N.G. Haiduck

It was 1971 and my London friend Alice Kilroy was visiting me in New York City.  I had met her the previous summer hitchhiking in Europe. Young people did that in those days. Alice had inherited a little money from her grandmother that paid for the plane fare, but didn’t have much more. She wanted to see America, so we embarked on a hitchhiking trip across the USA. We were two young women, 21 years old. As I mentioned, this was not unusual in those days. 

Over the years, we visited each other often. One night, sitting in my kitchen in the Bronx, we stayed up late remembering our adventures, reading letters we had written home (she wrote to her sister, not her mother; I wrote to my dad). We laughed and laughed—and vowed that our daughters would never be allowed to do such foolish thing as hitchhike across the country.

Among the letters was this warning from the New Jersey police for “begging rides.” 

We weren’t arrested, just warned and told to go to a safer place, at the entrance ramp. 

Alice Kilroy died in February 2019, right before the pandemic, so I got to visit her, and, once again, we laughed at our adventures when we were young.

We made it, by the way, to Missoula, Montana, where I had a cousin. We took the train home.