It was in the Depression-era US that hitchhiking really took off, and became codified as an act of social solidarity. Purkis’s touchstone here is Woody Guthrie, whose Dust Bowl Ballads addressed the new itinerant dispossessed: the anthem ‘This Land Is Your Land’, written after his transcontinental hitchhiking trip in 1940, talks of a ‘freedom highway’ crossing a land that ‘was made for you and me’. At the same time, refugees and emigrants from the war in Europe were making their way across borders, continents and oceans. In Britain, hitchhiking established itself among the armed forces and then more widely in the years of austerity and petrol rationing that followed. It was one way of responding to appeals to the collective good and empathy with the plight of others – ‘banal acts of heroism’ which reasserted human decency in the wake of inhuman aggression. In his memoir, A Hitch in Time (1966), Ian Rodger recalls hitchhiking around Europe in those postwar years, when ‘suddenly you could go anywhere.’ He thumbed his way around la France profonde, encountering wine and communist theory for the first time, finding himself one moment in a gay bar in Paris with three American dentists, the next planning routes with Dutch, Danish and Swedish companions, enjoying the hospitality of French locals and welcomed warmly by young Germans who told him ‘English good’ and marvelled at his passport.
By the time Rodger wrote his memoir, hitchhiking had become a badge of the counterculture. The nomadic ethos was there from its beginnings in the 1950s: though hitchhiking is virtually absent from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, his Beat compadres drew on their experience of riding with long-distance truckers and drifters – Gary Snyder, for example, in his poem ‘Night Highway 99’. The proliferation of newly affordable saloon cars, along with the spread of youth hostels, made ‘hitting the road’ a more practical prospect than ever before. Hitchhiking created a free transport network to support an alternative society of communes and festivals; it was seen as prefiguring the replacement of capitalism by co-operation, a message spread around the world by the thousands who thumbed their way along the hippie trail from Europe to India.