The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America (2 page)

The walkway is thick with tourists. I reach back out of reflex to check for my wallet. For the first time in memory, there’s only the feel of a denim pocket flat against my ass.

I reach the visitor center parking lot on the other side of the bridge and drop my pack near the freeway on-ramp. My plan is to travel through rural America, sticking to two-lane roads. It will be more interesting, I figure, and safer. But I must first get out of the Bay Area, and that means heading north on an eight-laner.

Except for a few local rides in high school and college, I’ve never been a hitchhiker. I know the baggage that mode of transportation carries. I won’t thumb rides on this trip. I’ll write signs indicating where I want to go. It’s a subtle difference, but I like to think of what I’m doing as carpooling.

I pull my first sign from my pack and display it to vehicles returning to Highway 101. My destination: “America.”

Drivers mouth the word through windshields, and smile. Tour bus riders laugh and nudge fellow passengers. One man in a car with Tennessee plates hoots halfway to Memphis. I’m glad my sign is getting kudos, but I’d prefer a lift.

Three women ride by on bicycles. “It’s a bit vague,” one says.

“I’m keeping my options open,” I say.

A young man with a serious look wanders up and stares. He speaks with a German accent. “Where is this ‘America’?”

Indeed.

“Hop in, partner.”

The man looks to be in his fifties, his beer belly wedged behind the wheel of an American beater a block long. Girlie tattoos cover his arms. Is he a kind stranger, or just kind of strange? I hope for the best and slide in.

“You hear about them two guys killing their way ’cross the country?” he says.

“No,” I lie, nervous about this fellow’s choice for an icebreaker.

“One’s twenty-three and the other’s sixteen. They steal a car, kill the people, and when it runs out of gas, they take another car and kill again.” He pulls the lighter from the dash and holds it to the end of a cigarette. “It’s a sad world. I’m kinda glad my time is almost up. It’s gonna get worse before it gets better.”

His name’s Art, and he’s on his way home to Santa Rosa, an hour up the road. He had his eyes checked this morning in San Francisco and had to pull over because his pupils were dilated. He blinks and squints, trying to keep his land yacht between the white lines. We pass my old office. No regrets—yet.

Art was career Navy, then dumped his last dollar into a seafood restaurant. He went bust after opening another. His wife took off when her mother died and left her some money. That was six years ago. Art’s not sure where she is. He’s lost track of the kids, too. These days, he shares an apartment with a waiter and tends bar when he can. He hasn’t worked in eight months.

“They won’t hire anyone over fifty,” he says.

He dials in a classic rock station. Led Zeppelin’s “What Is and What Should Never Be” blares through cracked speakers. The cloth lining from the ceiling falls on my head.

“Do you think I’m crazy, Art?” I say, after telling him my story.

“Hell, no!” he yells, like he’s angry. “I envy you!”

Art drops me at a gas station at his exit.

“Hell,” he says, “maybe you’ll find Utopia out there and won’t want to come back.”

I consult the AAA road atlas I packed. Ukiah is another 60 miles north. A book I read named it one of the 100 best towns in America. I wonder if “best” relates to “kind” as I write, “Ukiah,” on a sheet of paper with my Magic Marker and tape it to my piece of cardboard.

A driver stops on the on-ramp. “I’m only going to Healdsburg,” he says through the passenger window, “but that’ll get you fifteen miles closer to Ukiah.”

I cram my pack into the backseat of his tiny import. The guy says he’s going to see a friend in Healdsburg. He’s a large man, with a rough complexion and an unnatural orange tint to his hair. I try to make eye contact, but he doesn’t look at me. He shifts into fifth, and I tense as his hand brushes my leg.

“You really should see the Russian River,” he says. “I ought to show you my favorite place.”

I tell him I was at the Russian River a couple months ago. With my girlfriend. He drops the subject.

The man drives by the first of two exits for Healdsburg.

“Where are you turning off?” I say.

“Oh, I guess I should drop you downtown. I’ll take you back. I’ve got time.”

He takes the second exit. My gut tells me to get out here, but I know the odds of catching a ride are better at the on-ramp in town. We cross the overpass and head south.

We coast down the off-ramp at the central exit. Healdsburg is left under the freeway. The man rolls through the stop sign and continues straight.

Before I can protest, he says, “I’ll show you the river in case you get stuck here and want a place to camp.”

He rounds a blind curve. A yellow sign warns, “Not a Through Road.” There’s a gravel pit on the left, fields to the right. I feel all sense of control seep out of me. For the first time in my life, I think I know what it’s like to be a woman. The man drives on.

The road dead-ends at the river. The man turns the car around and cuts the engine. A van is parked to my right, next to an embankment. I can’t see inside the tinted windows. I watch the man out of the corner of my eye and wait for his buddy to emerge from the van with a knife, or worse.

“This is a good place to get your dick sucked,” the man says.

The remark ricochets off the windshield and hangs in the air like verbal graffiti.

Blood pounds against my eardrums. The day outside looks like a movie. If I can only stand in the sun, the rest of this might vanish.

My fingers grip the door handle, but I can’t bring myself to open it. I can’t even breathe.

Finally, the white noise is broken by the sound of the engine.

We’re moving again. The man says something about the trees, how good they smell. Yes, I agree, inhaling deeply.

He drops me by the freeway and asks how long I plan to be on the road. I tell him about two months.

“Well, have a good trip.”

I’m too unnerved to get in another stranger’s car today, so I let my shaky legs carry me into town. There’s a farmers’ market in the city parking lot. Free samples, I figure. I make several passes down the line of produce stands, smiling and nodding at the vendors, but nobody shoves food in my face.

A clerk at the Chamber of Commerce hands me a list of lodging options in the area. Accommodations fall in the categories of “expensive,” “moderate,” and “budget.” There’s no category called “free.” But I see there’s a campground, and I ask for directions.

I walk six miles to the campground, not knowing if the owner will let me spend the night. The country road winds through the Alexander Valley, part of Sonoma County’s famed wine region. Neat rows of grapevines stretch out to the mountains. A sagging wire fence is all that keeps me from the clusters of plump, juicy fruit. It’s been eight hours since the Elvis Scramble, but I’m not yet desperate enough to commit trespassing and petty theft. I walk on, my stomach cursing my conscience.

A sign at the campground entrance tells me a campsite costs $5. Another sign hanging from the nearby trailer tells me the man to see about a deep discount is named Chief. I knock on the aluminum siding. A large Indian appears in the doorway. Chief, I presume.

“I’m Mike McIntyre. I wonder if I could stay here, and I’ll do some work for you in return.”

Chief gives me a long glance from behind the screen door.

“For how long?”

“Just for tonight.”

“Pick yourself out a spot.”

I say thanks and ask what he needs done.

“I can’t think of anything right at the moment. Go ahead and spend the night.”

The campground sits on what was once a Wappo Indian reservation. “Everyone left to go work for the white man, and the government took it away from us,” Chief says. Now he works for the white man who bought his boyhood home from the government. He’s petitioning Congress to return the land to his tribe.

He was a big city cop before he tired of the politics and corruption and turned in his badge. His old lieutenant, now with the police department in another city, wants Chief to quit the campground and join the force. But Chief won’t hear it.

“I like it out here,” he says. “When I wanna take a piss, I just walk outside and take one. You can’t piss in the city.”

It’s the day after Labor Day weekend, so the campground is nearly empty. I unroll my sleeping bag beneath an oak tree. I didn’t bring a tent. My lack of shelter might be the excuse wary strangers need to invite me into their homes. Especially when it rains.

I sit on the picnic table and write in my journal. I look up to see my site’s idle barbecue taunting me. A man a few sites over grills chicken. The family across the path cooks steaks. Long after nightfall, I sit in the dark, listening to the belches and sighs of happy campers. Then I go to bed hungry for the first time since I was a kid.

The next day, a trucker carries me to the Ukiah exit. I walk the mile from the freeway into town, passing every fast food chain in existence. I get the shakes when I wait too long between meals. But I’m all shook out. What’s left is a headache that could split an atom.

I study the downtown restaurants like a robber casing banks.

I know my next move. But where? When? I circle the block three times. When I screw up enough courage, I slip through a doorway. Inside, I find a cafe still under construction. Stupid! I stammer my rehearsed offer to work for food, anyway. “Sorry,” the owner says. Her look tells me that in the span of 24 hours, I’ve turned into one pathetic dude.

A woman and two men chat on the sidewalk. The woman glances over the shoulder of one of the guys and flashes me a smile. She looks like a girl I went to high school with 20 years ago. She sat behind me in biology class, blowing lightly on my neck and whispering, “I love you.” Or perhaps it was the overhead fan, and her muttering, “I loathe school.”

I turn the corner and imagine her chasing after me, gushing, “Is that really you?” I tell her it is, and everything else. She must get back to work, but I absolutely can’t leave town until we’ve caught up. She hands me her house key and jots down her address. “The refrigerator’s full,” she says. “Help yourself to anything.”

Clearly, I’ve lost it.

I wander the streets and end up in the city park. Three bums occupy the bench near the drinking fountain. They swig from a jug of red wine as an Elvis Presley tape plays on their boombox.

“Dave! Dave! Dave!” one of them bellows. “I’m fucking drunk, Dave!”

The one on the end leans over and vomits to “Don’t Be Cruel.”

I scan the park and zoom in on three women eating sack lunches. I stake out a spot between them and the garbage can. On closer look, I see that one of them eats from plastic tableware. That means leftovers, not trash. Another one is fat. She didn’t get that way counting calories. Sure enough, she gobbles every bite, and then devours a candy bar. The third one, though, looks promising. She’s skinny. There’s half a sandwich still in her hand, and she’s definitely slowing down. From this angle, it appears to be avocado and Jack, with sprouts, on a fresh croissant. It’s got my name on it, I know it. It won’t be in the can long enough to be called garbage. But wait! She’s getting a second wind. She polishes off the whole thing. As a final insult, she licks her fingers.

Before I left San Francisco, my good friend Bruce gave me nine energy bars for the trip. I put them in the bottom of my pack, next to my winter gloves. My goal was for all nine snacks to arrive with me at Cape Fear. That would mean an abundance of kind strangers. But here it is only day two, and I’m ripping open the wrapper of a wild berry energy bar. It tastes like sawdust. It tastes great. I swallow the last bite and slump against my pack in defeat.

I sense that my luck isn’t about to change here, so I head for the highway, running the gauntlet of fast food restaurants. A shabby fellow overtakes me on the sidewalk and ducks into the shrubs bordering a shopping mall parking lot. He reaches down and comes up with something yellow in each hand. My eyes bulge. I know what they are, but I can’t quite believe it.

“What are those?”

“Pears!” the man says.

“They okay to eat?” I ask excitedly, wading into the bushes.

“They’re good! This is the Pear Tree Shopping Center.” He points to a sign overhead. And so it is.

The ground is covered with ripe pears. I rinse one off with my water bottle and bite into the fruit. Sweet, sticky juice dribbles down my chin. Incredible! I finish off the pear and eat another, and another. I store a few more ripe ones in my pack for later, plus a firm one that should be ready to eat in a couple days.

A balding schoolteacher drives me to Lake Mendocino, nine miles north of Ukiah. Bob hitched around the country in the sixties, so this ride is a trip down memory lane for him.

“I admire you for what you’re doing,” he says. “Americans are too comfortable. We forget. It’s humbling to know that all you have is in that backpack.”

I wait for Bob to invite me to stay at his place tonight, but he doesn’t. Instead, he hands me a small bag of sunflower seeds that’s already been opened. “There’s your dinner,” he says, chuckling. When I hop down from the pickup, I behold the seeds and wonder: Is the bag half empty, or half full?

The visitor center in Ukiah told me there was free camping at the lake. But when I reach the registration booth at the campground run by the federal government, the woman inside says, “That’ll be twelve dollars, please.” I tell her there must be a mistake. No mistake, she tells me. Free camping was phased out in the eighties.

The sun is setting. I don’t want to hitchhike in the dark. There’s nowhere to go, anyway. I ask the woman if I could pick up trash in return for a campsite. She radios the ranger. I repeat my request to Ranger Laura when she arrives in her truck. She doubts it, she says, but she’ll run it by her supervisor. She radios him, and he says he’s got to check with his boss. I see my tax dollars hard at work. Finally, word comes back from on high. “You’ve got a deal,” Ranger Laura says, handing me a plastic bag.