D I F F E R E N T N E S S
1
I didn’t stick my thumb out, preferring to walk for the morning along this scenic road where each hour I’m passed by a handful of joggers and cyclists in their tightest and brightest fitness wear. Like me they’re enjoying the quaint winding roadsides, blessedly cooled under shady wide-fanning fronds of the towering trees and bushes leaning above the highway. At one stretch of road, fighter jets scream back and forth low above the trees, sleek explosions of sound and metal that land and take off from the air force base I’d heard was nearby.
By noon, sun directly overhead, the road is quiet of athletes and traffic, and my stomach is growling. As I consider sitting for a backpack-lunch, a beaten-on old pickup truck passes me and swings onto the gravel shoulder ahead.
“Hey’ar, wanna lift?”
The driver, late thirties or forty, personifies the backwoods bayou country: unapologetic mullet hair, teeth in disrepair, stained jean shirt with the arms cut off and tattered at the shoulders, shabby cutoff shorts, and very dirty sandals. In stark contrast to the impeccably-dressed athletes I’d seen along this highway, both he and they exemplify the polar opposite cultures often living in side-by-side proximity around the globe.
“Sure, how far are you going?” I asked. He and his truck didn’t exactly have the aura of long distance travelers.
“Wal, up here a ways. My turnoff’s before town, get you near it, at least. Jist throw yer stuff in the back.”
I did so and hopped in with thanks. The truck rattled and thumped along with malnourished engine and a few loose-bolted parts, and a cab that apparently hadn’t been dusted since the day it was driven off the lot forty years ago. Garbage was the interior décor, probably simply kicked or swatted out of the truck on special occasion to make room for a passenger or more garbage. The kind of vehicle you feel a rustic ease in, closer to the earth—or, more accurately, the dirt—and a driver not worried about you ‘scuffing something’.
He ventured the usual hitchhiker-picker-upper’s questions like where was I from and what was I doing and how do I like it around here. I felt an uncomfortable, even a cautioning invisible finger tap my shoulder, so I deftly evaded his direct questions and didn’t vouchsafe any particularly personal details. Instead I asked questions about himself and this area, which opened the floodgates of ranting from his stubbly beard.
“Yeah, you get way back into the bayous, it’s lots more swamp than around here. Lotsa this here been filled in, make land for more goddamn of that ‘urban sprawl’ shit. They’s thousands ‘a acres ‘round here, dry land, used to be swamp, now it’s fuckin’ malls and golf. Takes away our living, doesn’t give us shit. Slowing down, though, lots of pertected swamp now, we had to fight off them developer fuckers through the courts. Stopped some ‘a them.”
When hitching, a personal rule: I never criticize or draw attention to my driver’s language, habits, quirks, or sundry other behaviors that may offend me. If I really don’t like my ride, I find a polite excuse and get out after a short distance. Otherwise, I act as if they’d said the most normal thing in the world. Because to them, they did.
“I got family back there, all up the bayous. Got my own place right on the water jist up here, but the family’s spread out way to the back country. Some ‘a them’s so far back nobody sees them for months, mebbe a year or two sometimes. Some ‘a their places is on stilts over the water. Jist build with whatever you kin find, take down some trees and make a place. They shoot squirrels an’ snakes and jist eats whatever, grows they own veggies and stuff. Hell, don’t even need money, way back there. Least, if the damn government an’ cops left you alone fer once. But, everythin’ changes.”
He continued in this vein for a few more minutes, then broke himself off mid-sentence with, “Wal, here’s my road.” He pulled over at the entrance to a dusty side-road that snaked passage beside a swampy bayou, both of them wending and becoming lost together far into the gloomy forest. Shacks, built of whatever boards and materials could be scrounged, were staggered along the waterway. Their overgrown yards were full of rusted and rotting and thrown-out relics of all species. The road, bayou, and shacks merged with the tangled, shadowy canopy of Grimm-style trees, their gnarled roots pushing out of the swamp and their vines drooping into it.
Though the driver’s face was blank of expression, my inner feeling insisted he was carefully feigning neutrality, so I felt an uneasy itch when he said, “You should come on in. See the place. Hey, we got some food if’n yer hungry.”
Something felt not-right. Not sincere, not face-value. Like this ‘nice’ version of him helping a stranger, inviting me in for more, was entirely faked, to cover up a less-nice intention lurking below.
So I said, kindly but without explanation, “No, I’ll stick to the highway for now. Appreciate the lift, thanks. Take care.” I’d said all this while stepping out of the truck, retrieving my backpack, and starting to walk along the road. All this done matter-of-factly, not hurrying but also without hesitation.
“Hey, you sure? Might wanna see the swamp, if yer a tourist,” he called as I walked away.
I finalized with a wave, “I’ll keep going. Thanks again.”
With no further comment, he turned off the highway and disappeared up the dark dirt road. Strangely, I did not think this was over. That nagging feeling…
2
The palms and thick bushes abruptly thinned, and the road blurted me from their gloomy shade into a more open vista. A long, beachy strip splayed ahead, rows of oceanview cottages and houses channeling either side of the road. I couldn’t see much of the ocean yet, just scraps of water between buildings, fences, trees. Two or three modest hotels peeked above the beach homes in the distant downtown core.
Twenty minutes after I was dropped off, I hear a familiar rumbling and rattling approach from behind and then stop beside me on the road. It’s the pickup truck again. Same driver but he now has two companions, equally backwoods-looking boys in their early twenties. Rough, stained clothing, unruly greasy hair, weathered dirty-looking skin with scarred hands and forearms. The driver calls across the boys, who both look intently at me.
“Hey, you wanna lift again? We’s jist goin’ up here a ways. Hop over in the back seat.”
The pickup is an extended cab with a small back seat but no back doors, so I’d have to crawl over the front seat to get back there. Through the years I’d compiled a trusted list of hitchhiking ‘rules’ that I never compromise, rules that help keep me safe and alive when riding with strangers. One of these rules is to never get into the backseat of a vehicle that has no rear doors. Always need an escape, in case of accident or dangerous people in the vehicle. They pull a gun or a knife or start pounding on you, where do you escape?
Another rule is to never—never never never never—ignore the ‘feeling’. This is the prime rule, in hitchhiking or any circumstance of life, for me. In many hundreds or thousands of rides during my hitching years, I’ve only gotten this ‘feeling’ a small number of times. It’s been long since I’ve felt this clarion warning siren from anyone, but I was receiving it loudly from these three.
And ‘feeling’ it is useless, if you don’t obey it. Shrugging it off, being afraid to act on it, is what gets you into serious trouble, or dead. I obey it unflinchingly, kindly at first but ready to run or do battle if the situation regresses to that.
“Hey, guys. No thanks. I was going to pass through, but I actually think I’ll stick around here for a while. I’m going to have lunch at that restaurant, sit and do some writing on my own, maybe get a room. Looks like a good place to write. Nice views around here.”
I said this kindly but leaving them no room for debate. Letting them know in a non-confrontational way that I was going to be by myself so I could write, without making it sound like I was turning them down for other reasons.
The driver had an okay poker-face. He was older, been around the block a few times. But the younger boys reacted, startled and uncertain. They looked around, at each other, at the driver as if to ask ‘Well, what do we do now?’ They showed everything plain as day on their faces, so obvious that it was almost comical. They had a plan, and I’d blown their plan in such a way that they couldn’t think of a debate or a backup plan.
I expect their plan was to somehow get me into that back seat, make me think they’re a bunch of swell guys helping me out, then pulling off the road somewhere and pulling a knife or jumping me. For my wallet and my gear, or just for kicks, or maybe worse. Who knows?
You don’t shrug off that ‘feeling’ just because you can’t figure out what’s in store for you. You’ll never figure out the myriad ways people can hurt you. You simply obey that feeling because you don’t know what’s in store for you.
There were houses beside us, people, cars passing on the road, so nothing they could do here. A few seconds of silence passed while they tried hard to rethink things, then I knocked the truck door with my knuckles, gave a quick wave, said, “Thanks anyway, guys, take care,” and walked on.
They didn’t say anything else, just drove on. A half-block ahead they pulled a U-turn, drove back past me with expressionless faces and were gone home again. Didn’t even have the smarts, or simply didn’t care, to keep driving ahead and make it look like they really were ‘going up here a ways’.
They had driven here expressly to try pick me up.
For…?
Whew. Escaped that one. Whatever it was.
Thank you, ‘inner feeling’.
Thank you, Me, for obeying.
I did indeed eat a long late lunch in the family restaurant I’d pointed to, read and wrote a little, nursed a drink for a couple hours under the ceiling fan. Mid-afternoon, empty restaurant, the servers didn’t mind.
3
Walking again, late afternoon. The beach homes became larger and newer, separating the original part of town from the later luxurious developments, together running a two-mile strip-community beside the beach. Many properties had For Sale or For Rent signs on fences by the road, obviously an old seaside community now exploding in new popularity. I could see larger slices of ocean through the spaces between buildings, but it’s still not the expansive ocean view I’ve been looking forward to. As I neared the downtown core the homes ceded to a long stretch of public beach on the ocean side of the road and a few trendy stores, restaurants, cafes and hotels along the other side.
The beach was so jam-packed with tanned and sweating bodies you’d be hard pressed to find a few square feet to throw down another towel. Beyond the beach, tropical blue waters were white-peppered with watercraft, many boats roped together into mini party-flotillas. Revelers on them were holding up drinks and cheering, dancing, jumping overboard to swim, and sporadically someone would moon the beach or flash their breasts.
The cacophony was viscous, with yelling and laughing and drunken wa-hooing, boom-boxes on the beach and stereos in the boats fighting over each other to be heard. Drinks were in every hand; I guess a small city can’t effectively police public alcohol consumption when there are twenty thousand visitors partying in public all week.
I feel like I’m part of a different world, passing through theirs. They in surf shorts and string bikinis, tanned or sunburnt, young and loud and excited, playing beach football, standing in groups drinking; me in sweatpants and hiking shoes, huge backpack, no longer particularly young, walking slowly past them, alone. Occasionally one or two of them would notice and, curiously, watch me walk by from their places in the crowds. Like two sides of a zoo fence, both species viewing each other. I, walking in search of ‘i’; they, trying to satiate their ‘me-me-me’.
I stopped on the sidewalk to gaze over the entire beach scene. A small, aging, lonely part of me wished I was younger again, appropriate and fitting in with their cutting-loose and music and booze and sex; but the now-version of me is already tired and stressed by this maelstrom of young party-minds, eager to extricate myself toward more peaceful surroundings.
I used to be ‘them’. But I have grown different, somewhere along the years.
So at the only traffic lights along this beach strip I turn north, and literally three blocks later I’m out of town, the spring-break revelry receding behind me.
4
A mile from the beach the landscape has again changed. Occasional homesteads sit alone in the middle of golden fields of straw, backdropped by forest behind them.
A white object on the roadside ahead catches my eye; when I reach it I figure out it’s an armadillo skeleton. The round outer body plates, skull and inner bones are all clinically clean of flesh and dirt and are bleached a pure unblemished white. A hole in its back attests either to being hit by a car tire or to being pecked through by birds wanting the tasty innards. It looks like it’s been undisturbed under the open sky for years, untouched except by burning sun and cleansing elements.
I plonk my backpack down near it and sit down for a rest and to enjoy the skeleton. How things change, become different: from nothing, then born into becoming a walking-around armadillo, then dying into sun-bleached bones with dry straw growing through them for years on a gravel roadside. Eventually it will change further, to become shards, then dust.
A shiny new convertible speeds past, five excited youths howling happily toward the beach. One pretty wind-in-her-hair girl in the back seat glances at me as they blur by. None of them notice the large white blob of bones at my feet.
5
After one ride with a quiet, elderly lady in an equally quiet and elderly car, and another ride whose details I forget, I was picked up mid-evening by another truck, heading north.
I didn’t get much of a look at the driver or the passengers; they filled the cab of the pickup so I climbed over the tailgate into the rear box and they asked me to lay low so any police wouldn’t spot me riding illegally back there and pull us over. I lay down, using my backpack as a mattress, rested my head on a pair of pants I’d rolled up for a pillow against the cab, and stared out the back of the truck as we drove past fields and forests under the dimming sky. Evening became cool and I shrugged into my jacket against the chill rush of wind.
After a half hour I was pleasantly lulled, the landscape a numb whoosh alongside. I felt a bump and the truck began ascending a slight incline, so I sat up a little and peered around; we’d just entered a long open bridge, climbing two stories high above a majestic river delta. The water and sandbars fanned a glorious pattern, three miles wide, with swampy forests lining both far-off shores.
Far out on the bridge I took a long breath and marveled at the vista around me. Cotton-swab clouds streaked carefree red and white patterns across the darkening blue sky, and a disappearing sliver of red sun bled out along the western horizon. The shapes and colors were almost psychedelic, sky above and mirrored waters below painted fearlessly and passionately in the Creator’s most colorful and mystical brush.
Lying in the back of the pickup I watched the long bridge rush beyond my feet and become a small curved thread into the distance, suspended between the vast paintings above and below. This bridge ride is a twelve-minute eternity of visual perfection, in comma between my past and whatever comes next.
Night gradually absorbed the dusk and enveloped the land. We were now driving past sweeping estates of manicured lawns shadowed under massive, spreading oak trees that looked to have been rooted there through wars and pioneers and discoverers. They loomed maternally over smaller stands of younger and politer groves of nut and citrus. Pecan trees adorned every estate in organized regality, and even poked up scraggily around the poorer yards.
I turned to look forward, through the truck cab’s rear and front windows, past the three dark heads sitting there—one of them nodding forward in sleep and then jerking up again—and I could see a glow through the trees ahead, lights of a city. The driver noticed me in his rear view mirror, rapped a knuckle on the glass in front of my nose and motioned to his open side window. I stuck my head out, into the wind.
“Yes?” I asked.
He leaned his head out a little, facing forward, and called loudly, “Where you going in town? Got an address you want to be dropped off?”
All rides are appreciated, but when a driver offers to go out of their way and drop you off at your precise destination to save you some walking, that’s double-dandy.
“It’s a small resort, southwest part of the city,” I called over the wind, and told him the name and the street it’s on. “Is that okay, or is it too far out of your way? I don’t mind walking.”
“Nope, that’s fine, only a few blocks off our route. No problem a’tall.”
He pulled his head back in and said something to his passengers. The sleepy one nodded. I stretched out on my backpack again, hiding low as we entered the city skirts, and surrendered myself limply to the speeding-up and slowing-down and side-to-side lurches as the truck picked its way through the city blocks, beneath a dazzle of passing streetlamps and neon signs.
6
“I’m sorry, we don’t take backpackers here.”
Some places just won’t rent a room to backpackers, making it a ‘policy’. They lump us all into one category: losers, down-and-outers, trouble, wreck the room and cause problems. If you have a high quality backpack and bright clean new clothes and a nice haircut and speak sincerely and respectfully—like me—you may still be treated no differently than the guy who staggers in with deer antlers duct-taped to his grungy army surplus backpack, drunk and disheveled in filthy pee-smelling jeans, sidekicked by a large stinky dog. Yes, I saw that hitchhiker on my travels.
When you walk in with a backpack on your back, you may be considered in that light no matter what kind of person you are. So I wasn’t surprised to hear these words from the young desk clerk girl before I’d even reached the plant-adorned marble check-in counter.
A couple days ago, in the young man’s house, I’d searched the internet and typed in both of the names I’d found on the little girl’s ‘favorite rock’ by the river. Unusual names by themselves, they popped up together on the ‘About’ page of this resort’s website. The two had bought the place recently, and the article included a short and interesting bio of them and their transformation of a run-down hotel into this intimate and luxurious boutique resort.
“Actually I’m here to visit the owners,” I explained, mentioning their names. “They’re expecting me.”
You could maybe stretch that into a truth; they probably are expecting someone vaguely like me, at some time or another, to wander in.
“Can you give them a call for me please? Tell them I come from a river with funny boulder names. They’ll know what it means.”
Always fun to mess with the over-polite hired help.
She humored me, professional enough to avoid grimacing as if I were annoying—at least until she collected more evidence—and pressed a digit on her switchboard.
“Hi, it’s me. Um, there’s a gentleman here who says you’re expecting him? He said he comes from a river with funny rock names?” Pause, while she listened. “Okay. Yup. Got it. Okay, thanks.” She hung up.
“They said if you could please meet them at the lounge patio, right by the pool? Just go through that door to the outside, walk between the two buildings, and you’ll see a lounge with Tiki torches and big plants to your left. They’ll be there in just a few minutes.”
Following the clerk’s directions I walked through and into a large, open courtyard. The resort is a two-story U-shaped building, totalling maybe forty suites wrapped around a central swimming pool, itself surrounded by tall palms, huge ferns in exotic ceramic planters, classy wooden deck chairs, and a semi-busy outdoor drinks-and-tapas lounge. The torches cast jungle-like shadows across the tiled courtyard and the wicker lounge furniture. On a stool by the bar a classical guitarist quietly finger-picked delicate tunes, polishing the ambience to a relaxing evening comfort.
Once again feeling out-of-place, I shucked my backpack and rested it beside a lounge table, while a few of the young people in elegant evening wear stole curious glances at me and my gear. Perhaps they might think I’m an eccentric millionaire backpacker movie star. Or something.
I wandered to the pool and meandered around its curvy perimeter. An arched stone bridge, with lush ivy and vines draping down, spanned above the middle of the pool, so I climbed it and looked down over the water, colored a romantic blue-green from underwater lights and reflecting the torches around it. Ripples wandered across the surface in memory of someone who’d left the pool a few moments ago. The aesthetic sophistication here is a night-and-day difference from the places I’d crashed and pitched my tent these last few weeks.
As I continued across to the lounge side of the bridge, I espied my two people descending the curved stairway beside the lounge patio.
Journey continues on the next page.