Hitch Hiking in Germany

I never did like to hitch hike. When we were kids my old man used to tell me and my brother: if you don't have anything to do, go to the end of the drive way and stick out you thumb. Seek adventure. I never took his suggestion. My brother did. He ended up in a mountain campground in the Pennsylvania hills. Had the time of his life. Got laid, got drunk, got in a fight and got his ass kicked. He still talks about it as the best week-end of his life.

I was in the middle of a dart shooting challenge at the Rod and Gun Club at Hahn Air Base in Germany. It is a famous place for people in aviation because Chuck Yeager had been assigned here. I had images of sitting and drinking beer knowing "Chuck" had been in the same spots. "Yeager" means "Hunter" in German. Yeager was unsurpassed as a hunter. He always made the first kill.

I guess the name of the town is Hahn. It consists of the "First G" which is the first Guesthouse (Bar) outside of the gate. There are other small bars lining the single exit street from the main gate. I never got much farther then the "First G."

Dart shooting at the Rod and Gun club was good. I was drinking free. Everytime I won I got paid with a Konigsbocker. It's a very tall bottled beer. Normally I drank Bitburger Pils in a smaller bottle. A winning concept of quantity versus quality. The joker that I was shooting was hell on hitting the triple twenty. This is the highest number you can score in darts. But I was winning every game because I was shooting big meat twenty's. I always scored a 60 with my three darts. He was lofting darts in the one or the five that surrounds the twenty. Every time he scored a 26 we all yelled "peaches and cream" we don't have a clue what this means, we had heard an English player say this. Darts is the national pastime in England and he was a good Representative.

The Rod and Gun Club sits on an isolated side road located in the middle of the golf course. It is towards the back gate of the Air Base.

I lived in a little village outside of the back gate about 16 klicks, called Peterswald. My family unit and one other American family lived there. All the villagers knew us and what we ate each day. We dumped more in the village dump then the rest of the village combined, everything we bought at the base was wrapped in some type of plastic that never decomposed. My landlord's wife cautioned me to never throw away any food in the dump. Too many people almost starved during the War and this action would be an insult to the village. She picked up our leftovers every day and dropped us off a bowl of sauerkraut. She kept two large crocks of kraut festering in the basement, under a board with a brick on it. It was wonderful. I believe it had juniper berries in it.

I was the last person standing in the Rod and Gun club. I said my good nights and went out to drive away on the snowy roads in my trusty 1600 volkswagon. It was gone. I had forgotten that my young bride had secured the car after telling me I was a drunken slob. I was wheel less on a cold snowy night.

I returned to the Rod and Gun club. They told me I was out of luck. The Base cab's had stopped running. I needed to get my butt outside and start hitch hiking, while there was still people moving around.

I returned to the bitter cold of the snowy Hunsruck Mountains. I buttoned up my ski-jacket, heavy snow was falling. Large flakes established a random drift for my viewing challenge. I watched closely trying to see identical twins, they were consistently different. I saw some cars approaching; I had my thumb out jerking in the air, masturbating snowflakes. The cars always buzzed past on another road. The place where I stood didn't seem to have many travelers. I kept my thumb out, waiting. Soon I was covered with snow. The hitch hiking snowman, still no ride. Meanwhile the employees inside the Rod and Gun club had finished all of their work cleaning up the place and were preparing to leave. I could hear them talking in German.

Then I heard the American manager say. "Yah, that's him. That's not a snowman in the driveway. That's a drunk-ass American that doesn't know a damn thing about hitch hiking."