The open road is never far away

As I look up from my desk at home, I see a color photograph of a Scotsman in a Formula One race car.

I did not take the photograph.

But I was there the day it was taken, and seeing it always sparks a memory.

It was that summer of 1969 I have written about before.

That spring I had been an American student abroad, studying in London with a group of other students — most of them more studious than I — from Earlham College.

And when classes ended, the summer stretched out like unprecedented freedom. It was early June, but my flight back to the States wasn’t scheduled until the end of August.

A good friend and I had originally planned to hitchhike through Europe together that summer, but an early trip to Scotland with our thumbs out altered our plans. In order to save our friendship, we decided to travel separately. He teamed up with someone else, and I set out on my own.

Looking back, it was a wonderful experience. But it must have seemed to my parents as if I had lost my mind.

With a cheap tent, a rucksack, a sleeping bag and some money left over from my paper route, I stuck my thumb out and took off.

No. That’s not entirely accurate.

To get away from metropolitan London, I had to take a train. In fact, I was dealing with trains pretty much all the way to Dover, where I caught a ferry to Belgium.

It was there the hitchhiking began.

Arriving on the ferry in Ostende, I quickly found the nearest campground and settled in. I roamed the sands the next day, sticking my head into concrete bunkers left over from World War II, then connected with some Belgians who introduced me to Stella Artois and the art of carrying on a conversation when none of us completely understood what the other guy was saying.

The next day, I was finally on the road.

And I waited and waited for the first lift, wondering the whole time if this was some idiotic mistake. Finally a car pulled over and a guy in his 30s gestured for me to get in.

The car was pretty much of a mess. The back seat was strewn with what appeared to be magazines.

But the guy was friendly, and he spoke English well.

It turned out that he was a publisher.

The magazines in the back were his, and they could best be described as soft pornography.

The magazine was called Partner, and the driver fancied himself the next Hugh Heffner or at least the next Bob Guccione.

But when you are hitchhiking, you are a guest, so I had no complaints and it got me farther down the road.

A day or so later, stuck again at the side of the road, this time in The Netherlands, another car pulled up. This time, the driver was not a pornographer and he was closer to my age, but his English wasn’t as good.

He asked where I was going, and I had to admit that my answer was vague. Aimlessness was a big part of my plan that summer.

Then he explained where he was headed: Zandvoort, for the Dutch Grand Prix.

Did I want to come along? You bet.

And so, this guy who had never attended the Indianapolis 500 and hadn’t even made it over to Eldora was now standing on the sand dunes watching Formula One cars zip along the asphalt.

Trouble is, as any real motorsports fan knows, you can’t really see very much from the cheap seats — or in my case, standing room only.

All I knew was that Jackie Stewart was leading the race in a bright blue Matra-Ford with a number 4 on the side.

I would have stayed to the end to see him win, which he did, but my hours of daylight were shrinking, so before the race was over my thumb was out and I was on the road again.

But that photo hanging above my desk dates from that day. I have no idea who took the picture. It was something I bought on eBay as a memento of that June day in 1969.

And I have no idea who managed to secure Jackie Stewart’s signature on the photo.

But there it is, on the wall of my study, above a painting of a rooster by some guy in Noblesville and next to an industrial landscape watercolor by an artist in Canada.

Still, when I look up at it, I am back in Zandvoort, amid the dunes, watching perhaps the greatest driver in history fly by, and I know the open road awaits me tomorrow.