Joe Bennett: New year encounter with hitchhiker in helmet on Lyttelton road

Who was this hitchhiker wearing an odd shaped helmet Joe Bennett encountered on the first day of 2021? Photo / Getty Images

A DOG'S LIFE

Every new year should bring a new thing and this year's brought a hitchhiker in a helmet. But let me begin at the beginning and the beginning is the road.

The road is the original road in and out of Lyttelton, a road carved by 19th-century pick-wielders up the inside of the volcanic crater and over Evans Pass to Sumner.

It's a snaking road, a goat track of a road, a heroic undertaking of a road, a walk-to-spare-the-horses road, a road that drunks sometimes drive off the side of and into the harbour with no one to know for weeks.

And even after the tunnel provided an easier route into Lyttelton in the 1960s it remained the road that the petrol tankers had to take because the tunnel authorities were timorous.

A friend of mine - and this will prove apt - was driving down this road when the earthquake of 2011 struck. Suddenly it was raining rocks.

Boulders the size of cars were leaping down the mountainside, bouncing over his ute or plugging into the road. When the rocks eventually stopped falling there was no way he could drive either forward or back.

But though he is a father of several children, and though he is a man who runs his own business, at heart he is an adolescent.

So in the back of his ute he had a skateboard. He skateboarded down the road, slaloming around the rocks. Half way down he came across a petrol tanker.

He coaxed the driver out of the cab and took him down to Lyttelton on the back of his skateboard. I am not making this up.

A truck stopped by the 2011 earthquake on the road to Lyttelton. A skateboarder coaxed the petrol tanker driver out of the cab and took him down to Lyttelton, writes Joe Bennett. Photo / Getty Images

The road stayed closed for eight years. It stayed closed so long you forgot it existed. When it reopened last year it was like a present.

I have driven it several times just for the pleasure of knowing it's there again.

But on the first afternoon of the year I wasn't driving it. I was walking up a bit of it on an obesity-thwarting constitutional. And at the point where the road and Reserve Terrace meet, a figure was standing.

From a distance he looked like a pointy-headed alien from Alpha Centauri. Putting fear aside as we columnists do, I approached in hope of a scoop.

Ten yards further on three things became clear. The first is that the figure was not alien. He was youngish, male and human. The second is that he was hitchhiking. The third is that he was wearing a helmet that encased his whole head which is what gave him the alien look.

It was one of those streamlined helmets that taper at the back, as worn by bob-sledders and downhill skiers.

Why a young man should be hitchhiking on Sumner Rd in a full face racing helmet I had no idea, but there he undoubtedly was, a conundrum to start the year.

When I was younger and poorer I notched up several thousand miles by hitchhiking and not for one of those miles did I wear a helmet. The reason is not far to seek.

People like to know who they're inviting into their car. They like to see a face, preferably a young and smiling one.

Now call me a softheart but I did not want to think of this young man spending most of New Year's Day by the side of the road unable to understand why the cars wouldn't stop.

So as I approached I waved a cheery hello and suggested he might do better with the helmet off.

"Pardon me?" he said in a rich North American voice. But even as he spoke I saw that at his side, standing on end like a midget companion, was a skateboard. And suddenly all was clear.

Once, pre-earthquake, I followed a skateboarder down this road. He was doing 30km/h. I was scared to overtake him lest he fell beneath my wheels.

And I was torn between admiring his daring and deploring his folly.

And here was his successor. Clearly he had already skated down once. Now he was hitching back up to do it again. It was as if he were skiing and the traffic was his chairlift. The only difference was that his piste was a public road.

Did I give him an old man's lecture? Did I call the cops? Did I confiscate his skateboard? I did not.

"Have a nice day," I said loudly and went on my way.

"You too," he said from within the helmet, and then he stuck a hopeful thumb back out into the brand new year.