"Too many offers along the way!"
Steffs Malan unburdens his conscience

When I shook off the sooty grime of city life a few years ago and emigrated to the Langeberg, my new posting involved abundant travel. For the first time in my life I was constantly on the road from one town to another and it was new to me to see the number of people by the wayside travelling by thumb.

For the first two or three months I was moved by the sight of so many people looking at me with hope and pleading in their eyes. I was helpful as could be, picking up anyone as long as they looked clean and more or less respectable. I won’t say I felt smug, but there was a certain satisfaction in thinking that I was making a difference. Indeed I had one or two pleasant companions and good conversation along the way.

I became a kind of serial picker-upper.

Not any longer.

Let me hasten to say that this is not for any hair-raising reason. My life was never in danger. It was simply that I became fed-up with having to turn down invitations to extend my hospitality.

My first disenchantment came one Friday afternoon travelling from Robertson to Ashton at around five. I know you’ll think me nuts seeing that it was a Friday, but I stopped for three people in about their middle thirties. They were kitted out as if for Sunday Church service and I had no hesitation.

They were going home to a farm that was their workplace some five or ten kilometres off the main road past the turn-off to Bonnievale.

Finding that out also told me that all three of them were almost incoherently drunk. I could not imagine how I had not seen the signs from a distance. It was a cold winter’s evening and opening the windows was to take one’s comfort zone and throw it out into the slipstream. Even so, the smell of stale wine was barely kept at bay by the icy blast, and strange to tell, seemed to linger on long after the journey was over.

As I pulled up to let them out at the turning, one of the women, well past her first bloom and with lipstick everywhere but where it was aimed, leaned over from the back seat and gave me a wet and sloppy kiss on my cheek.

“Don’t you need a wife?” she slurred softly.

“No thank you I’m OK in that department,” I said, trying to keep my sides from splitting; at that early stage as Good Samaritan I was hugely amused and not in the slightest offended by this purple-wrapped duck trying to turn my lift into a much longer-term relationship.

Not a week later, late at night, I came across a family along the same highway trying to flag down the traffic. And they seemed in genuine distress, the bonnet of their car was open. A man came to the window and told me they had ‘inexplicably’ run out of petrol. Not being in any particular hurry I happily agreed to go back to Robertson with three of them to get some petrol. The wife, or girlfriend or whatever, leaped into the front passenger seat leaving the man and a child to get into the back. After we’d negotiated the petrol and a container, we set off for their car, and then the same old scene played out.

“I’m looking for a job,” the lady leaned over and told me confidentially. “Don’t you need a wife? Or a girlfriend. Or even a housemaid?”

“No thanks, I’m fine for all those things”, I replied.

“Well then,” she asked. “Can I have those coins you have sitting there in the ashtray?”

What could I say?

That was my last offer of marriage, but the begging went on. Over the coming weeks I did several more pick-ups and to a man, or to a woman, they all ended with a polite thank you and a firm request for money. And ‘no’ was never enough. ‘But Sir, I’ve got this’ or ‘I need that’.

Saying ‘no’ again and again is a hard thing to do, so now I just drive on by.

Back to Contents Page