Toots and the Brummies

Evanston RoundTable, Nov. 30, 2023

Note: Some of this story is true, some is made up. See the end for clarification.

In the spring of 1968, a junior year abroad university student in London, I decided it was time for my real education to begin. I packed a backpack, took a train to the south coast and crossed the English Channel on a boat from Newhaven to Dieppe, a four-hour, 90-mile crossing. I had no responsibilities and four hundred bucks in American Express Travelers Cheques, which I figured was plenty for eight or ten weeks of cheap youth hostels and free transportation. America’s problems – King’s assassination, inner city uprisings, the war in Vietnam, campus takeovers – seemed insane and far away, and the lovely Old World beckoned.

In my backpack was everything I needed: a passport, three pairs of clothing, a sleeping bag, a few toiletries, a Hallwag map of Europe, a directory of European youth hostels and some guidebooks. The general idea was to stick my thumb out and go wherever the rides took me. I would travel six days a week – and then, like God, rest on Sunday.

That was the chief advantage of hitchhiking, in my opinion. Against the uncertainty of knowing when you’d get a ride and where it would take you, the trip would be cheap, serendipitous and full of adventure.

Hitchhiker’s guide to the road

Of course, even hitchhikers willing to go where fate took them usually had a rough destination in mind. My plan was to head south, toward warmer weather. From Dieppe I would travel down the French coast to Spain, then sail to Morocco. High up on the charts of the late ’60s was a pop song called Marrakesh Express (“Sweeping cobwebs from the edges of my mind / Had to get away to see what we could find”), which made Morocco seem exotic and intriguing. Discovery – both global and personal – was the point of the trip.

From Morocco I’d cross back over the Strait of Gibraltar and continue up the east coast of Spain, across the French Riviera and northern Italy to Switzerland and southern Germany. After that I expected to go to Salzburg and Vienna (Mozart and Beethoven country), then back down through Italy to Florence and Rome. After that I guessed I’d be out of time and money, ready to head back to London and fly home. In retrospect it’s amazing how close I came to realizing the original itinerary – except for getting kicked out of Morocco and making a 2,000-mile detour to Israel. But that’s another story.

Traveling with Paul and the ladies

On the boat across the English Channel I met a Scotsman named Paul, and two young ladies from California who had bought a van in England. The women planned to travel around the continent and then finance the whole thing by selling the van, a clever strategy, I thought. Their first stop was Rouen, and they invited Paul and me to join them. Our boat landed at Dieppe about 4 p.m. The weather was cool and sparkling crisp, with the smack of sea salt in the air.

I am usually calm by temperament, but this afternoon I was almost giddy with excitement. After dreaming about and planning this hitchhiking excursion for years, doubting it would ever happen, here I was, finally – in France, on European soil, off to parts unknown! While the French customs agent poked around in my backpack I imagined distant ports in faraway places, many weeks and miles down the road.

“Oui, oui, off with you,” the agent said in surprising English, and the four of us boarded the little camper van and turned onto Highway 27. Our first stop, Rouen, an hour south, was where Joan of Arc ended her miraculous journey, famous also for its magnificent cathedral whose spire juts above the French plains and dominates the countryside for miles, the same cathedral where Emma Bovary began her first affair.

The hostel, where I planned to spend the night, was on Rue Diderot, and after stopping for directions, the three travelers dropped me off. They had invited me to join them at a nice hotel, and though I was tempted, I knew it would be more in keeping with the spirit of my journey – and a lot cheaper – to stay in a hostel dorm. But as I said goodbye and good luck to them and they sped off, I was struck with a sharp sense of loss. We had spent less just a few hours together, but all of us shared the same sense of exhilaration and wanderlust. We were certain this trip would be our best opportunity to see the continent. The older one got, we agreed, the more difficult and then impossible it becomes to drop everything and go slumming through distant capitals.

After checking in at the hostel, where an ancient hostess informed me “ze door ees locked exactly een the tenth hour,” I set off for dinner and a little sight-seeing. By 9:30, tired and mindful of ze closing time, I returned to the hostel and unrolled my sleeping bag along one of the upper bunks at the far corner of the men’s dorm.

At the hostel

At the other end, young men were talking quietly, their shadows bouncing off the walls from the flickering light of a solitary candle someone had lit. The comforting sound of English drifted over to me, and I joined the group.

People introduced themselves. There was a young fellow from Brooklyn and another from Houston, two Englishmen, one considerably older than the other, and a handful of Europeans. It was just a chance meeting of a dozen travelers, each coming from some distant spot and heading off in the morning to other distant spots, drawn together for a quiet evening of stories and tips to get better rides.

The younger Brit, swarthy and stocky with a neatly trimmed beard, described a long and roundabout trip he had made from Brussels. It had started off well enough, getting a ride from a French fashion model to Lille, just over the border. At that point she was turning south, to Paris. He was heading further west, to Cherbourg off the coast of Guernsey, where a college friend of his lived, but he was tempted to stay with the model and take the ride to Paris. “I thought it would be easy to get a ride out of Paris to Evreux or Caen, and then I would hop a train or bus to Cherbourg. But just at that moment there was a good deal of truck traffic crossing the highway going west, and I thought, ‘Ah, I’ll get a ride easy.’ So I waved bye, jumped out and tried my luck on the road. But guess what? No luck,” he said ruefully.

Instead, he added, the intersection quieted and remained nearly deserted for hours. Finally he headed south, walking out of town and sticking his thumb out at every passing vehicle. After a few short hops he wound up walking the last 10 or 15 kilometers to a little French town called Arras, where he stopped – exhausted and disgusted – for dinner at the only café still open. “As it happened the man sitting next to me, hoovering down brats and a beer, was coming here for the night, and he gave me a lift. What a spot of luck.”

Lay of the land

Someone said this was the typical lot of the hitchhiker, bad luck followed by good, or more often the other way round. One fellow told of coming from Paris (just 150 kilometers away, a poor day of hitchhiking); others hours away from Lyon and Bordeaux to the south (spectacular). The kid from Houston had come down from London and sailed on the same ferryboat I had. He had a bicycle with him, a knockabout with no gears and no hand brakes, and was planning to pedal to Paris over the next few days and then make his way to Spain for a month before heading home. Like most of the rest of us he was a student on holiday.

We were all traveling on tight budgets. Economy was a point of pride as well as necessity, and it dominated the conversation, along with the best routes and locations for rides and other tips.

The best way to get rides was to travel with female companions (though none of us were), and the ideal was to latch onto a pair of young American ladies with a nice van who were willing to chauffeur you around at your pleasure. I realized I had stumbled onto something very much like this only hours earlier, and without realizing how lucky I was had stumbled right off.

We considered what appeal hitchhiking might have for people who could afford to travel more conventionally – here we were speaking hypothetically, since none of us had that luxury – and agreed that meeting new people on the cheap was the big plus.

Of course, it helped to be sociable, by enabling one to enhance and thus lengthen rides, and it was best if you could schmooze in the driver’s language. Nevertheless, some people considered the talking part a burden. No less an authority than Jack Kerouac, who might be considered to have written the book, said in On the Road: “…one of the biggest troubles hitchhiking is having to talk to innumerable people, make them feel that they didn’t make a mistake picking you up, even entertain them almost, all of which is a great strain when you’re going all the way and don’t plan to sleep in hotels.” Kerouac notwithstanding, most of us enjoyed this aspect. It was part of the inimitable adventure, making friends of strangers.

And so we did. The evening talk meandered pleasantly along these lines for quite some time – the best places to get a ride, pros and cons of holding up destination signs, backpacks versus duffel bags, standing in one place versus walking ahead – when someone mentioned safety. One of the Europeans, from Munich, informed us a hitchhiker had robbed and murdered a driver just outside the city a week earlier, and as a result no one was getting rides in Bavaria. Generally though, we thought it was the hitchhiker who was the more vulnerable in a stranger’s car. Nevertheless, we agreed, it was one of the safest and best ways to travel. We were very pleased with ourselves, teeming with self-regard.

The Brummie’s story

“But there is one thing you’re overlooking,” interrupted the older Brit, speaking up for the first time. He was a Brummie, the nickname for natives of Birmingham, “the Detroit of England,” he said. He was pony-tailed and gray-haired and might’ve been in his late 40s or early 50s, easily twice as old as the rest of us.

“It’s not just that you don’t always know where you’ll wind up,” he said, staring into the candle and speaking so softly we had to lean in and cock an ear to hear him. “Or what kind of driver you’re entrusting your life to. There’s more to it.” He said he’d been on the road for years, traveling across Europe and South America. He’d witnessed revolutions and “all sorts of wonders” and met people of every color and disposition.

The Brummie looked a little like Peter O’Toole – tall, slim, a little-hollow cheeked: Lawrence of Arabia minus the horse. There was a broad, slow cadence to his speech that was mesmerizing and charged the atmosphere in the room. We listened attentively, for he seemed to be settling into a story. Surely this was the voice of road experience.

“I was on my way south from Berlin to Athens last winter,” he said. It was now past 11 p.m. and the few other hostelers at the far end of the dorm appeared to be sleeping. The candlelight flickered against the wall, the candle flames shooting up at odd intervals, so that our slight movements had the exaggerated quality of a silent movie.

“It was very cold, and I was having poor luck getting a lift. There are times when you can be choosy picking a ride, and other times when you’ve got to give in and find a bus or a train. I was two days out of Dresden. Each day I had to come back to town and hire out a room – the hostels are closed there in the winter – and Dresden in the wintertime is a closed and forbidding city, to an outsider.

Toots arrives

“The third morning, as I was leaving my hotel with my knapsack at my side, getting ready to walk to the train station, this ancient lorry pulls up at the curb and a dark-skinned balding man yells at me, ‘Goin’ down, my man?  Goin’ sout’ to de ocean?’ He was Jamaican, and had come to Europe to make some money, I later found out. He had purchased the lorry for one hundred deutsche marks and was trucking produce and anything else he could transport.

“I got in the cab with him and we drove out of town and headed south. He told me he had gotten his first order in weeks just the day before, from a Scandinavian iron merchant, carrying a load of beams for a construction job in Thessalonica. ‘This is a stroke of luck,’ I thought. ‘I can be in Greece in 24 hours.’  And he was as bent on getting there as I was. We whipped down the road, through Bavaria into Czechoslovakia, stopping only at the border of Austria, south of Graz, for a late-night meal.

“By midnight we were heading down the coastal highway of western Yugoslavia, along the Adriatic, a meandering two-lane road where autos could sometimes crawl for hours behind tractors and farm animals.

“We passed Zadar and Split, skirting the giant Balkan Mountains to the east. Finally, when we got to Dubrovnik, Toots, that was his name, announced he had to stop. He hadn’t talked much, not at all about himself, and not for hours, when he said, ‘Hey mon, I gotta duck out for some shuteye. You welcome to stay or go, don’t make no difference to me.’

“Even though it was nighttime – and as you know it’s never a good idea to set off after dark – I thought I’d try my luck outside Dubrovnik, the ancient walled city. That’s the power of the white line fever, I call it. You just want to keep going. Simple physics, really: an object in motion will stay in motion. But rides had stalled, my bad luck was still with me, and after a few hours I headed back to town to find a train or bus. Now it was early morning and who do I spy but Toots, waiting at an intersection. I couldn’t believe it, my luck had turned again! He sees me and leans out his window and says, ‘Hey mon, climb back in and let’s go.’

Snowfall and exhaustion

“We raced down the road so fast I was afraid the lorry would tip over, we were rocking so. In a few minutes we had slipped away from the sea and started climbing the great southern Yugoslav mountains. Snow fell all around, flakes as big as golf balls, swirling around the trees and distant hills.

“I must’ve slept some, for when I opened my eyes it was nightfall, darkness coming early and thick. There were no lights on the little two-lane road but the glare of our headlamps and the racing white snowflakes being sucked into our windscreen by the crazy flapping wipers. Toots was plunging all over the road; the beams in the rear rocked against their cases and the cases scraped against the sides. He said, ‘We be in Tessylonika ’fore long, sure,’ and sang a little song to himself about sweet Caribbean breezes.

“As frightened as I was by the mountain and the snow and Toots’ driving, I was so tired I couldn’t help but keep drifting off to sleep. The thick snow swirling past the lorry was all you could see: the darkness had consumed the road, the trees, the mountains. I was mesmerized by the hypnotic dance of snowflakes. My eyes kept tracing their fall, one and then another and then another, until I couldn’t see them at all. I remember just the fuzzy edges of a thought as I drifted off to sleep: ‘Either I’ll be in Thessalonica in the morning or lying under a thousand feet of snow on the side of the Balkan peninsula sleeping under the light of the eternal moon.’ Tell you the truth, either one sounded good to me just then.”

He paused to sip some water from a paper cup on the table in front of him. There was a collective intake of air – I don’t think anyone had drawn a breath since he had started.

Noisy surprise

“I heard a sharp noise and awoke with a start,” he resumed.  “We weren’t on the side of the mountain and it didn’t look like we were in Greece either. It was morning, a dim-lit morning with a washed-out sky. The lorry sat at the side of a desolate road. I turned to Toots but he was gone. Some peasant farmers stood a distance off, looking like ragged scarecrows, peering in at me. Something felt very wrong, I have to tell you. I groped for the door and started to get out but as I did a soldier jumped up and looked at me, speaking in a loud voice with harsh, foreign syllables. Then it came to me. We must be in Albania! That’s the country, gentlemen, where no westerners ever get to go and from which no natives ever leave – the dark Stalinist mystery at the heart of southern Europe!”

With that his eyes, which had been mostly lost in the candle flame, drew back. He collected himself, looked into our faces and smiled as if to say, “Now that’s something you’ll not run into in a year’s worth of traveling.”

“Where was the driver, that Toots fellow,” the younger Englishman asked in astonishment. The storyteller’s narrative, the flickering candlelight with its licks of dancing flame spitting off the wax and the fierce, blunt shadows on the wall had drawn us as completely into his story as if the farmers had been crowding into the room.

“Under arrest. In the crates in the back of our lorry were guns and mortars and other artillery, not beams, and he had been running them to a cell of rebels in south Albania, near the Greek border. In the thick of the storm he had wandered off his familiar country back-road trails, and we had driven up to a police blockade outside an Army post near Tiran. When he saw the blockade it was too late to turn around. He jammed on the brakes about a hundred yards from the barricade. The soldiers started to run toward the lorry, motioning with their guns for him to get out. As they approached he jumped out on the road and tried to make a dash into an open field. They cut him down before he had gotten 25 yards. That’s when I awoke.” He scanned our faces impassively. Mine registered astonishment.

“I saw soldiers kneeling over his body and picking at his clothes. The soldier by my door looked in and sneered, in rough English, ‘Death to traitors!’ The others came back to the lorry and took me off to jail. I was there for six weeks until the embassy could get me out, most of the time under sentence of death by a firing squad.”

Moral of the story

Then abruptly he stood up, stretched his long thin frame, and shifted in his loose clothing, looking as if he was done.

“What about the part we’re overlooking?” the kid from Brooklyn asked.

“How’s that?”

“You said a while back we were overlooking something. There was more to it than not knowing where your ride would take you, something like that.”

“Should be obvious, Yank, don’t you think? Not every trip you take is as safe as this one,” he said, tapping his forehead, “the voyage inside your mind. Sometimes it’s better just to stay inside – no? – and let your neurons do the hiking.”

With that he stepped from among us and walked off to his bed in the far corner of the dormitory.

We sat there for a minute, no one stirring, until someone snuffed out the candle, and we made our way by the light of the soft French evening pouring through the windows to our cots.

“Do you think that was true?” the kid from Brooklyn whispered to me, from his perch on the next bunk, as I settled into my sleeping bag. “Probably not,” I replied, “but it makes for a good story.” He thought about it for a second and said, “I don’t know. I don’t think you can make that stuff up.”

I lay in bed a while, staring at the ceiling, imagining Toots and the ancient lorry with its cargo of contraband weapons careening down the Balkans under a blanket of snow, before I fell asleep.

Note: Like many self-respecting American college students of my generation, I spent the better part of a year abroad, from September 1967 to June ’68, during which my parents and draft board assumed I was a full-time student. They were wrong. Mostly I was traveling ­– first around London (a walker’s paradise), then Manchester (wooing a British medical student, and when that fell through), Paris, Moscow, Leningrad and Warsaw – altogether a far more valuable schooling than college. In the spring of ’68 I embarked on a long-held dream: to stick out my thumb and travel through Europe wherever the rides took me. The first day went pretty much as described above. The Brummie? I remember meeting such a character – either on the road or in a youth hostel – who said he’d been hitchhiking for years, and wondering what kind of life that would be like. I spun his story, this story, as I imagined it, into fiction.