A Journey of Encounters and Memories

I remember hitchhiking in the summer of '90 from my home in Southern Indiana to a town in Northern Indiana where I was attending college at the time.  It began with me sitting at my desk in my room on a Friday night listening to the music of Keith Green through headphones and thinking about my Grandpa, Poppy, who had been a wanderer of the West in his late teens/early twenties during the great Depression.  He had jumped freight cars and used the railroads to take him from Ohio to most every state in the American West.  I do not remember exactly what my thoughts were at the time, but I do remember my mood and the sense of a crushing melancholy that hit me while sitting in that largish closet I'd converted into my office, sucking all of the air out of it and making it hard to breathe.

It was some time after 11pm and my parents and sisters had gone to bed, the house completely dark.  I suddenly found myself sobbing while listening to that music that had always touched me so deeply and carried me through some dark times in High School.  It was a feeling that could not be contained in so small a space and with thoughts of Poppy on my mind I determined to take a journey into the wider world.

I wrote a note to my parents, gathered up a few dollars and some change, then found an old wool coat in a closet that had been my Dad's not worn since the 70's.  It was a kind of blue and white tartan pattern with a matching wide belt and buckle.  It was a bit preposterous and I considered it a costume of sorts for the road along with my holiest t-shirt.  The shoes I grabbed were cheap dock shoes that were half falling apart and completed the homeless look.  Finally, I put a couple of small tracts in my pocket that said something to the effect "Do you want to be a good person?"  In retrospect, this is something that Poppy would have done as he was known to leave these kind of small Christian pamphlets in public places for people to find.

***

I snuck out the back door and into the chilly night air of Mitchell, Indiana.  I had no idea where I would go or how I would get there.  I heard the sound of a train coming from the direction of the downtown area of our small town and set off in that direction.  When I arrived at the tracks the train was heading southward and moving much too fast to jump on.  I considered where it was headed, which was  likely Louisville through rural Southern Indiana, and decided that was not the path I would take this evening.

At that point I considered going back home and going to bed, but I still had that terrible itch to make an adventure of it and decided instead to hitchhike north on the main highway that was on the west side of town.  The next town north of us was about nine miles away and my plan was to thumb a ride to that town and then decide what to do from there.  About five miles into the trip with no rides to be found I was having some serious second thoughts.  My PayLess shoes were rubbing my toes raw and so I stopped and sat in the grass at the roadside to take them off and rip the toe of the shoe away from the sole to allow for some more room.  A few miles more and I was regretting it as gravel was finding its way into my shoe through the open front.

***

I was practically to Bedford and a fog was starting to set in.  Just when I was about to give up hope and head back home, a car pulled over to pick me up.  The guy was a twenty-something Caucasian male and looked a little rough around the edges.  With a kind of bewildered tone he enquired as to what I was doing walking this time of night and to where I was going.  That is the translated and abridged version.  In reality, every other word out of his mouth was a cuss word.  I had never heard anything like it or met anyone who laced their speech so densely with profanity.  No one in my family used cuss words.  I'll always remember the time my Dad hit his thumb while driving a nail into my bedroom wall when I was a kid.  He yelled out "Dadgummit!" and my Mom instantly appeared in the doorway and chided him for using such language.  He quickly calmed down and apologized.

I told this good Samaritan that I was headed into Bedford and joined him in the front seat.  We made small talk about how expensive driving had become in recent months as it was a time when the price of gas had started to make a precipitous climb.  He continued to show a tremendous amount of empathy for my plight while unknowingly burning my conservative Christian ears with his foul language.  It was quite a lesson for me as I had never before equated a "clean" heart with a "dirty" mouth.  In my limited experience and exposure I'd thought they were somehow mutually exclusive.  He dropped me off near Denny's and then sped off into the night, but not before I'd left a tract on the seat for him to find later.  His act of kindness and concern trumped my little paper pamphlet, but I only vaguely understood that at the time.

***

As I stood in the glow of the Denny's sign the thought occurred to me that it would be nice to go in and sit down with a cup of coffee and find someone to talk to or at the very least be able to chit chat with a friendly waitress.  I didn't have any money to spare if I wanted to eat later and I was eager to continue my journey.  It was at this point that I had the audacious idea to hitchhike to Marion, Indiana a hundred and fifty miles from where I stood.  It was home to the college I was attending at the time, Indiana Wesleyan University.  I had some friends who lived off campus and might be around over the summer.

Lost in these thoughts, a car pulled over and another guy offered me a ride.  This guy was probably in his early thirties and quiet.  He asked me where I was headed and I told him I wanted to head north on Highway 37.  At some point, after getting into his car, I shared that my ultimate destination was Marion.  Within a mile or two he propositioned me for a particular act that caught me by surprise and made me realize I was swimming in some strange and unfamiliar waters.  I did not let it show in my voice and simply told him I was not into that kind of thing.  He offered to take me all the way to Marion if I complied.  When he could not change my mind he pulled over to the side of the highway to let me off.  I discreetly fished another tract out of my pocket and placed it underneath me on the seat before exiting the car.

The fog was very thick by now as I walked somewhere between Bedford and Bloomington.  It would be almost impossible for a car to see me under these conditions and so I walked invisibly through the heavy mist for at least a few miles.  This kind of wandering while lost in thought is something I was prone to do after leaving home for college, mostly driven by a kind of uneasy angst.  In retrospect, I think it acted as a buffer against despair and included free floating prayers that I was sure were heard by a deity who listened to lonely people.

Having a destination made the wandering a little less aimless in my mind and gave me the motivation to keep going.  I passed between some sheer rock walls where the road had been cut through a very large hill.  On the other side of it a car came from behind me.  It was driving slow as if looking for something.  When it passed me it slowed further and then pulled over.  I jogged up to the car and opened the door.  It was the man who had propositioned me earlier and I said, "Oh, not you again" in a kind of mock exasperation.  He assured me he wouldn't bother me about anything this time, but was headed to Bloomington now and could give me a lift.  I hesitated, but then got in knowing that with the fog and at this time of night I would not likely get another ride for quite a long time if at all.  He was even quieter this time, but he did say a few things that made me think he'd found the tract and at least glanced through it a bit.

“Do you think I’m a bad person?” he asked.  His tone struck me as someone who is feeling a good deal of guilt and self-loathing.  I wasn’t sure how to respond, but finally told him that only God can judge him.  He dropped me off at one of the Bloomington exits and headed east into the city to look for something he couldn’t seem to find as I continued to head north.

***

The next ride came quicker than I expected.  I could hear it before I could see it.  The car was big and wide, pimped out a bit with some chrome hub caps and long vinyl bench seats with a  stereo designed to rattle the teeth in your head.  His windows were down and cigarette smoke wafted out, thickening as it hit the cool night air heavy with moisture.  He asked me where I was headed over the loud heavy metal music which he'd turned down only slightly.  When I told him he said he could take me as far as Muncie which is just south of Marion.  I could not believe my good fortune.  I had been worried about how I would navigate my way around the Indianapolis beltway with its myriad exits.  It would be the trickiest part of the journey, but now almost the entirety of the trip had been handed to me in one two-hour car ride.

Within the first mile or two I realized why he had his windows down and his music blasting.  He kept drifting over the lines and was trying to keep himself awake with the cold air and vibrations of his subwoofers.  The second or third time he'd swerved back onto the road after his head nodded, I proposed to him that I could drive and knew how to get to Muncie.  He thought about it for a minute or two and then pulled off the side of the road and we switched places.  He fell asleep almost immediately and I quieted the radio and rolled up the windows.  I watched the white hash marks flicker by in the darkness and felt my place in the oddness of the universe, cruising up Highway 37 in the middle of the night in a stranger's car.

We made our way up through Martinsville, a boy wearing his father's coat and a snoring headbanger, then hit the ramp to the 465 beltway around Indianapolis.  I would hitchhike my way back down to Mitchell through this stretch from the Indianapolis airport four years later in 1994.  The intervening years would include a two year stent in the Army, finishing my last year of college, and then spending a few months in Europe.  I flew from Frankfort, Germany to Chicago and then to Indianapolis.  I had not told anyone I was coming home and wanted to surprise them.  At the airport I bought a newspaper, a black marker and some tape.  I wrote "37 South" in large script and taped it to my tattered army surplus backpack that had carried my worldly possessions the past few months across Europe.  A scraggly looking man in a rusty red pickup truck picked me up and ended up taking me all the way to the doorstep of my sister's house.  It was once again an exercise in learning not to judge a book by its cover as I talked with this man and got to appreciate his struggles and good heart.

Back to 1990, I circled Indianapolis on its east side and then took Interstate 69 heading northwest.  The Muncie exit came up about 45 minutes later and I pulled into the gravel of an abandoned gas station and left the car running.  My passenger was still sleeping and so I poked him to wake him up.  "We're here", I said and exited the car.  He groggily scooted over to the get behind the wheel and lit a cigarette.  "Thanks for the ride," I said.  He nodded, then drove away.

***

I made my way back up the ramp to I-69 and headed northwards again to continue my hitchhiking  journey.  It was now twilight and the birds were singing their morning songs.  I felt tired, cold and hungry, but also thankful to be able to experience this moment of peace on a quiet stretch of road at sunrise.

A car pulled over in front of me and as I opened the passenger side door some familiar music greeted me.  Even more inviting was the heat coming out of the vents.  It was the first bit of comfort to be had on this all-nighter.  The driver was a middle-aged man in shirt and tie.  He asked me where I was going and I told him Marion.  He told me he could get me to a Marion exit, but would not be able to take me into town.  As we drove up the interstate I made comment about his music and named the artist.  I could tell by his expression that he had not expected me to know that he was playing a song by a Contemporary Christian singer.  It was that book and cover thing again, but with me as the object of scrutiny this time.

I shared with him some bits of my life, being a student at Indiana Wesleyan University, and other such information as the conversation unfolded over about a twenty minute period.  He was the first person to fully engage me in this way and it was obvious that he had not expected this particular encounter when he offered me a ride.  I seem to remember him saying a prayer with me when he stopped to drop me off at the exit on the outskirts of Marion.

***

The last leg in my northward journey was spent in the pickup truck of an elderly farmer who dropped me off at the corner of campus.  I made my way into a gas station convenience mart and rummaged in my pockets to find the two dollars and some odd cents that I'd stashed there. The donuts looked tempting, but I did not know how much longer this journey would last and so I went for the sausage and cheese biscuit breakfast sandwich sealed in plastic.  The microwave melted the cheese in a way that made it difficult to get out of the wrapper.  It tasted bland and artificial, but it was a warm and welcome visitor to my stomach nonetheless.

I sat at a booth by the window and looked out towards the college campus planning my next move.  There was no itinerary.  First it was Bedford, then Bloomington, then Marion frickin' Indiana for goodness' sake.  Who knows why I did what I did at that time in my life?  My mother certainly didn't know and my father and I might as well have been living on different planets by the time I hit college.

I spent an hour or so roaming the campus and may have even wandered into the Christian Ministries building where Art Professor Rod Crossman was painting a magnificent mural of the Apocalypse of John while suspended on some scaffolding.  The center of the massive canvas was commanded by a giant lion's face, probably ten feet tall or so.  There was also a woman with a crown of stars holding a newborn baby while a serpentine dragon loomed over her, waiting.  The four horseman may have been in it too, but I cannot see them clearly in my mind's eye and they may simply be a product of my imagination and fractured memory.  Under the lion's head was the silhouette of a shepherd holding a staff on a hill overlooking a modern city of gridded street lights that stretch out underneath these apocalyptic scenes suspended in a starry sky.  He is pointing them out to a modern figure next to him who is also in silhouette.

He took a break from his work and we talked for awhile.  I told him I was a fan of C.S. Lewis's stories and wanted to write things like that some day, and by "that" I meant fantasy-style fiction that would have a deeper layer of meaning glimpsed only by the sincere and attentive reader.  He was very gracious to spend that time with me and he encouraged me to follow that dream.  It sounds cliche now, but at that time in my life it was very meaningful to me.  And now that I have written out this memory I realize this meeting happened the previous summer, when I was traveling with a recruiting team for the university.  At that time we had occasion to stay on campus a few weekends of the summer while traveling all over the Midwest.  During those few weekends on campus we had stayed in an old house with white pealing paint that had a kitchen, common room, and a few bedrooms.  It was used by a variety of student groups that traveled for the university in various capacities.

It was that house that I found vacant and locked.  I walked around trying the windows and found one that had not been locked or could be jimmied in some way to get it open.  I crawled in conscious of the fact if campus security caught sight of me I could be in some serious doo-doo.  It was uncomfortably warm inside, but I was so exhausted I didn't care and laid down on the worn couch to take a nap.  I probably slept an hour or so before the heat got unbearable and I could no longer sleep.  I got up and went through the cabinets in the kitchen looking for food.  I found some packets of ramen and ate them raw like a cow munching on dry straw.  I lapped up water from the faucet with my hand.  I noticed a phone on the wall and thought to call my parents and let them know my whereabouts.  My Dad answered and asked where I was.  I told him I was in Marion and that I would be spending the day hitchhiking back to Mitchell.  He told me to stay put and he would come and pick me up.  I convinced him instead to meet me at my Grandma's house in Anderson which was about a 45 minute drive from Marion.  I walked to Highway 9 to extend my thumb one last time on this journey.

***

A man who looked to be in his fifties picked me up just outside of town and agreed to take me into Anderson.  He asked a few perfunctory questions and then commenced to bitch about his ungrateful daughter for the entire 45 minute ride.  He went on and on about how he'd been wronged, taken advantage of, mistreated and misused.  It was a torrent of toxicity and self-justification that was absolutely nauseating.  He had his captive audience and was going to exact his pound of flesh as the cost for the ride.

I did not know the exact location of my Grandma's house, but I knew it was on Main Street.  We passed Mounds Mall and my mind dove deep into memories from when I was probably four or five and we would visit Grandma and "Grampy John," as we called our step-grandpa.  She would take us to this mall where there was a play area with huge concrete turtles that we could crawl over and under.  It was a very simple set up, but thrilling to me nonetheless.  The less-than-thrilling memory from that mall was when my Mom did not have a dime to open the stall door in the lady's restroom and made me crawl under the door to open it from the inside.  These memories helped me detach from the man droning on in self-consuming anger and find a much needed mental respite.

I saw the sign for Main Street and latched onto it like a drowning person grabbing at a life preserver.  "Here, let me off here," I gestured to the side of the road a little too enthusiastically.  He pulled over and I thanked him for the ride, though I would have almost preferred to have walked the entire distance if I'd known what I was getting myself into.  I headed south on Main Street knowing that I'd eventually run into my Grandma's house.  It was an odd perspective kind of thing because we had always approached her house from the south and turned before the house itself to access the shared driveway in the back.  I was practically in front of it before I recognized her front porch and made my way around back.

The back yard was small and surrounded by a waist high chainlink fence.  I entered the covered back porch through the screen door and knocked on the back door of the house proper that opened into her kitchen.  No one was home so I rummaged through a sack of wooden clothespins that hung on the wall where I knew she sometimes hid their house key that looked like those old skeleton keys from a bygone era.  It was not there and I wondered where they were and how long it would be before they returned this hot Saturday morning.  I tried to catch a nap under their picnic table, lying on the grass in the shade, avoiding the direct heat of the sun.

They did not seem wholly surprised to see me when they arrived and they asked no questions as to how I'd come to be there.  In retrospect, my Dad must have called them and told them I'd be coming.  I seem to remember she had some groceries with her and maybe she'd gone out with Grampy John to get some food for my arrival.  None of this was mentioned at the time and we simply went inside together and she made some lunch while we chit-chatted waiting for Dad to arrive.  When he got there he joined us for lunch and we talked a bit more, the four of us around her metal kitchen table.  The fact that we were all together because of my impromptu journeying was the elephant in the room that remained unacknowledged and unspoken.

***

We said our goodbyes and gave our hugs and kisses before getting back on the road.  It was a very long drive home with almost no talking, both of us just staring out at the houses and cornfields whipping by as we progressed southward.  I guess at that time I just took my parents for granted in my solipsistic way of viewing the world and had no real understanding of how this might affect them.  I had had my adventure at their expense and six months later I would once again blindside them with my decision to join the Army at the outset of the first Gulf War, dropping out of my senior year of college and ending up in Korea for two years as an infantryman.

As is the case with many of the memories I've written about in the past few years, whether in poems or prose, I only seem to really appreciate these things now because I have a son of my own and can finally relate to what it might have been like for them.  All of those times I thought they'd been impatient with me growing up when, in reality, they'd been long suffering.  It's the difference between looking through the eyes of a kid and the eyes of an adult.