Riding Shotgun and Living Life

I KNOW I'm not the only woman who waits for something. Some of you are waiting for the phone to ring, or for him to kiss you, or propose, or come home. I just have my thumb out, and I never have to wait long. Though I know I cede my power the minute I get in a car, I feel we're driving on my terms because they're taking me where I want to go. I long ago forgot how to drive, and anyway I don't have a car.

I've been hitching since its heyday when I was a teenager, through several serial killers' careers and waves of social conservatism, while everyone else was getting married and divorced and having children.

Back when I started it was a popular and cool way to get around, and I've made it to middle age without any traumatic experience of hitchhiking that would alter my behavior.

As a woman I've always found hitching as efficient as driving, not to mention cheaper, and an interesting way to meet people. It's not unlike serial dating in that practically the only people who pick me up are men. Often the flashiest new cars are the ones that stop, for the affirmation of sex appeal has always been part of the new-car fantasy.

The men who pick me up seem to imagine I have secrets that place me beyond fear. Even if I'm very clear up front about who I am, they are always guessing at an unrevealed truth. While 30 years ago it would have been accepted that the reason I was hitching was to get from Point A to Point B, now the fact that I hitchhike seems to infuse me with mystery.

No doubt their intrigue is supported by my being at their mercy, which means of course I laugh at their jokes and I openly admire their cars, their driving and maybe their dogs. I make sure the conversation keeps going because I believe if I humanize myself I stand a better chance of retaining my physical integrity and not becoming a collection of severed limbs along the highway.

You can be sure drivers check me out before they stop. But at speed, from a distance, all they are able to establish is that I am a woman of proportional shape, alone. Closer, from across the front seat, they are able to see the fine lines on my face and the many gray hairs challenging my identity as a brunette.

But by now they are already interested, and the kind of interest that stops a car at 60 to 70 miles per hour holds a momentum that continues forward. Also, I am going where they are going, and that is social reinforcement.

They expect never to see me again, which spurs them to confidences. Most men normally do not open up this easily without alcohol. But here they are comfortable because they're the ones behind the wheel. They don't have to worry about any judgment I might make of them because I am only a hitchhiker. Within a few miles we are social intimates.

Everyone is divorced, is what I've learned, but they all have cars and still have to go places.

Because we are intimates, they often offer me hospitality. We stop for coffee, for a meal. They pay without deliberation, assuming I have no money, and this, too, makes it feel like a date. Usually they will drive out of their way to take me to my destination and sometimes even wait to see that I am safely inside.

If they are happy to show off their new cars, they are also happy for the opportunity to show off their favorite places, their houses, their driving, and more than once I've met my drivers' mothers, who always disapprove.

On one occasion the mother was in the car; she was visiting from out of town and being shown the sights.

They passed me by. When five minutes later they circled back to pick me up, the mother still gazed straight ahead, as though they hadn't stopped at all.

My hitching was itself enough to win the mother's disapproval, but she still asked questions intended to show me up as inappropriate for her son.

She found reinforcement for her disapproval when hitching's legal status came up. I admitted I was a lawbreaker. "Then it's also illegal to offer rides?" she asked, casting a significant look at her son.

When I said goodbye and made my thank yous, he passed me his number surreptitiously, letting me know she'd be gone in three days.

It doesn't take a mother's disapproval to sense that the illicit thrill is sometimes what they go for, though the illicit part is all on me.

They invariably ask, "Have you had trouble with other drivers?" But to different people my vulnerability means different things.

IT only takes a short bus ride to get out of the city to where the open road starts and a ride can stop. One time a streamlined purple pickup caught my eye and almost as soon as I could predict it, it pulled over. Behind trendy sunglasses the driver looked like Richard Gere poorly disguised, with gray tousled locks that made him an attractive coeval.

I asked where he was going, and he named the common destination for anyone following this road. Once I was inside he admitted he was going a few stops short of there.

"Do you mind if I smoke?" he asked and, while driving fast on the curvy road, proceeded to roll a cigarette with one hand.

"I used to be a truck driver," he told me, noting my awe with a sideward glance. "Driving comes easy." He told me that as a truck driver he picked up hitchhikers all the time, but only women, to warn them of the danger.

I looked at his face for self-mockery, but there was none.

Driving was no longer his living. "I don't normally tell people this," he confided, "but I'm a millionaire."

He'd been injured using the company's loading equipment, and there'd been a suit for compensation that was settled out of court. Though he drove his last truck eight years ago, the settlement had just come through.

His mother demanded $30,000, his sister wanted $18,000, all his old drinking buddies wanted loans for new cars.

He wasn't used to being rich. He was a fugitive from the mortgages and children and broken cars of the people he knew, people who were still stuck in the working poverty he came from.

Now he had 100 acres, a new house overlooking the ocean and 23 pins holding his shoulder in place, the culmination of six operations.

He lovingly described his rolling hills and the way the land got light all day. He'd bought himself a new family: bull, cow and calf he kept as pets. The bull alone cost $50,000, the same as his pickup.

WHEN we arrived at the turnoff, he gave me a final lecture on the dangers of hitchhiking, and I hopped out. I leaned back through the window and said I'd have invited myself to see his place if it weren't so far off the road. He offered to drive me down again, so I jumped back in.

We drove 20 minutes up a long dirt road past flowering trees and fields with cows and sheep to a tiny but luxurious log cabin with a sweeping view of the water, where his purebred new best friend, a $500 boxer, guarded the front door from its chain looped through the spare from a 16-wheeler.

Inside he relaxed and took off his shirt. The truck driver he used to be was revealed in his tattoos. One arm was covered in Japanese Yakuza-style full-color drawings and the other was delicately etched in blue. To mark the turning in his life he had recently cut his long hair and let the hole close up on his pierced ear.

He stood with the non-Yakuza arm crooked slightly in front of him, from the shoulder not the elbow, like he was holding a stretch after being in driving position for three hours. After a couple of minutes I realized the arm wasn't going to go down.

A bubble-pack of painkillers took pride of place on the coffee table, and in the time he'd offered and gotten me something to drink, he'd punched out and washed down half of them. He couldn't drive me anyplace immediately.

As soon as he could manage the wheel he took me all the way to my original destination. He didn't want to worry about who might pick me up, he said. He gave me his number to call, so he could fetch me again when I was finished. Conscious of the pain driving cost him, I hitched to a phone booth halfway back. It was so easy.

The next day he took me on his chartreuse 4-wheel motorcycle to admire his property and see his three cattle. Riding behind him on the bike was our first physical contact. Our driver-passenger relationship took an intimate evolution. In this position I could count the 23 screws myself.

We talked late into the night after looking at the stars through his high-end telescope. All the former girlfriends he described were alcoholics or pill takers or had four children by four different men or were crazy and abusive or promiscuous. It occurred to me that maybe he picked me up because he was always wanting to save somebody.

The morning I left he had to drive me down to the road. He stated his intention to take me to the police station first to let them know I was leaving, so if anyone had seen me in his (memorably purple) pickup and later on the road someone murdered me, he wouldn't be a suspect. It seems years of convalescence spent watching too many TV crime shows had given him a kind of legal paranoia.

Yet he never did anything to make me afraid, and I wasn't. He tried to give me fear, for my own good. But in the end I persuaded him simply to drive me down to the road, where I left him.

E-mail: modernlove@nytimes.com

MODERN LOVE Jessica Krasilovsky lives in New York City.