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I have a lot of stories but this one sticks out more than the others.

I hitched from Boston MA to Bow NH on a Friday night to stay at a friend's lake house for the weekend. This would have been early 70's. Got a ride from a redhead who had rolled a joint in a Tampax wrapper.

Was still hitching round about midnight and seems like I was getting a ride from a middle aged guy in a nice BMW. Got left off where I thought I needed to be but it turned out two roads met in two different places (almost like a Bow) and I was at the wrong intersection.

I saw a house with a light on and ventured up to ask some directions. It was a guy from a state road crew who was making sandwiches for the next day. He was real nice and gave me a sandwich or two and I asked him if I could put my sleeping bag on the floor for the night. He said OK. There were a lot of cats around - like 10 or 15 as I recall.

I was thinking it could have been worse - got food and shelter and could push on at first light. As I start putting my sleeping bag on the floor he goes to a closet and comes back with a revolver. By all rights, I should have been dead. But instead he puts it under a couch cushion and explains that the cats get nervous with a stranger in the house and that the gun calms them down.

I thanked him for his hospitality and skedaddled and spent the night sleeping by the side of the road. The next night my friend and I went to Old Orchard Beach NH in his Corvair, and spent the night in jail for drinking beer on the beach with two girls we had just met - turns out that town made a living off of arresting people for doing exactly that - the jail was full of people just like us and the shelves above the desk sergeant's desk were filled with confiscated Budweiser.

I truly marvel at my good fortune at having survived some of my "adventures".

Got a ride at the Skelly near Little Rock going east on a semi with 3 black guys in the cab. They were small and it was not too tight. While we rolled through Arkansas I had to keep ducked down so no one would see a white man in the cab with them. Only one was a driver and he was tired. I had a Florida CDL (easy to get in the 60s)and he asked me to drive a bit. As I drove the three all kept their own heads down . When we crossed the line into Tennessee the one called Dave said hey now we can breathe and everybody sat up. No problems in Tennessee.

Somewhere in the middle of Texas in the mid 60s I change direction in a small town. I got checked out by a local constable then I got one ride out to an intersection of a very small road a couple of miles east of town. Daytime became night and it commenced to get cold and I did not see another car. The road looked good on the map but it seems nobody actually used it. There were loose apparently dead bushes rolling around and I captured one and decided to make a fire. Well, I put a match to it and it went up like paraffin- big torch. A few minutes later the cop who had checked me out drove up and he said I wondered how long it would be before I heard from you again. He took me back to the road I had turned from and I decided to take the longer better traveled route.