When I first went into the Navy and for several years afterward, the streets seemed to be a much safer place than they are today. I remember that at my first duty station in Key West, Fla., I was to go on my first leave. Though I had the money for a ticket to get home, a buddy from the lower part of South Carolina didn't have the price of a ticket. So he asked me, and I agreed to hitchhike with him. In those days, people were willing to pick up service members in uniform. I think a lot of them had been in the same boat while in service.

I had the idea of surprising my parents, but, of course, they called just before I was leaving and found out that I was going on leave. I neglected to tell them my mode of travel. I think my Dad met every bus originating from Florida for a day.

We checked out at midnight in our white uniforms and hit the highway. The first ride was a Navy tractor-trailer going to Miami to pick up food for the commissary store. The driver dropped us off just south of the city on the main highway, which would make it easier to get a ride north. After a short wait, a wrecker stopped and provided a lift into the middle of the Everglades. The driver took us to a truck stop, saying that it would be easier to find a ride there.

When we left that filthy wrecker, our uniforms were no longer white. Sure enough, we met a driver who said he could take us about 50 miles further. He drove a pickup that belonged to a construction company clearing the swamp. Oh, yeah — it was loaded with explosives. There was very little traffic at a desolate crossroads where he dropped us off. If you are unfamiliar with the territory, the imagination can run wild with the thoughts of snakes and #+gators.

As it happened, when we were getting out of the pickup, a Swift Meat Co. tractor-trailer delivering to stores in the area pulled up, and we asked for and received a ride through the rest of the swamp all the way to Jacksonville after we finished delivering the route.

Believe it or not, our stay outside of Jacksonville was the longest time we had to wait — only 30-minutes. We were given a ride by a schoolteacher headed back to West Virginia to pick up his family after getting a job in Orlando. He dropped my traveling companion in the lower part of the state and was kind enough to let me out at my parents#, driveway in Columbia at 2 a.m. I had been on the road for 26 hours.

Needless to say, my parents were not happy campers when they found out about my mode of transport. That was my last adventure on the open road without a ticket or a vehicle. For several years afterward, when I didn't have my family with me, I would stop for servicemen in uniform as sort of a payback for the kind way I had been treated.

In later years, I'm afraid that our society got rougher, and it was no longer safe to provide rides. Sometimes, I wonder if society's advances are worth the loss of civility.

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