I was going through some old stuff and found my old hitchhiking card, designed and printed by my brother-in-law Duane Miller, which brought back a rush of memories of simpler, safer and more carefree days.

I started hitchhiking in 1976 to get home from college and in the late ’70s used my thumb to get everywhere. I saw myself as the Jack Kerouac of the ’70s, travelling the country, meeting folks, experiencing their lives and writing about it. I crossed America several times, hitched south to New Orleans and the southern tip of Mexico, crossed Canada in the dead of winter with a pair of skis, hitched my way out of London to the Dover Cliffs and went up and down the Malayan Peninsula in Southeast Asia several times.

I chalked up around 24,000 miles or the same as the distance around the earth at the equator. I met good people and I met very bad people. I had incredibly warm and rewarding experiences and I had dark and scary experiences.

The last time I hitched was in 1986 when I did it as an anthropology project while in grad school. By then times had changed. Car doors were locked and no one trusted strangers. With hitching you’d have a few minutes, an hour, a few hours, a day with someone, and you’d exchange your life histories and then suddenly you’d reach an intersection and have to jump out of the car. There was no time to exchange addresses and almost certainly you’d never see that person again. So I had Duane design a card which I could hand out as I jumped out of the car at a busy intersection and say, ‘If you’re ever in Wisconsin, look me up and I’ll repay the favour’.

No one ever looked me up.