Tiny spots of rain started to dot my brow as I hopped from the van. Leaning back in, I slipped the worn shoulder strap of my backpack up to my neck and hauled it from the seat. As I stepped back from the door, I pursed my lips, raised a hand and mumbled a vague
'Danke schön'
to the driver who was clearly glad to see me go. When he'd first picked me up, around 40km up the road, he had seemed super enthusiastic to have a hitch hiker in his van. Maybe he thought it a good laugh, something to share with his mates at the pub later. But, as he realized that my German was pretty dire and his English non-existant, he resorted to periodically shoving a pack of cigarettes my way, more, it would seem, out of courtesy than a desire to be hospitable. Not wanting to offend his good nature (or to use up my own, as money was running tight) I obliged him by smoking them down to the filter and then mindlessly flicking them to the asphalt. To drown out the deafeningly awkward silences, he began to turn up his stereo to full. I felt like a plasterer or building contractor, flying around in a white van, blaring out thumping chart music. In all honesty, I didn't mind the noise. It gave me time to sink back in self-pitying reveries. Without being conscious of it, I had taken a long of emotional baggage traveling with me. From an indulgence in too much Kerouac, McCandless and romanticising, I had some how envisioned that the 'freedom' of the road would heal all of my wounds - absent loves, friendships gone too far and the general malaise and apathy that was beginning to creep in to my heart. Unsurprisingly, 'the road' did not heal me. Central and Eastern Europe are not all that different from rainy Manchester or middle-class villages of East Anglia. I hadn't escaped or dealt with my problems, in fact, I have just succeeded in clearing away all distractions so that all I saw and thought of were my problems. By this time, I longed for the comforts of home. An end to my solitary days and lonely nights. I longed for something constant. I longed to be understood.
I slammed the door of the white van, with a resounding thud which shuddered the side of the vehicle. Hitching my bag up a little, I turned on my heel and headed towards a solid concrete picnic bench. As I walked, my back started to twinge, causing me to momentarily convulse as if I had grasped a live electric cable. The pain, a trapped nerve I suspect, had been with me, on and off, for the last couple of days. I put it down to a combination of bad footwear, poor posture and a heavily overladen backpack. Note to self: five thick paperback novels and two hand written journals are not commonly considered essential travel kit. Had it not coursed agony down my legs and up my spine, I might have had a humorous level of objectivity about my suffering. To be honest, I am surprised any one picked me up. How often is it that you see a hitchhiker? Rare. How often do you see a hitchhiker and offer him a lift? Not at all often. How often do you see an unshaven and generally badly turned out hitchhiker crabbing towards your car like an exaggerated Hunchback of Notredame, who periodically doubles over and twitches with flashes of teeth clenching pain on their face? Exactly. If you are ever unfortunate enough to witness this, you certainly wouldn't wait around for him to get close enough to, say, bite you, let alone get in your car. The fact that multiple people did is testament to the good nature of the general European public. Either that, or it demonstrates which side of the fight/flight dichotomy they reside within, or possibly the worrisome effects of terror on the decision making process.
Sitting down at that concrete bench, I reshuffled my thoughts and realised I had two priorities. The first, naturally, was roll something to smoke. I hastily did this with trembling nicotine craving hands and rain smattered cigarette papers. With this accomplished rather sloppily (ash would occasionally fall from the tip, spreading over my clothes and giving the impression that I had mistaken a cremation urn for a wash basin), I moved on to priority number two. Working out where I was and how I could get home.
With a lingering sense of dread in my entrails, I pulled the green European road atlas from its home; rolled up and unceremoniously stuffed in the top of my pack. Spreading it out before me, I thumbed through to vaguely where I thought I might be. Whilst it is certainly a smart move to equip yourself with a map prior to hitchhiking, it is an even smarter idea to obtain one that is decipherable. My chosen cartographic counterpart was at a scale of 1:1,500,000, which, especially when you look at areas surrounding a city, often resembles the mess you might get after filling a toddler with spaghetti and alphabet soup whilst stood in the queue for a roller-coaster. The area I was currently trying to travel through was verging on unreadable.
I had set out that morning, bright and early, from Frankfurt. After spending hours following yet more misleading hitch-spot instructions (Who could go wrong with 'walk 1.5km NW until you find a small foot path through the woods') and another subsequent hour traipsing through residential neighbourhoods, back woods and back gardens, I had reached my spot. A clearly desolate and isolated lay-by somewhere along the A3 to the northwest of the city. My route home was intended to be along the A3 to Köln, then west across the border to Brussels and then a concerted last push on to Calais to hop on a ferry back to good old England. But as I sat and stared at the map, my heart sank in to my shoes. I was too far north to make my connection to Brussels. I felt frustrated and heartbroken. To add insult to injury, my phone buzzed - a text from a friend telling me to get to the nearest computer and book one of a few remaining tickets to see a band I loved.
Since I had been traveling solo, my emotions had become significantly amplified. The highs higher and the lows lower. A blow like this felt dreadful. I rolled another cigarette to calm down. Reaching back in to my bag, I pulled out the mangy piece of cardboard which had been serving as my hitching sign. I felt dismayed as I saw the diminished amount of space for scrawling on. I had spent the previous evening enthusiastically scrawling 'Köln', 'Brussel' and 'Calais' in permanent marker, wasting a whole side of A3 cardboard and almost running my pen dry in the the name of forward planning and preparation. Drawing deep on my fresh cigarette, I stabilised my emotions and the initial irritation passed: I now became proactive about my situation. Glancing about, I observed my surroundings. Thick grey oppressive clouds sat atop the evergreen forestry which surrounded me. The constant roar of cars from the six lanes of the autobahn just beside me formed a monotonous drone. The lay-by in which I have been unhelpfully dropped bore few signs of life. An occasional car or minivan. Scattered concrete picnic tables. A cobbled road. The rest area was little more than a small road running parallel to the autobahn and only metres from it. No infrastructure existed here: No toilets, cafe, map, signs or anything. Just thickset checked shirt wearing German hauliers pissing against trees and checking their tyres, concrete picnic tables laid out with a platter of bird shit, chewing gum and litter, and me; a young English hitchhiker with a twitch in his back, poor grasp of German and little idea of which way home was.
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