As a regular summer camper, hitchhikes in random areas are not a new thing for me. My experiences have been exclusively positive, but then again there but for the grace of G-d…
A story that did not occur to me, but I heard first hand, occurred to a fellow camper several years ago. He was about 15 or 16, on a hike and got separated from his group. He was not lost, simply with a different group, just to be clear. He was wearing a hooded top, as it was raining. He looked for a hitch, a car stopped and, after informing the Madrich by phone that he was going to join his own group farther down the road, he left. A minute into the drive, which was to a spot a few minutes drive away, he took of his hood. The guy, who until that point had seemed very friendly, glanced at his cappel and said, in a sharp voice, “Are you Jewish?”
The bochur answered affirmatively. The man swung the road onto the side of the road, in the middle of the nowhere, and brusquely ordered him out of the car. Not the scariest story ever, perhaps, but certainly worrying. As for me, literally just the other day I was coming back from a day out with my friends, and I was unable to get on the bus home. So, since I was about a forty minute run from my home, I started running along the side of the motorway. Traffic was sluggish at one point, so I decided to race the cars on foot. There was one particular car that I kept overtaking. I noticed the guy staring out the driver’s window, and I flashed him a big smile and kept running. A minute down the road, he caught up, pulled over and gave me a lift. He was a very friendly black man with a large cross on the dashboard, although I didn’t notice that until I got into the car. He turned out to be funny, interesting and took me virtually all the way home. He wasn’t Jewish but was very interested in Jews, and whilst I expected some proselyting none was forthcoming. He was genuine and I enjoyed his company. My cheshbon was that firstly, it made sense that he would pull over out of kindness, considering the way he first saw me, and secondly, I was bigger than him, and if anything, he should have been scared of me. but those points were, in retrospect, not valid, and I should have exercised more caution. Generally, people should not take hitches unless they’re with people they know and trust.