During the sixties, I was part of what people called the counterculture. No, not the hippies – they were from well-to-do families and could afford all the glitz, clothes, and designer drugs. I was a Folkie, not only a Folkie, I was a Folksinger. You know those dark holes-in-the-wall clubs with exotic coffee drinks and people singing the blues or soulful ballads? Well, those places paid shit, and that meant Wes, my stage name, traveled using the thumb.
Most places have laws against begging for rides, which is what traveling by thumb is. So, yes, I was a breaker of the law – and not unintentionally. One might say that I attacked it with glee and contempt. To place a finial atop the whole thing, I was a serial offender. I did it almost weekly for thousands of miles of illegal travel. They say confession is good for the soul…so there it is.
Did I ever pay the cost of my sins against the community? Well, there was the time in Cape Neddick when I got stopped and made to walk from one end of the town to the other with the local cop checking every few minutes. But in the next town, their officer picked me up and drove me to the best location to get a ride. He said that Officer Opie was an ass.
Clearly, I have repented of my irreverent, youthful ways. I am a law-abiding pillar of the community. I only unintentionally break laws these days, except by pulling those nasty tags off pillows. Old age sucks!
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Your one friend was right, officer Opie “was” an ass . . . but that “was” all those years ago . . . he has since changed in is old age and he has repented himself of being an ass. He also sends word that you are forgiven of your passed transgressions as well. ☺
Thank you! Mea culpa, Mea culpa etce etce😊
I can appreciate your repenting ways. I do think some people attract police in negative ways, and once you are recorded somewhere as “one of those…”, you become a perennial backseat rider. If you had a beard or Foo Manchu moustache back then, you were wearing the mark of a troublemaker, “one of those damn hippies”, so were treated ever more roughly by “Officer Pup” than he treated a clean-cut person of the same age. Oh yes, those “John Lennon round-frame” glasses were all it took to undo any benefit you had by being otherwise dressed in clean slacks and an Arrow preppie shirt.
Actually, I didn’t grow the mustache until 1969 and kept the hair short. when friends asked why I told them it was camouflage. And if you were hitching that’s exactly what it was.
I was somewhat the same way, though hitch hiking wasn’t the reason. My father was a policeman! It kept peace in the family if his college-attending kid, me, at the time didn’t look too extreme.
Good memories … still in the making. I’ve hitchhiked 17 countries since turning 60 in 2016 (added Turkey to the list last week), still using my same old 1970s backpack. Back in the hippie* days, though, I met someone just like your Cape Neddick cop in Waller, Texas. He said — sounds like a movie script but I’m not making this up — “Walk till you see the city limits sign and don’t come back; we don’t like your type around here.” (*By hippie I means something broader than your def — my own group of artsy, nerdy, countercultural nonconformists who were generally broke all the time and hitchhiking to somewhere or other 🙂 )
Yea, there was ( is) something about that particular brand of “officer of the law”, Maybe it was the rod stuck up their nether quarters that did it. but a friend of mine told me about “sundowning” in the American south in the fifties if you weren’t white. That was much scarier.
Your people were pretty much the same as my people – interesting people going places to create, discover and find a living.
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