Eating Fried Chicken with a Hitch-Hiker Brought Me Clarity

I used to pick up hitch hikers all the time, like once or twice a month. It was when I was about 18, 19, 20 years old and I felt like the world was a place full of good people. I wasn’t a complete idiot about it; it’s not like I was picking up men walking down the Blue Ridge Parkway dragging clunky garbage bags behind them. And I always approached it with the thought that these people were taking as much of a chance on me as I was on them. (Yes, I realize that this isn’t a logical argument in any way because I know for a fact that I am not a psychopathic killer where as I am not entirely sure about the hitch hikers). Either way, some of my most memorable social encounters have been with hitch hikers.

When I was a senior in high school, I picked up a man one Sunday who was stranded in my church’s parking lot with a flat tire. He was trying to put his spare on, but his spare was flat too. I stopped to see if he needed any help and he asked me if I would mind driving him down the road to an auto-shop so he could see about buying him a new spare. I drove him to a couple auto-shops before we realized that with it being Sunday, there wouldn’t be anything opened until at least 1 o clock. I can’t remember the man’s name, but I do remember we went and got cups of coffee at a gas station and then sat outside waiting for the shop to open. It was the first time I realized just how much strangers can talk about when they have nowhere else to go. He was probably in his late forties and we talked about our favorite subjects in school. We started talking about books and he couldn’t believe that we were still reading basically the same books 30 years later. I remember him saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” We got his tire and I took him back to the church parking lot. I left him there because at that point I was sure my mother was wondering where I had gotten to and if you know my mother, you also know that she had already contacted the local police station, and was printing out a flyer with my latest yearbook picture on it.

After that encounter, I got kind of addicted to picking up hitch-hikers. It was one of the first times I felt like I was doing something that really and truly mattered. A person needed something and I could provide for them in a very simple and tangible, albeit dangerous and naïve, way.

I met two of my favorite hitch-hikers in the High Country while I was a student at Appalachian State University. I was driving back up the mountain one Sunday after a weekend at home and the flurries turned into snowfall right when I hit Wilkesboro. There was a man walking down the right side of the road, hunched over, wearing a jacket that was much too thin. Right before I passed him, he turned around to walk backwards so the wind wouldn’t hit him in the face, and he waved me down as I passed by. I pulled over and he ran up to meet me, and I’m not going to lie, when I rolled the window down I was tempted to drive off. This guy looked a little worse for the wear and smelled like beer and cigarettes, but I said a prayer and tried to remember some of the self-defense moves we’d learned in health class…just in case. After telling me that he was just headed ½ a mile up the road to a hotel (which made it even shadier), I told him to hop in. He struggled with the door handle for a second and when he got into the car, I realized why. The poor man had two huge bandages, one covering each of his hands (which again, made him even shadier).

“Tough day to be thumbing a ride huh?” I asked as I pulled back onto the highway.

The man didn’t laugh (which made me worry that he was going to harvest my organs) but he plunged into a narrative about an unfortunate sledding accident involving a 2 X 4 and his girlfriend’s son. He had been walking for about 45 minutes in the freezing cold after going to the hospital where he found out that he had two broken thumbs (irony overload). I dropped him off at the seediest hotel on 421 and picked up some Febreeze at the Boone Wal-Mart.

Then there was George. I saw him standing at the corner of Poplar Grove and 105 one afternoon. I was headed out to the creek near the Hound’s Ear Club to do some hiking and writing. It was about 50 degrees which is a pretty warm day for Boone, especially in March, but George, who was probably in his 70s, was bundled up in a puffy jacket. He had a case of beer and a lot of grocery bags so at first I thought he was waiting for the bus. Then I realized that corner wasn’t a bus stop. He waved at me as I drove by in a way that seemed to say he was waiting for me. I turned around and pulled into the parking lot of a Go-Kart place that still hadn’t opened up from the long winter, and he trundled over to my car with his groceries.

He told me that he’d been waiting for somebody to stop for the past hour and he asked if I would give him a lift to his house, out towards Vilas. I decide to forgo the hike and spend some time with a perfect stranger.

Turned out George got a lift to town every Saturday from a neighbor, but it was a one-way ticket. The neighbor drove down to Hickory for the weekend and never came back before Sunday evening. So every Saturday, George stood on the corner just waiting for someone to stop, waiting for human decency, temporary insanity, and the Golden Rule to prevail. And surprisingly, he hadn’t been let down. Every week, for years, someone would stop and give George a ride home. I’m sure a lot of times it was the same people over and over again, but still. George was a Korean War veteran, like my grandfather and we talked about that and about what I was studying in college. He probably asked the same questions each week since it was usually a college student driving him home.

The drive to George’s house was long and after about thirty minutes I’m ashamed to admit that I started to get annoyed by how much gas I was using. When the road started to get narrower and narrower, my annoyance turned into terror and I decided that George was going to murder me and his puffy jacket was just a ruse to hide his well developed and muscular arms that could strangle me, no problem. I even imagined the Dateline show where they talked about my disappearance and a police dog would find my remains under an abandoned barn in 2015. But then he told me to turn left onto a gravel driveway and I could see a small white board-and-batten house that looked like it had grown from out of the ground with a rickety front porch. As I got closer to the house, I could see an older woman sitting in a rocking chair with a blanket covering her legs. She stood up and waved us in and for some reason, all of my fears about George went away. This woman walked out to my car to help her husband get the groceries and I realized that everything George told me was true. This was obviously a routine for her and she had been anxiously waiting on the porch for her husband’s safe return for the last few hours.

George introduced me to his wife, whose name I cannot remember to save my life, and she invited me to stay for supper. I realized that this was probably a part of George’s routine, and since I was 85% sure that they weren’t going to murder me and sell my jeep for parts, I decided to stay and eat the best fried chicken I had ever had in my life with two of the sweetest perfect strangers I’d ever met.

Sometimes, if I’m really upset, I think about this man and his ability to hope and believe in the kindness of total strangers and it makes me cry and then smile.

Ironically, after my experience with George, I stopped picking up hitch-hikers. When I would tell people the George story, they would yell at me or tell me that I was crazy. And when I really thought about it, it was crazy! What kind of an idiot picks up an old dude standing on the side of the road wearing a giant jacket on a warm day and carrying a case of beer. And then who would agree to drive him 30 minutes into the woods and then eat a meal that he and his wife could have easily laced with something. I mean, it’s those situations that stories like Hansel and Gretel, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood, etc are very clear about. Don’t talk to strangers! Because if you do, they will either try to eat you, murder you, or kill your grandma.

I started thinking about all of this lately because I went on a post-traumatic-graduate-school-rejection road trip and ended up in downtown Baltimore. I had to stop because I was out of money for the tolls and I was hungry. I ended up driving through the Mount Vernon neighborhood right near the Washington Monument and there was a little Greek place called The Crazy Greek with a parking spot right out front. I ordered the spanakopita that was on special and decided to walk down to the park around the monument to eat and stretch my legs before I started the rest of my trip home. As I passed by a beautiful Methodist church in the circle, a man sitting on the front steps called out me.

“It sure was cold last night, wasn’t it?”

“It was. It feels pretty good out here now though.” I said back to him.

He was obviously homeless from the number of bags he was carrying, and he was all bundled up kind of like George, even though it was almost 60 degrees. It was like he had known a type of cold that kept him from ever being as warm as the people around him. Something about this man made me want to stop and talk to him, in the same way George had. It was almost like he was waiting for me.

I stopped and asked him a few questions about the park and of course he was a veritable tour guide and could tell me everything I wanted to know, down to the dates the monument was built and how a lot of people get it confused with the Washington Monument in D.C. Before I knew it, I was sitting down on the steps talking with this man about Baltimore’s history.

His name was Allen and I got really excited when he told me that, and I asked him how he spelled it. (It would have been too perfect to meet a man named Allan in Baltimore, Maryland, the home of Edgar Allan Poe). He spelled it with an E-N though which led us to a discussion about his family life, and how he ended up homeless. Allen was a very neat man considering the fact that he had no home and listening to him talk about his daily routine, it seemed like he spent most of his time and energy finding places to get cleaned up. I would imagine if I ran into Allen today, he would look a little different because he probably spends more energy trying to find places to stay warm, but it was fascinating listening to him talk about homelessness in such a straightforward way. I offered him some of my spanakopita before realizing that I only had 1 fork, but that didn’t matter, because he pulled a fork out a bag. I cut the spanakopita in half, and we sat there in the beautiful park on a fall day eating and talking. After about 25 minutes, I realized that I needed to hit the road since it was a school night and I still had about 6 hours of driving ahead of me.

I said good-bye to Allen, and walked back to my car, elated by making a connection with a complete stranger. It was a feeling that I hadn’t had in years, probably not since eating dinner with George and his wife. It was that feeling where I had given myself over to something bigger than me and I had come out unscathed, and better than before. I was allowing myself to be moved towards people instead of moving myself away from them. And the results were beautiful.

I hesitated to post this because I didn't want it to seem self-righteous. Picking up hitch-hikers wasn’t always about altruism because it made me feel so damn good to do it, and if you remember the episode of Friends about altruism you’ll remember that it doesn’t count as altruism if it makes you feel good. Plus, it makes me realize that in the last ten years, I have changed and I have lost some of my trust and hope and that makes me sad. Helping strangers means trusting strangers, and I hate knowing that I've lost a lot of that ability to trust.

I guess this is all coming up because it’s reaching New Year’s Resolution time and I am and always will be a firm believer in those. As cliché as it is, I love New Year’s Resolutions. Last year I resolved to start a blog and to lose weight. With this post, I will have written 29 essays this year that I’ve felt confident enough to share (p.s. writing makes a person feel incredibly vulnerable) and I’m over 20 pounds lighter than I was at Christmas last year…not including the preschooler I probably gained at my mom’s Christmas party today. Don't worry Mom and Dad, I’m not saying that I’m going to start picking up hitch-hikers again, but I am going to try and allow myself more opportunities to make connections with complete strangers (that don't always have to be homeless or in need of a ride). Some of my most vivid memories are from these encounters and anytime a memory is bright, that means you were probably living more in that moment than a years’ worth of moments combined.

And giving is living.