Le Stop

In the U.S., it's called hitchhiking, and although many a student with a sign (GOOD CONVERSATIONALIST ALBUQUERQUE PLEASE) can still be seen, express ways and police are driving the custom out of style. But in Europe, the autostop, as hitchhiking is known in internationalese, is a thriving student institution. In universities across the Continent, and on many U.S. campuses too, college kids are about to dust off knapsacks and take to the open Autobahnen, routes nationales, carreteras and autostrade.

West Germany is a favorite for practitioners of the autostop. At border crossings, West German police have been known to halt a car and order the driver to take aboard a wholesome-looking stoppeur. Neatness counts, since it denotes respectability; so does a pair of knobby knees (male), because Germans like outdoorsiness. The thumb is a U.S. import; native custom dictates an erect forearm and a vigorous loose-wristed wag of the hand. One student last summer became king of the Autobahnen by carrying a sign that said: I KNOW A THOUSAND JOKES.

Spain is also popular, because it issues a free formal card to hikers if they supply character references. By using the card, the stoppeur automatically renounces the right to sue his benefactor in case of accident, and gets maps and a small national flag. Drivers who help a hiker get a coupon toward membership in the honorary "Brotherhood of the Highway." In Italy, more cars and better roads have raised the country's ranking on the autostop circuit, though the hot-blooded national temperament sometimes makes hitchhiking a perilous means of transportation. Italian men are markedly hospitable to foreign girls ("Because you never know how it might wonderfully end," says one driver).

Stoppeurs were panicked recently by a rumor that France had outlawed le stop. It turned out that only persons under 18 were forbidden to hitchhike, and the situation soon returned to normal. Yet for single girls who do not happen to be judo champions, a women's magazine darkly warns that white slavers cruise the roads for recruits. Military uniforms and Boy Scout getups are a help for hitchhikers, and two Canadians in Nice recently made it in record time to southern Spain by dressing in cassocks.

A handful of daredevil stoppeurs have developed their own system; the hiker slaps the side of a moving car, then quickly falls down. The driver screeches to a stop and out of fear and sympathy lakes the traveler aboard, or so survivors report. A commoner, and safer, technique is to spot the license of an oncoming car and whip out a national flag to match.

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