Nov 12 2009
Reviving the Orkney tradition of hitchhiking
Last night I realised that our campaign to promote hitchhiking on Orkney is nothing new — it simply revives a time-honoured tradition. Yep, a kind of hitchhiking used to happen all the time on our island in the form of people stopping to give lifts to each other.
Sure, we can give you a lift!
Why’s the bus service so bad?
Over a cup of tea, Malcolm heard the story from James Stockan, our councillor for Stromness and Hoy areas, while chatting about Touchwood’s mission of doing green living in a fun way. When Malcolm mentioned the latest one on hitchhiking, James said (I’m paraphrasing here):
“Know why the bus service is so poor? It’s because years ago, people used to stand waiting for the bus and invariably a fellow islander would stop to offer a lift, so no one was left for the bus to take.”
How about that. Giving a lift to someone used to be commonplace.
I like to imagine little old ladies standing at the bus stop waiting when another one comes along and offers her a lift. They chat on the side of the road, maybe one offers a helping hand into the car and away they go.
Giving a lift to someone is a chance to catch up on news, perhaps even to make a new acquaintance. You never know who you might run into.
Just think who you might meet, giving a lift
We could do with more getting to know each other too
Even here, we could do with getting to know each other better. There are 16,000 of us or so on the Mainland (Orkney’s main island) and while I’m sure there are many who know quite a few people, we don’t actually all know each other. What’s more, I also know a lot of people who moved away because they didn’t feel connected to the community, like they were part of things.
Something like half the population isn’t from Orkney originally, so that’s a lot of people moving in and trying to get to know their neighbours and where things are.
How much nicer would it be if you just moved in, walked down the road, stuck your thumb out and struck up a conversation with someone you’d never met; you got the insider tip on the best butcher, where to get a kitchen table cheaply, and where to find the tastiest espresso?
Think that might make you feel more welcome? More a part of the community?
It could work in big communities, too
Now I imagine doing this in larger communities, cities even. Think of the opportunities for increasing community spirit, a sense of connectedness to one’s neighbours.
One thing stopping people is fear. Maybe another is just not thinking about it.
It’s important to show it can be done, safely and enjoyably, and that’s why I’d like to see it work here on Orkney. We’re ridiculously safe here and we’ve already got a bit of a tradition of it — now it’s time to reintroduce it!
What needs to happen to make it work
As for fear, the perception of risk is disproportionate to the reality. Nevertheless, Malcolm is working on fail-safe measure to ensure modern carsharing is safe (more on that in future posts).
James says he used to always stop for someone, but the reason he doesn’t stop anymore is because there are a lot more cars on the road now and with few laybys, he’d be holding people up if he stopped.
We could largely deal with that problem by doing a bit of awareness-raising on the radio and in the paper to remind people of this tradition and encourage them to at least be patient when someone in front of you stops for 30 seconds to offer a lift.
Or we could even invest in a couple of laybys in the busiest areas, like heading out of Kirkwall and Stromness.
The point is, I guess I’d been thinking of this hitchhiking thing as a kind of new-fangled thing, and here it turns out (like just about every other green idea) people were doing this long before my generation popped up. Nice to know, really.
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Have you read Gavin De Becker’s “The Gift of Fear”? You can definitely wad that up in your fear-fighting pipe and smoke it – he writes a lot about the perception of risk and how to recognize (and respond to) true fear versus anxiety and worry.
Excellent stuff, worth getting your hands on.
I am *loving* the hitchhiking series of posts. Keep ‘em coming!
Kerrilee, that’s one of my most well-thumbed books! I bought some 10 years ago when I was living in DC when people in my neighbourhood were being violently mugged regularly. You felt like you couldn’t walk down the street at night without someone coming up behind you and grabbing you.
Thanks to it, when someone did try to mug me at gunpoint, I stayed calm enough to persuade him to just take my cash instead of my whole bag (I didn’t want the hassle of having to get my license and credit cards replaced) and paid attention to his features so I could give the police a full description later on. Turns out he had mugged a lot of people, and when I described him and which way he’d gone, they were able to put on a helicopter search and snag him less than an hour later. Off he went to jail and I even got my money back.
So yes, that book has helped me tremendously and everyone should read The Gift of Fear.
Hi all,
here at Findhorn, informal hitchhiking is nothing new, people often stand on the corner of the Findhorn Foundation ‘Park’ entrance and hitch a lift, as there’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing of cars to Forres. I almost always pick someone up – I enjoy meeting people that way, and also it helps in a small way to assuage my guilt that I’ve driven there. But also because it’s fun to meet people and chat about ‘Findhorn connections’. Many years ago a friend and I, as students, spent a holiday hitching around the South of France, and another time I hitched with a girlfriend from Newcastle to London and back. I’d have been horrified if my daughter had done that 20 years later, though! How sad that we live in this ‘fear’ culture where we automatically mistrust the motives of anyone standing by the roadside hoping for a lift.