The man wanted a ride from Eureka to Arcata to see his sister and brother-in-law. His sister he liked; his in-law, he didn’t, he told me. He offered to pay for the gas, a bold move to anyone who drives an SUV. Once in the passenger seat, my rider refused to fasten his seat belt and my warning buzzer blared the whole way. He may have an issue with confinement, but the rest of us have issues with people flying through windshields.

Nearing Arcata, the man said he needed to go to 14th Street near the university. That’s when the puzzle pieces began to assemble. He was headed to Arcata’s 4/20 Festival, the unofficial pot celebration. Ahead, its minions meandered up the hill, carrying their guitars, blankets, coolers, and presumably, their bud.

As we neared the drop-off point, my passenger began to hit me up for cash. How else could he eat, he said? Once again, Dave the Lovemaster had reached out his trusting hand and had been bitten by the serpent. At my age, I don’t expect to change. I told my rider that loving people wouldn’t let him go hungry. If nothing else, I said, they served great brownies.

I don’t have a problem with 4/20 Day, although I have never put it on my calendar (It’s already there along with the Fourth of July). I’ve attended just one, the subject of one of my last news stories before Channel 6 shut down its evening news, although the timing is coincidental, I’m sure.

I remember my 4/20 experience as a mellow affair during which I declined the brownies, but took many pictures of “toking” people We got along fine until the instigator showed up, a medical marijuana card-holder shouting epithets and accusing the kid-smokers as being disingenuous delinquents (although that wasn’t his term).

The experience piqued my interest in pot as a culture symbol, just as it did back in the ‘60s, when I would walk the Haight-Ashbury. I believed then as I do now that everyone is entitled to euphoria, none more than the poor people of Jamaica where ganja is a sacramental herb. The same sacrament will get you busted in Arcata Plaza.

I’ve also learned a lot about Rastafarian practices, including dreadlock hair, symbol of the Old Testament lion’s mane.

When I discussed this issue in my College of the Redwoods class the other day, they seemed underwhelmed. I guess if you’re that interested, you’ve read about it already. They preferred to talk about the FLDS Church, the radical faith that practices polygamy and sequesters its women and children in a Texas compound.

Unlike Rastafari, theirs is a faith we still know very little about. In fact, what we know, we’ve seen in the vacant eyes of FLDS women, pleading for their children as they cover for their husbands. Nevertheless, it’s a lesson from which we all can learn. Trapped in our own information “compound,” we are just as likely to parrot the words of our mentors, unable to passionately speak for ourselves. We can believe that we are free to go, but that life is cold and cruel beyond our walls. So, we learn to accept the confinement in which we live.

I’ve always been afraid of acquiescing to “acceptance,” which is why I have gone crazy places and done crazy things, much to the chagrin of those who loved me then and love me now. Even now, I’m another credit card away from doing more. In his song “Netherlands,” the late Dan Fogelberg wrote: “One road is simple, acceptance of life. The other road offers me peace.”

I’ve since learned that you don’t have to use a passport to find peace. It can be had as easily on a walk to Target for a dollar-seven soda and popcorn special, as I do every day. Peace is in the reassurance that comes with every heartbeat and every breath.

To have ignored my panhandling hitchhiker would have been to miss an experience both rich and disappointing. On one level, I was just a guy who had spare change. On another, I allowed myself to be the student of life around me, ever inquiring, ever reaching.

That’s why I laughed when commentator Bill O’Reilly, with whom I often share this same opinion page (but rarely the same opinion), said there was no such thing as a homeless veteran. Yet, with my student Elizabeth Tjader, I met one in our first minute at St. Vincent de Paul’s Dining Center. Sometimes, compounds are physical walls and dark religions. Sometimes they are the product of ignorance. Freedom is ours for the asking.

Dave Silverbrand is a well-known Humboldt County television personality and teaches journalism at College of the Redwoods.