The last time my thumb was out was to indicate to the waitress that the eggplant parm was for Carol. Prior to that, you’d have to go back almost 50 years to the shoulder of Highway 90 just outside New Orleans, where the thumb of a freshly graduated college boy was outstretched alongside a cardboard sign reading “New York.”

   Of all the memories that leave me shaking my head, hitchhiking from New Orleans to New York in 1971 is near the top of the list. Or maybe it’s all the hitchhiking I did in Europe for the nearly three years I lived there. No, it would have to be the attempt to hitchhike from Algieria to South Africa with this other suicidal lunatic friend of mine.

   What links these three mentally certifiable disorders together when looked at from the state of the world today is how different the world must have been then. Or maybe it’s simply how different I was then from who I am today.

But I also believe that something that once was is truly gone for good. It’s nothing to be sad about, but it sure is something to feel nostalgic for. Because it really did exist once

   I was never fearless, but always naive. So one explanation for my hitchhiking days was a view that the world was one very large theme park, and I had bought the Everywhere ticket option. Serial killing and mass murders hadn’t yet begun trending in the early 70s, and so many were hitchhiking back then, there was a kind of herd immunity to its safety. I marvel at the comfort level that existed back then between hiker and driver, who almost always would remain total strangers before, during and after the ride. You could argue that it was all merely Uber before its time, but there was a freely given level of trust then that even Uber doesn’t presume.

   By the time my children were the same age I was when I started hitchhiking, it never once occurred to me to encourage them to do what I had done, even had they been tempted to try, which thankfully they weren’t. The economy had changed for one thing, and the work visas I had so easily obtained in the 1970s no longer existed in the 1990s. To say nothing of how hijackings and mass shootings had become part of the daily diet of news and the subject of films by Michael Moore.

   Yet young people still travel by the millions. It’s just that they have the money to do it by more conventional means like rail. That’s how I’m doing it, and believe me, I don’t miss the “romance” of thumb travel at all. I’m glad I did it, but I’d never want to do it again. I do believe the world is a more dangerous place than it was 50 years ago, but in reality, it’s probably just a very different place, requiring a different, more measured approach to live as we once did. It’s still possible. But I also believe that something that once was is truly gone for good. It’s nothing to be sad about, but it sure is something to feel nostalgic for. Because it really did exist once.

If you’d like a bigger slice of what it was like to vagabond in Europe in the 70s, click here for my book An American Walkabout.