showed her a less well-known area where seals sun themselves on rocks, took her back to the farm to meet the family and fed her a hot meal, later dropping her at her campsite, enriched and unharmed; this happened to me on the South Island of New Zealand. No one ever reads these stories because they are part of an oral tradition - told around campfires or at hostel kitchen tables over co-operative cooking ventures. No one ever reads these stories because no one has ever documented them, until now. |
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