The things I learned while hitchhiking from Cape Town to Makhanda

It is a winter evening more than 20 years ago and I find myself standing on the N2 just outside Caledon. It is near sunset and I am quite happy. I am hitchhiking from Cape Town to Makhanda, where I am a student at Rhodes University. The journey is 873km and from experience, I know it should take about 24 hours, which means I am bang on schedule.

Author Milton Schorr on the road to Springfontein. Image: Milton Schorr

“Mossel Bay by morning,” I mutter to myself, as the last of the sun dips below the distant mountain peaks. Almost immediately the temperature drops, but I don’t notice it. I’m young and foolish.

Cars pass.

I peer into each one. “Who are you?” I ask a driver who sees me too late and is startled and speeds away.

I turn to follow his rear lights, making sure that he isn’t going to change his mind. No, the little car disappears around the bend. I look up and see that the mountain peaks are gone – dusk has turned to night. I smile because the beauty of the hitch is solitude.

I know this spot. Last summer I stood here in the heat, heading to the start of my first year. Only 110km out of the city, how worried I’d been, facing the prospect of university, facing the prospect of adulthood. But the road had been with me then as it is now, showing me the way.

Car! 

I put my thumb to the road as the man who taught me to hitchhike showed me. 

The face in the motorcar is hidden, a black silhouette, a placeholder for a world unknown.

“Take me with you. Show me your life.” 

I light a cigarette. The heat of the match between my cupped hands reminds me it’s getting colder. I look up to the black sky uneasily. I did not expect it to be this cold. I put my hand in front of my face. I smile. I cannot see my fingers.  This is the beauty of the hitch. 

The longest I’ve ever stood was five hours. I was dropped in Gqeberha the year before, only 130km or so from my destination, but nothing would stop for me. I walked the length of that city on a miserable afternoon, trudging on blistered feet. Eventually, I gave up beside that dirty highway, walking slumped over, head down, my thumb hanging from my hand. 

I saw a truck pull off far in the distance and thought nothing of it. But when I was closer I saw a hand waving out of the open passenger window, and I didn’t understand it when I climbed into the cab and the man wasn’t even angry that I’d taken so long. Instead, he offered me curry from a fresh, steaming styrofoam tub. It was the best I’d ever tasted.

I can taste that curry now.

Car! 

I put the smile on my face, the one that the man who taught me to hitch showed me, the one that says, “Take me and you will see, my adventure will be yours also”, and it works not at all. Those headlights, like blazing comets, like parallel worlds I will never know, shriek by, leaving me to the beautiful dark. 

But dammit, it’s cold. It is settling like iron. Again I look up, looking at nothing, and now concern is creased on my face. I’m shivering. I gauge that I have been here three hours. To stay on schedule I will need a lift at least before midnight. 

I upend my backpack and put all of my clothes on, every single item. Soon I’m padded up, a Michelin Man. And the cold persists. I waddle up and down that stretch of empty road, trying to stay warm.

I throw stones, I sing songs, I think. This is the beauty of the hitch – the journey does not come easy. 

I saw something terrible once, on the road. 

I was standing on the N2 just out of Cape Town near the Baden Powell turnoff, right in the middle of the shacks. There was an old man trying to climb the concrete barrier in the middle so that he could cross to the other side. He couldn’t quite manage it. His joints, you see. 

I sprinted across the road and cupped my hands for him. He was confused as to why I would help, a white boy in the middle of his world, but he put his shoe in my palms and together we heaved him over. I returned to my spot, my thumb out, happy at the favour, and then a dark VW Polo came speeding up the opposite highway and shrieked to a stop. A burly man wearing a tight black vest jumped out and rushed at the old man and began to beat him. He beat him senseless. There were six lanes and a concrete barrier between us. I watched the beating in a dream, too shocked to say anything, too afraid.

Car! 

I rub my hands together, looking for heat, hoping. That spinning world does not stop, that portal into another life. 

“Someone will always pick you up, you just have to wait long enough.”

What is the time? 

I fancy I have stood for six hours now. I fancy this is the longest ever. 

I am scared. I’m not sure if it’s too cold. It’s the coldest I’ve ever been. 

I walk up and down. I kick at stones. 

The best lift I ever had began at the One Stop just outside Mossel Bay. It was 1am and I was moving among the cars asking for a ride, 19 hours and 450km in on the road from Makhanda. 

“Yes, if you pay half for petrol,” said a woman perhaps five years older than I, her forehead creased as she considered my request. 

“I don’t have any money.” 

She took me anyway. And we did not stop talking for the five dark hours it took to Cape Town. It was as if our souls left our bodies and met between us, and danced, and we laughed breathlessly, so shocked were we that our lives could be so beautiful. “Let’s exchange numbers,” we said, she a married woman and me a taken man, and neither of us ever dialled, so perfect was our memory, so scant the chance of it ever being the same. 

It’s past 1am, I am sure of it. 

Do you know that feeling, when hope goes? It’s funny how important a goal is. Mine has crumbled in the black. There are no cars. No one would be on this road in the dark, in this cold. No one but the mad.

I jog in my triple-socked feet, my trusty boots. I jump under the mighty stars. I have no more clothes to put on. I didn’t even bring a jersey, so stupid am I. I’m just tee shirts and a coat and underwear. 

Car! 

Please! I mouth, begging desperately with praying hands. 

The lights of heaven do not stop. Why would they? I am a wretch out here, infectious. The world will not stop for me.

I turn, looking from dark to dark. 

“Someone will always stop for you, you just have to wait long enough.” 

I remember the man who taught me to hitch saying it. He was my older sister’s boyfriend, 19 to my 14, my hero. I remember cigarette smoke pouring from his smile, mingling with a hot West Coast afternoon. 

“What are you afraid of?”

“I’m afraid that I’ll lose my dreams.”

I am grappling with control, I am grappling with reality. I lie down on the tar, curled up, trying to stay warm. I am ready if one of those worlds comes spinning; I’ll raise my thumb like a flag of surrender. 

“What are you doing here?”

It takes me moments to understand.

There is a man standing above me, dressed in neon with a torch on his forehead.

“Are you alright?”

“Do you have any water?” I croak. 

He hands me a bottle.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m hitching to Rhodes.”

“It’s too cold, you fool. Go down to Caledon.” 

The torch shifts, lighting his face.

“Have you got any money?”

I shake my head.

A hand on my shoulder, clasping it. 

“Get off this road. Go down to Caledon.”

“I can’t. I’m on a schedule.” 

The man chuckles. I see his light, hopping away in the darkness. 

“Someone will stop,” he calls. “You just have to wait long enough.” 

“What time is it?” But he is gone.

Car!

Twin lights come sweeping up the road, a stranger behind them. 

I scramble up, my thumb out. 

I fancy the car dodges in fright when it sees me. 

The stars are spread above. I cannot tell you how beautiful they are. 

And so continues the longest night of my young life. There comes a time in it when something profound happens inside me; I give up. I abandon my schedule. I abandon my plans and dreams. And something unforgettable happens, peace comes to me. In those last hours before dawn I stand with my thumb out wanting nothing, happy to see the mighty world as it is around me, happy to feel the cold circling my bones, and happy to praise the wonder of spinning worlds, as I see the glow of one approaching from beyond the black horizon.

It is a sports car, low, driven by a young lawyer in a rumpled suit that stops for me just as dawn is finally breaking. I am stunned, I thought I would never get a lift again.

“You must be freezing!” he says, grinning at me and passing a two-litre bottle of Schweppes granadilla from the back seat. “Drink that, and put your seat back. We’re getting out of here.”

I lie back, smashed by the comfort of this car, by the hot heater blowing on my legs, torching the cold from my bones. 

I am young, and foolish, with all my life ahead of me. 

I make Mossel Bay by morning. DM/ML

Milton Schorr is an author and actor. His latest novel A Man Of The Road tells the story of Little Mikey, a young boy who must get onto the South African road to save his mother. On his way he meets characters from all levels of society, who collectively teach him what it is to be “a man of the road”. The book is inspired by the author’s two decades of hitchhiking around southern Africa. A Man Of The Road is available in bookstores and for delivery via Takealot. Internationally, the novel is available in paperback and ebook via Amazon. 

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