Listen to the full piece here:
The driver angled the station wagon toward the side of the road and billows of dust rose up when the four tires hit the hard-crust dirt and broke through to the loess beneath. The vehicle slid to a stop about a hundred yards ahead of me and I ran toward it with my blue backpack flopping over one shoulder.
I wanted to reach it before it could take off again. I’d been hitchhiking for a few weeks now and I’d had plenty of experience with cars pulling over and then speeding away as I caught up to them. Usually it was a group of adolescents grinning and waving wildly through the rear windshield as they sped away.
I could have ambled slowly over — a way of hedging my bets — but I knew instinctively that everyone had a role to play in this little drama. Just then mine was to come up short, stand forlorn in their swirling backwash and let my pack fall to the ground in desperation. I played my part well; I saw the giddy satisfaction in my audience’s eyes while I mimicked despair. They went home overly-pleased with themselves while I just went back to sticking out my thumb and trying to bum a ride and get myself as far as I could from home.
I had plenty of time so I didn’t begrudge them their game. I did wonder if one day, down the line, they’d remember their antics and feel remorse. Right now I let them enjoy their little joke.
So when this vehicle slowed, I ran.
But the two men in their station wagon waited patiently. They had four small but powerful dogs in the back and it was these animals who were pawing and wagging for me to climb aboard. The two men, for their part, just sat staring forward, waiting for me to get in.
I put my hand on the door handle and hesitated. I looked at the hyper-active canines slobbering all over the windows and the two stolid men, eyes front. Something didn’t seem right but I also didn’t have a lot of options. I’d been standing there fruitlessly since early in the morning and this was the first car to stop. So I did the only thing that made sense. I got in.
To do so I swung my pack deftly around and used it as a shield to push the dogs to the far end of the seat long enough to close the door so they couldn’t run loose onto the highway.
“Thanks for stopping,” I said.
The dogs had re-grouped and were now scrambling over and around my backpack. The first of many tongues landed on my cheek.
“Where you heading?” the man in the passenger seat said.
“I’m heading East. To New Orleans.”
“You’re hitching in the wrong place. Nearest truck stop is behind us. You need to go back. We’ll take you.” He still had not turned his face to me. The driver said nothing but the car started rolling forward, picking up speed and bouncing over the soft shoulder to re-join the highway.
“But I’m heading the other way,” I pleaded.
“Got that. But you need to go back to the truck stop where the long haulers are. Otherwise you won’t ever get outta here. These crackers would rather die than stop for you.”
The driver took the next exit and looped under the highway to take the on-ramp going back the way I had just come.
I started to say something but lost my nerve. Maybe they were right. And anyway I was under assault by four drooling dogs. Just as I pushed one away another would make a lunge for my face and draw their tongue wetly across it. They were small, compact dogs, all muscle, some sort of pitbull cross. One of them, the bitch, had big sagging teats hanging under her belly. I was their new toy.
We drove several miles in silence except for the grunting and snuffling of the dogs. Up ahead we all saw a pick-up truck by the side of the road and a woman staring at a flat tire. The two men exchanged a quick glance and pulled over, behind the woman’s truck. They both got out while I watched the situation from the back seat. I’d given up trying to fight off the dogs unless they managed to put their tongue in my mouth.
The two men walked over to the woman. One of them knelt down and looked at the tire with concern. Then he got back up and walked to the rear of the station wagon and dropped the back door. The dogs suddenly turned their attention to him and began scrambling in his direction.
“Get back!” he yelled viciously and the dogs, to my amazement, halted in mid-scramble. He was rummaging around in all the junk in there. He walked back toward the woman carrying a tool.
Just then another pickup came down the highway and screeched to a halt in front of the woman’s truck. A man jumped out and I could see the relief in the woman’s face. After exchanging a few words, the two men came back to the station wagon, scowling. One dropped the tool with a heavy clunk on the floor. The driver turned the key and uttered the first word I’d heard him say, “Fuck.”
I didn’t like these guys and I didn’t like whatever I’d almost been a part of.
After another mile or so we pulled off at the exit but instead of a truck stop we found just some forelorn country roads leading to nowhere.
“I remembered wrong,” the man in the passenger seat said. “Must be the next one.”
I didn’t wait to find out. As the car slowed down I worked the door and jumped out dragging my backpack behind.
“Thank you,” I shouted over my shoulder as I scurried away.
As luck would have it, a farm worker stopped and picked me up. And indeed, as the men had said, at the next exit there was a truck stop full of 18 wheelers and a slew of shops and life and people moving this way and that across the country.
Soon enough I caught a fresh ride in the cab of a gleaming semi and was on my way to New Orleans.
Sitting at the kitchen table in my studio in Buenos Aires beside the big window it all seems an awfully long time ago. The fire and desperation were burning bright in me back then and they just kept pushing me further and further down the road.
I’ve mellowed. Maybe I learned something along the way or maybe I just became more accepting of the contradictions. Life has two parts: the impulse that you alone can give it and the things that happen outside your control. It’s the interplay that writes our stories.
I used my wits and instinct to get from San Francisco to New Orleans and back on 90 dollars. But I didn’t do it alone. I couldn’t have done it without the strangers.
Sure, the universe threw up these two guys right out of a Jim Thompson novel and put them on my path but all the other strangers I met came to give me a hand. (And in the end it seems those two men did too… it’s just that they gave me the creeps.)
There was an elderly lady who gave me a ride across the California desert because she feared someone else would do so if she didn’t. The hunter who bought me a meal in Barstow. The Mexicans hauling a refrigerator in the back of their truck over the Sierras. The truck driver from Shreveport, Louisiana who shared his hotel room with me while we waited for a load. The hobo who whisked me away from a group of vagrants around a fire with an urgency that I only later understood to be a sign of the danger I had been in. The group of guys I slept with in an all-night laundromat including the one who showed me the next morning how no one was going to get the jump on him, flashing the gun under his vest. The college students who befriended me in New Orleans and took me to their priest who let me stay a few days in an unused office at his community center.
It was these people who showed me where to find God should I ever need him.
God, it turns out, is a stranger.
Subscribe to Little Epiphanies newsletter here: https://www.kevincarrelfooter.com/join/
Like this? Share it with a friend:
Leave a Reply