COLUMN: Should I Pick Him Up?

By Tobin Barnes
A hitchhiker stood by the side of the Interstate, not far from an on-ramp.

Nothing new, right. See it all the time.

But this one was different. He had a new approach.

Thing is, I don’t pick up hitchhikers. Never.

Seen too many movies, I guess. A lot of bad endings, both for the driver and the thumber. Bloody stuff, usually.

Doesn’t mean I haven’t hitched a ride myself. You’d think that’d make me sympathetic. But no.

I was desperate that one time, you see. I was in Sioux Falls, and I had to get out of there. If I had stayed, I’d have to keep taking the old paint off the clapboards of a house with a heat gun and a scraper, then sand the remnants down to the wood.

Far as I could figure, it was a job made in hell, especially in the high heat of summer.

It was my friend’s sister’s house. We’d been working twelve hour days. That was four hours more than I’d been used to working during my college summers. Besides, I didn’t want to work even one hour more with a heat gun and a scraper. I figured I had nothing more to prove in that regard.

So I hit the road, thumbing my way back to my hometown and leaving my forlorn friend holding the heat-gun-and-scraper bag.

It wasn’t one of my proudest moments, but then again, it was his sister not mine who’d given us that less than sterling opportunity.

However, the point of that is this.

Desperate people, like I was then, hitchhike.

But unlike I was then, hitchhikers are also often at the ends of their tethers: dead broke, luckless, and oftentimes downcast.

Though they are metaphorically my brothers in whom I theoretically take an interest, I don’t want them sitting beside me in my car, thinking of ways to disembowel me, like in the movies.

On the other hand, “What would Jesus do?”

Other than not drive a Hummer, He’d most assuredly pick them up.

But then again, I’m most assuredly not Jesus, despite the fact that I wouldn’t drive a Hummer, either. As you can imagine, the resemblance doesn’t go much beyond that.

Which brings us back to the hitchhiker I was talking about at the outset.

He was holding this sign, you see.

Again, nothing new there.

But this sign said, “Jesus Saves.”

Though I appreciated the message, this new tactic didn’t change my mind about hitchhikers in general or this one in particular.

I supposed his sign was meant to assure drivers that they’d not be taking a chance by picking him up.

Didn’t work on me, however. The sign, after all, could have merely been a ploy. A knife or gun might still have been at the ready.

And even if the sign were not a ploy, but a sincere statement of his beliefs, that would still not convince me to pick him up. The sign might indicate that he was an evangelizer of the most extreme sort. His version of The Word sitting next to me for miles and miles might be just another warped edition of the long, strange trip.

And who needs that.

So I drove on, taking comfort in the knowledge that as the sign said, this hitchhiker would be taken care of in the long run, if not now.