The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America

by McIntyre, Mike

  He flirts with the waitress and jaws with some old-timers about the weather. We both order fried chicken, which comes with lentil soup, salad, fries and rolls. Lester downs five cups of coffee. He orders a butterscotch sundae and berates me for not doing the same.

  I ride with him another 60 miles and get out at a rest stop at the intersection of Highway 20.

  “If you could do something different now, what would it be?” I ask Lester.

  “Not a thing. Yew are lookin’ at the most contented man in the world.”

  “What’s your secret?”

  “I guess I make the most of what comes and the least of what goes.”

  Someone told me at the mission that hitchhiking is illegal in Wyoming. I’m only 75 miles west of Nebraska. If the cops give me any problems, I can walk to the state line. But when I clear the first rise in the road, I see I don’t have to worry about the law. There’s nothing out here but me and the wind.

  I don’t see a car for a half hour. An 18-wheeler blows by and just about rips the sign from my hands.

  The next car isn’t for another 15 minutes. A white Lincoln Continental with a single woman driver. Not a chance.

  I start looking around for a place to camp in case I get stranded.

  I turn around and see the Lincoln stopped on the shoulder a couple hundred yards up the road. I don’t think she stopped for me. She’s too far away. I keep looking, waiting for her to drive off. After a few minutes, she backs up. I guess she was weighing the odds.

  “I never pick up hitchhikers, but you had such a forlorn look on your face,” the woman says.

  Jennifer is 32. She’s a tall, attractive brunette, dressed in a fancy warm-up suit. She’s going to Mt. Rushmore.

  “What a coincidence. That was my original destination, but I got sidetracked.”

  “There are no coincidences,” Jennifer says.

  Riding with Jennifer means a 150-mile detour north into South Dakota—negating half of Lester’s ride—but I guess I’m destined to see Mt. Rushmore.

  Jennifer is a dentist from Wisconsin. She’s been vacationing through the West in the rented Lincoln. She was traveling with her boyfriend, a banker from England, but she kicked him out last week in Big Sur because he called her “a self-absorbed baby.”

  Within five minutes, Jennifer tells me she graduated from college in two and a half years, flies her own plane, owns a Mercedes, lectures around the world, sits on the boards of several associations and treats the Amish at night for free. By the time she concludes her verbal résumé, I’m feeling sympathetic toward the English banker.

  I flip through one of Jennifer’s tour books, reading aloud about Mt. Rushmore. It’s open at night. “And it’s free,” I say.

  “Hey, even you can afford that,” Jennifer says.

  It’s pitch dark when we cross into South Dakota and drive up into the Black Hills. A tacky tourist town clogged with souvenir shops announces the entrance to the monument. I don’t know why, but I pictured Mt. Rushmore as being out in the middle of nowhere. We drive around a curve and then, boom, there it is. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt—all lit up like the Fourth of July.

  Jennifer parks the car and walks up a path. I almost have to run to keep up. We walk down into the amphitheater. I gaze up at the magnificent faces. Finally, after all these years. What a spectacular sight.

  “Ready?” Jennifer says as she turns to leave.

  We drive down the hill toward Rapid City. Jennifer plans to see the Badlands in the morning. I see lights in the distance. The city is bigger than I thought. My stomach churns. I remember how Mo dropped me back in Ashland, Oregon, after I thought I had a place to stay. I decide to take the initiative.

  “So, what’s your plan here?” I say.

  “I’m going to get a motel, have some dinner, then crash out,” Jennifer says. There is an agonizingly long pause before she adds, “I can get two rooms if you’re uncomfortable.”

  I exhale with relief. “One’s fine,” I say.

  We stop at a coffee shop. Jennifer special orders steamed vegetables and rice. She offers to buy me dinner, but I’m still full from the lunch Lester bought me.

  “Just water for me,” I tell the waitress. “I’m on a liquid diet.”

  “Are you the Invisible Man?” the waitress says.

  She’s 20 but looks 12. Giggly and blond.

  “Nope, who’s that?”

  “You didn’t see that movie?”

  “I haven’t seen a movie in a while.”

  “What’s the last movie you saw?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Did you see Natural Born Killers?”

  The question jars me. I flash on what might be waiting for me out on the road.

  “Yeah, that was the one,” I say quietly.

  I want off this subject.

  “So what do people do in Rapid City?” I ask the waitress.

  “There’s a meat packing plant. The Coke plant. If you make seven dollars an hour here, that’s a good job. My dad’s been out of work two months.”

  I ask her to tell me more about her hometown.

  “Gangs have moved in.”

  “Gangs?”

  “Yeah, but they’re not real ones. They don’t kill anyone. There’s about one person a year here that gets killed. That’s not much.”

  “Unless you’re the one person who gets killed.”

  “Yeah,” she giggles.

  When she returns later with Jennifer’s change, she says to me, “Well, I hope you make it to where you’re going.”

  She is cute and friendly, and for just a moment I’m convinced she’s the devil.

  Jennifer checks us into a roadside motel. The room has two beds. I’ve stayed in the homes of people I didn’t know, but sleeping in a motel room with a stranger strikes me as weird. If Jennifer thinks so, she doesn’t let on. She comes out of the bathroom dressed in silk pajamas and gets into her bed. The last thing I see before closing my eyes is her—reading a textbook. I fall asleep to the squeak of her highlighting pen.

  It’s still dark when I hear Jennifer come out of the bathroom in the morning.

  “I’m going to leave in about ten minutes,” she says.

  I quickly shower and shave and load my pack in the car. Jennifer stops at a supermarket and buys us some fruit and orange juice.

  We drive an hour east and enter the Badlands National Park. It’s otherworldly, a place I could explore for days. But Jennifer zips through the park like she’s in a race. I ride another hour east with her and decide I’ve got to get off the interstate and slow down. I see a tiny spot on the map called Murdo. I ask her to drop me there.

  I’ve spent the last 24 hours with Jennifer, but she’s revealed nothing of herself that’s truly personal. I can’t leave without taking one crack at her armor.

  “What’s your biggest fear in the world?” I say.

  “I don’t have any fears.”

  CHAPTER 16

  It’s Homecoming Day in Murdo, South Dakota. The street and storefronts are whitewashed with messages: “Go Rebels!” and “Crush the Chieftains!” The noon whistle blows, marking the start of the parade. The sidewalks fill with parents and children, some dads lifting infants onto their shoulders.

  A woman tells me the parade will be over in two minutes. It takes that long because it circles the block twice. The last parade was in June, when Murdo celebrated the paving of Main Street. The town’s other roads are dirt. I take in the scene, the grain bins, the water tower in the distance, and realize I’ve crossed over from the Wild West into the Heartland of America—plains, pickups, and prayers.

  The homecoming king and queen ride past and wave. They look at once young and old. At 17, they can already see the balance of their lives stretched out before them, as predictable as the prairie. The postmaster leans in the doorway of the post office and watches for the umpteenth time. Kids rush into the street with plastic bags, snatching up sweets tossed from the floats. A politic
ian in a convertible throws the most and the best candy. Some things are the same everywhere.

  I sit on a bench to write a letter to Anne. A woman stops to talk with me. Doris is 66. She has a friendly smile and the nasal twang of the Midwest.

  “You know, you get out in these rural areas and you see we’re the glue of America,” she says.

  Doris grew up in western Minnesota. She went to college at South Dakota State because tuition was only $34 per quarter, including room and board. She met her husband there. They have five grown children. Their youngest son has cerebral palsy and lives in a senior citizens’ apartment complex in Rapid City. The rest of their kids are married and live on farms.

  Before long, Doris has invited me to come spend the night at her house.

  “I looked at your nice backpack, that tells me you’ve got a mission,” she says, like it’s all the reason she needs to bring a perfect stranger home without consulting her husband.

  I finish my letter and catch up with Doris at the Uptown Market. They’re handing out free hot dogs. We each eat one.

  We drive out to her daughter’s place, a modern log cabin in the middle of a 6,000-acre cattle ranch. Linda and her husband Larry raise 500 head of beef cattle a year. Last winter it got so cold, they had to catch the calves as they dropped from their mothers so they wouldn’t freeze. Piles of rolled hay dot the landscape. Linda’s son and daughter ride bikes near the barn. Linda schools her kids in a makeshift classroom in the home.

  Larry ambles up. He’s a lanky galoot, with salt-and-pepper hair, a bright smile and a beat-up brown cowboy hat. He gets right to it.

  “I got a feeling our paths aren’t going to cross too many more times,” he says. “So I’m going to tell you the one thing that has given me the most joy in my life, and that’s the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for my sins.”

  Before I have to respond, Doris’s husband Pete drives up in a Mack truck loaded with corn. He backs up to the grain bin. Larry cranks up a tractor, which powers an auger that carries the kernels up and deposits them in the bin.

  Larry tells me that if I ever pass through again, I’m welcome to stay.

  “We’ll polish a nail for you,” he says.

  “He means we’ll have a bed for you,” Linda says.

  I ride back into Murdo in the truck with Pete. His hands are black as coal and his teeth are packed with bits of raw corn. We park the truck on a dirt road and walk to the firehouse. The volunteer firemen are hosting a pancake and sausage dinner. Doris is already there. Larry and Linda soon show up, as well as the rest of the town. It’s a roomful of honest faces, folks who aren’t ashamed to tell a stranger how they get down on their praying bones every night.

  A man tells Pete his cistern is about dry. Most folks outside of town aren’t hooked up to Murdo’s water line. Pete is 68 and semiretired—the “semi” part meaning he now works six days a week instead of seven—but he still hauls spring water to his neighbors. It’s $2 for 1,000 gallons and a buck-fifty a mile. Water rarely crosses my mind when I’m home, but it strikes me that it’s been a recurring theme of this journey. I’m always drinking it, looking for it, or thinking about it. Now here I am, the guest of a waterman.

  Pete and I bounce along a dusty road into a pink sunset. Pheasants fly up from the culvert as we rumble by. Tiny shoots of winter wheat poke through the ground. They’ll soon be covered with snow, not to be harvested until next summer.

  Pete plucks a pamphlet called “The Way to Life” from the dash and hands it to me.

  “A lot of people go through life and never know the meaning of life,” he says. “It’s not enough to believe and do good deeds. You’ve got to receive Jesus Christ as your own personal savior.”

  I ask him when he knew for certain. He says it was when he got married. Then something catches his eye out the window.

  “Sometimes traumatic things move people to Christ, sometimes away. I’ll tell you a story. See over there?” He points to a stand of cottonwoods and a few grain bins near the White River. “That was my house. I was five, my brother Eddie was six, and we had a younger brother who was four. Our dad told us to go open the gate and let the cows down. We got up to the top of the hill and opened the gate, and the bottom just dropped out of the sky. It rained thirteen inches in a half hour. That’s a lot of water. I got out of there. I just ran straight down the hill. I knew where home was. By the time I got to the fence, I crawled through and the water was up to my neck. My brother Eddie stayed with my younger brother. Nicky, that was his name. We had company at the house and he was real bashful, so he came with us. He was real little and he shouldn’t have been there. I was little, too. The water came up and Eddie showed him how to grab hold of the fence and let the water move you down. But he let go and washed down into the river and the river carried him away. And to this day, we’ve never found him. That was in 1932. Ever since, I’ve wondered why God took my little brother, yet spared me.”

  Pete and Doris live eight miles west of Murdo, at the end of a road on the edge of the prairie. The first thing I notice is the poster hanging on the dining room wall. It’s the same one that Tim and Diane had back in Lakeview, Oregon—two little boys in overalls, one saying, “Been farming long?” I left the Bible that Tim gave me at the shelter in Bozeman because my pack was getting too heavy. Now here comes Pete, a volunteer Gideon, handing me a pocket-sized copy of the “New Testament.” I guess I’m fated to finish this journey with a Bible in my pack.

  The kitchen counters are covered with gallon jugs of spring water. More plastic bottles line the floor. The three of us sit around drinking glasses of water late into the night.

  Doris marries up the partial empties as we drink, so Pete can have bottles to fill on his next trip to the spring. Doris washes the glasses in a plastic tub and saves the water to flush the toilet. I feel guilty taking a two-minute shower. I really feel bad when I learn how Pete bathes: Doris plugs the tub when she showers, then Pete jumps in and washes up in the gray water.

  I sleep soundly upstairs in a pine-paneled room with two windows looking onto the rolling plains. The sun wakes me in the morning, rising over a purple horizon. When I go downstairs, Doris is cracking fresh wheat for pancakes. The pancakes are wafer thin and melt in my mouth. Doris fries me an egg to go with them.

  My plan is to head south today into Nebraska. But Doris is high on the South Dakota state capital, Pierre, about 60 miles north. She offers to drive me. Then Pete says I should just stay and explore around here another day. I give him no argument.

  The town where Pete and Doris live is called Okaton, which means “See Far” in the Lakota Sioux language. It sits on a ridge—the ridge being about 10 feet higher than the rest of the ground—and you can in fact see 100 miles farther into the Midwest. The population is 19, counting cats and dogs. The post office is so small you have to step outside to lick a stamp.

  The main highway used to run through Okaton, but the interstate turned it into a ghost town. The blacktop is crumbled and potholed. All that remains of a Texaco sign are the X, A, and C. A faded red grain elevator, its top torn off by a tornado, marks the middle of town. The old one-room schoolhouse sinks into the earth, its window frames twisted and sagging. Houses long abandoned have no paint left to peel. There are a few rusty trailers, some idle farm equipment. The only sign of life is an antiques store that caters to the occasional tourist who wanders in off the freeway. An American flag flaps in the wind, and Christian music blares to no one but me and the wasps.

  Pete doesn’t get in from hauling water until 11 pm. Doris cooks us a couple frozen pizzas. I do the dishes, mindful not to rinse as thoroughly as I would at home. I go upstairs after midnight. Pete stays up to prepare for the Sunday school lesson he must give in the morning. The boombox on the kitchen counter is tuned to a Christian radio station. A large spoon serves as the antenna.

  I break out my khaki pants in the morning and press them on the kitchen table with an iron Pete and Doris got as a wedding gi
ft in 1951.

  We drive two miles to the Evangelical Free Church, a white clapboard building with nine rows of wooden pews. A sign on the wall notes that last Sunday’s attendance was 33. The all-time high was 65. The congregation sings several hymns, and the pastor asks for prayer requests. Doris says the church should “pray for this young man who’s hitchhiking across the United States.” The pastor fits me in between a church member sick in the hospital and a fellow who recently died. He then launches into his sermon, titled “Money Matters.”

  “Do you know where you’re at financially?” the pastor says.

  Yes, I sure do, I say to myself.

  Doris leaves after the service to start supper. Pete and I stay for Sunday school. Afterwards, we walk toward Okaton.

  “We’ll hitchhike,” Pete says.

  Pete’s brother Ed stops for us. He’s 69 now, but all I can see is a six-year-old boy helplessly watching a swollen river carry away his little brother.

  Linda and Larry and their kids are already at the house when we get there. I remind Larry that our paths have crossed three times now, and he smiles.

  Another of Pete and Doris’s daughters, Judy, and her family arrive from their farm down near the Nebraska line. They came to pick up a pair of goats they rented for the summer to the local antiques store’s petting zoo. Judy and her husband Keith are my age and have seven children. Keith used to be a preacher in the area. But he couldn’t support his family on the $500 per month his church paid him. They moved south, where Keith now shears sheep.

  “It was a venture of faith,” says Keith, a full-bearded man. “We prayed for a big house with a lot of water and a porch. And the Lord gave us a big house, a lot of water and three porches.”

  Doris’s two eldest granddaughters help her in the kitchen. Before long, they’ve prepared a feast of pot roast, meatloaf, mashed potatoes and gravy, salad, green beans, homemade bread and fresh honey. Sixteen of us squeeze around the dining room table like it’s Thanksgiving. But this is no holiday or special occasion. It’s life in the Midwest.