Some people say it was our own fault, as we shouldn't have been hitchhiking. Screw that, is my opinion. We were doing nothing illegal, and hitchhiking is not really dangerous if you're doing it with company and are choosy about the lifts you take.
What happened could have happened anywhere, no matter what we were doing. What happened was this. Sally and I, I'm Michelle, by the way, were hitching through Kansas. We were careful about what lifts we accepted, always picking a ride where the driver was a woman or accompanied by a woman. Elderly people were best.
Hitching out of this little town, a farmer and his wife stopped and offered us a ride. They weren't going all the way to the next big town, but they said they would drop us off at the turn-off to their farm. We'd be on the main highway and only about five miles short of the next town. That was OK by us. We could walk five miles to the next town dead easy. We were both quite fit.
You may want a little information about us before I continue with the story. It's always nice to know something about the people talking to you.
Sally is blonde, twenty and what the boys call whistle bait. On this particular day she was wearing a flirty skirt and a t-shirt.
Me, I'm twenty-one, blonde, but darker that Sally, and I've had my share of whistles. I was wearing lime green shorts and a yellow tank top. And please note I said shorts, not hot pants or daisy dukes. They were just plain, every-day, walking shorts.
Virgins? I said we were twenty and twenty one, respectively. You work it out.
Anyway, as I was saying this farmer offered us a ride, we accepted and hopped in and the farmer took off. Well, in that old car of his it's probably more accurate to say that the farmer eased onto the road and chugged slowly away.
Eventually the farmer reached his turn-off and stopped to let us out. It was just under five miles to the centre of town, he told us, but if we wanted to wait, there was a bus along every couple of hours. Just wave to the driver from the crossroad and he'd stop and pick us up.
The farmer drove off, leaving me and Sally surrounded by what looked like miles and miles of corn. Those fields seemed to stretch forever. Sally and I looked at each other. Did we stay in the cornfields and wait for a bus, or did we try our luck hitching while we hiked towards the town.
We thought that if it was only five miles, we could probably walk to town before a bus actually rolled up, even if we didn't get a lift. We put on our backpacks and set off.
It turned out that there was very little traffic along the highway that day. We must have gone about a mile before any cars overtook us, and that was just a beat up old bomb with a couple of young men in it. They whistled, slowed and offered us a lift, but we just smiled and politely declined. They were just the sort of lift we didn't take.
The boys seemed to take it in good spirits and took off. For a beat up old bomb, it had a nice engine in it. They vanished into the distance and we hiked on through the cornfields. We must have gone about another mile before we even heard another car, and that one was coming from the wrong direction, heading out of town and towards us.
It turned out to be the two men in the old bomb. They whistled as they passed and headed on to wherever they were going. Then we heard a squeal of brakes. Looking around, the boys were doing an U turn and heading back towards us.