Cole and Katrinka

I recently found myself somewhere I zealously try to avoid: the chilled chamber of a greyhound bus.

Taking the 'hound is a desperate measure for me, to which I resort only when pressed for time, or when a rideshare is not forthcoming. Having already missed two days of work to witness L. Cohen's historic and exquisite return to Montreal, I needed to get back to Boston on Tuesday--not exactly prime time for 'sharing.

Luckily, this time I had my girlfriend's shoulder on which to lean, and her ears with which to share my CBC podcasts.



I also had the memory of the first-class rideshare we took on the way up with the kindhearted Cole and loquacious Katrinka. Incidentally, one of the podcasts we listened to was the geeky, yet endearing, Grammar Girl who, in a particularly quirky episode, explained that the so-called funniest phoneme in the world was the hard "K" sound.

Cole is a mover from Tennessee whose chiseled farm-boy looks mask a hyper-articulate theology student impassioned by jazz and baroque music (he was heading to Montreal for the 2008 Montreal Baroque festival).

Katrinka is an extroverted upstate New Yorker who was raised by a Jewish father and Bahai mother and, channeling Kate Hudson's Penny Lane, longs to lose herself in Morocco.

When Cole and I first got in touch, he offered to meet up beforehand - for his peace of mind or mine I'm not sure. We decided it wouldn't be necessary, but Katrinka took him up on the offer and they seem to have hit it off since Cole was planning to crash at Katrinka's sister's Westmount pad for the weekend (Are all these "k"s making you giddy?")

Like all good ridesharers, we waxed transiently about God, the Problem of Evil, and the legacy of CBGB. What else?

Family Business

My big brother Josh drove down for the weekend to accompany me at Sunday's Bruins-Canadiens hockey match. Things didn't go as well as planned for our Canadiens (we lost in overtime, snapping a 14-game winning streak over Boston) but still had a nice weekend visiting the Gardner Museum, catching some live music at Matt Murphy's, and sampling the Middle Eastern fair at, well, the Middle East.

I've been babbling to Josh about the wonders of rideshare for some time now, as you all can imagine. Unlike me, he owns a car and I've been trying to convince him to stuff it with ridesharers on his next weekend roadtrip.

But Josh has been hesitant, asking typical rideshare-skeptic (some may say prudent) questions such as, "How do I know the person isn't a weirdo?" or "What if they run off without paying for gas?"

After reading this blog and hearing me wax philosophic about rideshare, Josh finally decided to give it a go.

Meet Els, a 27-year-old ice-cream maker (!) and veterinary assistant from Iberville, Quebec.

Els, Josh, and the rest of his backseat crew hit it off immediately, talking relationships, music, and - you guessed it - ice cream!

You don't have to take my word for it, but I think Josh was sold.

Foreigners in Motion

After grudgingly taking the Greyhound up to Montreal for Spring Break, I was desperate to find a rideshare for the way back. I posted my request on craigslist more than a week in advance and checked the rideshare forum at least twice a day to see if anyone was heading to Boston on St Patrick's Sunday. After a few days, I received this rather colorful message:

hi if you are willing to help me in gas confortable car please give me call 617 XXX XXXX thanks

So I called the number and spoke to a man with a Borat-esque accent who told me to name a price. I said I was accustomed to paying around $35 one way.

“Maybe when gas was $1.50," he cackled, "now it’s $3.50!”

Apparently I had named an outrageous price.

“Make it $40,” he continued, “and we’ll call it a deal.”

“Uh…ok” (I was tempted to bargain him down to $38 but thought I’d count my blessings).

This guy clearly meant business. I was a tad apprehensive about spending 5 to 6 hours in his car, no matter how “confortable” it was. But it turned out – as it always does – that he was a pretty cool guy.

Jamal immigrated to the States from Algeria in 1990 when he was 30-years-old. At 48, he has a wife and 15-year-old twins, and although he possesses an engineering degree and owns a renovation business, currently works as a cab driver to “pay the bills.”

Jamal is Berber and compared the linguistic tensions between Berbers and Arabs in Algeria to Quebec’s language politics. He also caught me up on centuries of Arabic Rae music; it's not bad, though I was half disappointed that Sting never showed up for a chorus.

Ridesharing is Caring

(photo from the creative commons)

Anonymity is one of the key tenets of craigslist. Normally, you don't get to see who's behind the "Reply to" address unless you ride with them, buy something from them, or meet them for a late-night "casual encounter."

But over the past few weeks, I've had the privilege of sitting down with a number of ridesharers under the immortal pretense of "journalism," putting a face and name to those dizzying-set-of-numbers@craigslist.org. Among them were:

• Padma, a 30-year-old electrical engineer from India.

• Katie, a 6-foot-plus ice hockey player and documentary film maker from Colorado

• Srin, a Newfoundland-born Pediatrics resident at Harvard

• Amber, a 22-year-old animal rights activist from Syracuse

• Bridget, a stand-up bass player (and stand-up gal) from Jersey
  

They all had different stories, backgrounds, destinations and rideshare expectations, but what they all seemed to have in common was a strong degree of trust. A trust in the basic good of (hu) man and a passion for connecting with people, transiently or not.

I like to think of this as the "backpacker mentality," although it is by no means the sole domain of the grungy traveler with a heap of canvas on her back.



For instance, last summer I joined an organization called Servas, a world-wide network of hosts who welcome travelers into their homes for a two-night cross-cultural exchange - for free. Most of my hosts were around my parents' age, and among them were doctors, teachers, engineers and psychologists.

Often they were people who had traveled when they were younger and were eager to expend some of the hospitality they'd received over the years.

They were people who hadn't lost the backpacker mentality- the spirit of trust and openness to whatever or whomever might come knocking.

Meet Freddie Mercury

Last night I had a great conversation with Ben, a 23-year-old ridesharer from Manchester, N.H. Ben’s been ridesharing through Craigslist for about a year and had some crazy stories about his most recent adventure. I tracked Ben down on CL where he was looking for a passenger to join him on a spur of the moment trip to Wisconsin to knock on doors for Obama.

Ben ended up taking Brett along, a self-described “unemployed vagrant” who’s been backpacking around the country on a shoestring budget and documenting the adventure on his awesome website.

The “highlight” of the trip came when Brett, charged with driving Ben's '96 Honda Accord, was pulled over late at night in Ohio for doing 83 in a 65 mph zone. Brett tells the story way better than I can but suffice to say it involves a $130 dollar ticket, an unimpressed trooper, and a narrowly avoided stint in the slammer.

Ben's return trip to New England was no less eventful. Before he left home a craigslister offered him $100 dollars to pick up a package from friends in Toledo and bring it to her in New York City. Ben's first instinct was that it was a bad idea to transport anything for a stranger across state lines but after speaking to the woman he agreed to take on the parcel/passenger: a 12-month old purebred dachshund puppy!

I apologize if you were expecting to meet the dead rock n’ roll legend but that’s the Freddie Mercury pictured with Ben above.

Faces in the Rear-View Mirror

Omar was my first. He was a PhD student at Brown and rented a Ford station wagon for the occasion. We met outside North Station where I spotted him in the Montreal Canadiens T-shirt he had promised to wear. Three other people were in the car - Kristina, Andreas, and Winston. Kristina studied Spanish literature at Brown and was Omar’s neighbour. Andreas was a “random” they had hooked up with through the Brown graduate student website. Winston studied Spanish at Harvard and was Kristina's friend, although the backseat hand flirting I witnessed while crammed in with them led me to believe they were more-than, or intended to be. Omar blasted Kanye West and politically-tinged underground hip-hop for most of the ride. Except every now and then he’d add some Frank Sinatra into the mix which raised eyebrows all around.

***

I didn’t think I would like Jason at first. From my vantage point behind the passenger seat he looked like Ryan, the smarmy intern-turned-boss from The Office. But Jason turned out to be a nice guy, a sardonic violinist and German teacher who described himself over the phone as “pretty much as safe a driver as they get.” We listened to Led Zeppelin and Phish and commiserated about being in long-distance relationships. On the way back to Boston we were joined by a sweet girl with blonde hair and big eyes, an art student in her early 20s. When Jason dropped her off near Boston Common and asked for her 35 dollars, she handed him a cheque, explaining the rest-stop ATMs she had visited would not accept her cards.

“Who travels with a cheque book?” Jason said as soon as she left the car. Incredulous, he promised to text me if the cheque didn’t bounce; I’m still waiting to hear from him.

***

My last Rideshare was with Raj. She picked me up in front of Dusty’s, the Montreal breakfast joint I’ll only frequent on New Year’s Day. She drove a beat-up grey sedan and hadn’t printed out Mapquest directions; we were making our way to Brookline on instinct. Neither of us had brought CDs but the conversation flowed from real estate to Barack Obama to travel epiphanies without hesitancy. Raj ran “math camps” for inner-city kids at Boston public schools and, in the summer, for wealthy businessmen at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Recently the McGill alumnus decided to move back up north despite not speaking any French. She said she loved the city and was determined to give it a go.

I hope it works out for her.

Last Horse Crosses the Finish Line

Until this moment, I was probably the last journalism student without a blog. But here I am in my Bob Dylan T-shirt hunched over a coffee-stained laptop hammering out my first blog post. The only thing separating this scene from indie cliche is that I'm not wearing plastic-frame glasses (they're in my school bag) and I'm not typing on a Mac (The commercials are fun, but I'm still not sure what the fuss is about).

True, everyone has a blog these days but mine will be different. It won't be an outlet for self-righteous rants about elections I can't vote in, or ironic posts about washed-up '90s sitcom stars. Most importantly, my blog won't be about me. It will be about bringing people together, about fostering the sort of intimate-yet-transient relationships that develop when we spend 2 to 50 hours in cramped sedans with strangers - sharing music, stories, laughs and travel tips.

This blog will chronicle my experience trying to make sense of the rideshare phenomenon and building my website, "Strangers in Motion: The Secret World of Rideshare" (working title). You'll hear all about the interesting people I meet in the process as well as the frustrating ones who won't return my phone calls.

I hope the site and blog will also double as a sort of Ridesharers hub. A place for people to learn about it, talk about it, and be empowered to take the leap of faith themselves.

So please do share: What sort of experiences have you guys had with Rideshare? Or why might you have hesitated to try it out?