Hitchhiking Across Berkeley

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I’ve been hitchhiking across Berkeley.



Well, more precisely, I’ve been hitchhiking down the Berkeley hills. Most mornings of the week I walk to a busy corner, stick out my thumb, and hope for the best. I usually don’t have to wait long. This morning a couple picked me up after about two minutes and motioned for me to get in the backseat next to their four year old daughter.





This is not the first time I’ve hopped in a car with children, and at these moments I wonder if I would be as bold as these parents, allowing a stranger into close quarters with the most important thing in the world. Once I got into a van with five kids in the back – the father was carpooling, and met by five shocked little faces, I couldn’t help but imagine them telling their parents how the neighborhood carpool picked up some random lady en route to elementary school. But I suppose we let strangers near our children all the time (“our” in the shared sense that they are our community’s children), at the grocery store, in day care, with the babysitter your friend referred you to. And I am as innocent-looking as they get, 5’4 standing in a skirt on a residential road of a safe, remote neighborhood. Honestly, if one of these parents asked me to babysit their kid by the end of the trip, I don’t think I would be surprised.



But it’s usually solitary drivers that pick me up, on their way to study at UC Berkeley law school, or to their psychiatric office, or to tennis club practice. I’ve been picked up twice by Rashida Jones, who works as a hairdresser in Oakland, and a man I call “the economist” – both after dropping their kids off at the nearby elementary school. Rashida was driving a rickety car with wires sticking out where the radio should be that her “boy from the hood found” for 1k. She took my number and said she’d hook me up with a good deal.



Most people pick me up because they are excited to see a hitchhiker in their neighborhood, and shower me with stories of hitchhiking across the States, through Europe, in blizzards and with college friends and boyfriends (these stories come from middle aged women). This week a woman exclaimed, “I have been driving this road for decades, and never seen anyone hitchhiking! I just had to pick you up!” Some, like Rashida, pick me up because they sympathized with being carless. Rabbi Michael Lerner was my first ride, and he was motivated by an ideological support of ride-share (he didn’t realize that we had actually met the previous week at a Shabbat learning event). A few of my rides have been people from countries where hitchhiking is common and accepted.



And I’m starting to think that some people pick me up just for the company. Earlier this week a woman stopped on her way to what she called a depression workshop at an Oakland clinic. She said she had been going for a month, and had done the program before, although it doesn’t working as well this time. We had a good conversation about the prevalence of depression in our society and the difficulties of overcoming it. I hope that my 15 minute contribution to her morning ride left her spirits a little higher.



But throughout this morning’s drive, my little 4 year old neighbor was quiet and sneaking looks at me as her parents recounted their tales of hitchhiking in the 70s, and told me about their work at Berkeley School of Public Health. I was sneaking looks at her as well, as she had beautiful golden hair down that hung over her, and was just plain adorable. Right when we are about to drop me off, the girl finally asked her burning question, evoking laughter throughout the car.



“Mommy? Do you know this person? Because I don’t.”



Yours,



Ariel

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