The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America

by McIntyre, Mike

  I’m overwhelmed by a sudden sense of displacement. I’ve heard it said that hell exists only here on earth. I think that might be true. For the first time on this journey, I’m not afraid of death. I’m afraid of something worse: the feeling of total detachment parked in my soul.

  I feel so lonely in my tent. I know from the map that I’m in O’Neill, Nebraska. I also know that I’m lost.

  CHAPTER 19

  By morning, despair is dislodged from my mind by the demands of the journey. I’ve got places to go, people to meet. Malaise can hitch its own ride.

  I slept well. The ground beneath my tent was the flattest and softest yet. My only complaint is that I woke with freezing feet. It’s late September, and I know there won’t be too many more nights I can camp out.

  I walk east through O’Neill, my back to traffic. A man in a pickup with a camper shell pulls over for me before I stop and hold out my sign.

  “You gettin’ in shape for elk hunting?” he says with a smile.

  The man is tanned and wears glasses and a red T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. I like him instantly.

  I consider the role that fate might be playing in this sojourn. I think of all the good people who have stopped for me and wonder what would have happened had they kept going. Who was in the car behind them? A drunk driver? A rapist? A serial killer? I climb in the truck, thinking the Shamrock City may have been lucky for me in a way I’ll never know.

  Ron is 54 but looks 34. He’s driving an hour east today to check on a client. Ron sells the giant center pivots that irrigate cornfields.

  “I help make cheap food,” he says. “Where else but in America can you get good quality food for practically nothing?”

  He grew up near Lincoln, Nebraska, and was drafted into the Army in 1965. He proved a crack shot in boot camp, scoring a perfect 500 on the final shooting test. He took bets on himself in the barracks and bought a new Chevy Impala with the winnings. After a tour in Vietnam, he returned to Nebraska and got married. When it didn’t work out, he drifted around.

  We pass a slow truck buried under a mountain of hay.

  “I traveled the whole continent, every state, and I came right here to Holt County to live,” Ron says. “This is the apple of the country.”

  He remarried and now has a little daughter he takes fishing. He’s also a passionate elk hunter. As he drives, he reaches into his briefcase and hands me a stack of photos. I flip through pictures of him posing proudly among antler racks of elk he shot in Montana.

  We reach the town of Tilden. Ron stops at a greasy spoon called the Hy-Way Cafe.

  “You want a sandwich?” he says.

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “You already told me that.”

  The special of the day is baked steak, potato salad, corn on the cob, cottage cheese and bread—all for $4.25. Ron is right, our food is cheap, not that I have the right to call anything cheap on this trip.

  Ron has a ’58 Corvette parked in his garage. A few times a year, he drives it down to Phoenix to visit his three teenaged kids from his first marriage. He drives 110 miles an hour.

  “You know what a state trooper does when he sees you going a hundred and ten?” he says.

  “Handcuffs you or laughs,” I say.

  “He laughs. He can’t catch you.”

  Ron says he’s been chased only once.

  “I knew he was coming for me because a cop will usually flash his lights and give me a thumbs-down, but this one didn’t. I pulled a U-ball and when he saw me the second time, I was going a hundred and fifty. Hee-hee.”

  Ron pays the bill. I get my pack from his truck.

  “Well, you’re seeing America at the perfect time,” he says. “This’ll be one of the best years ever in the Midwest. We’ve had the perfect combination of rain and sun. Here it is September twenty-seventh, and we haven’t had our first frost. It’s been a long summer.”

  I know Ron is cocky, but I can’t help liking the guy. He has the air of a man who knows he’s arrived—and where. It’s a trait I wish I had.

  I envy and admire so many of the people I’ve met on this trip. I’m grateful for their rides, their food, their shelter. But the kindest act of all is when they’re merely themselves. They help me in ways they aren’t even aware of. It’s always a comfort to meet an honest man, and I’m always sad to say goodbye.

  I stand at the intersection in Tilden, holding a sign out for Norfolk, the next town down the road. I don’t have any plans to visit Norfolk. But I’ve found my chances of getting a ride are better if I don’t get too greedy and try to gobble up a big chunk of the country all at once.

  A Buick Skylark drives by and the woman behind the wheel gives me a long glance. She keeps going, then brakes and turns around. There’s been some deliberation, so I know I’m safe. Anybody who wanted to harm me would have pulled over right away.

  “Where you going?” she calls through the window, like she knows I can’t possibly be headed for Norfolk.

  “East,” I say.

  “Well, I’m going to Omaha. I can take you that far.”

  Omaha is more than 100 miles away. It will be close to dark when we get there. I don’t want to arrive in a city at night with no money. I figure I’ll ride with this woman a while, then hop out in whatever little town looks the kindest.

  Joan is a short, buxom woman with a husky voice. Long, curly brown hair frames her weathered face and falls from under a battered black hat with a fake pink rose stapled to the front. She looks every minute of her 44 years, and then some. She also looks like a nice person.

  “I know what it’s like to be out there,” says Joan, who used to thumb rides herself. “My boyfriend says I shouldn’t pick up hitchhikers, but I do. I don’t want to live in a world where I have to be afraid to help someone.”

  Joan lives in Burton, Nebraska, nearly 200 miles in the other direction. She says she’s driving to Omaha to play bingo. She also says she has to see a doctor there every two weeks. I wonder why anybody would drive six hours one way every two weeks for a doctor’s appointment, but I don’t ask.

  She’s originally from San Diego. I tell her I’m a fellow Californian. I mention how surprised I was to learn that the big city problems we have out west—gangs and drugs and the like—also exist here in the heartland.

  “As an ex-drug addict, I know,” Joan says.

  “What kind of drugs?”

  “Heroin.”

  “How long you been clean?”

  “Three years.”

  The way she says it, I know it’s been a bitch.

  Joan became a single mother at age 14. When her son was 12, she sent him to live with her mother because shooting heroin had become a full-time occupation.

  Years later she told her mother, “Mom, I’m a hope-to-die drug addict. I’m gonna die a drug addict. You just gotta accept me the way I am.”

  Joan’s son is now 30. He lives in Maryland, where he feeds his own addiction—cocaine.

  “I thought of saying something to him,” Joan says, “but I know the mind of an addict.”

  Joan plunged into the gutter before she kicked her addiction. She took up prostitution to pay for the drugs. But there was always a line she would not cross: She never became a thief.

  “I’d rather sell my body than rip you off,” she says. “My girlfriend called me a dope fiend with morals.”

  Joan was luckier than most. She knew several hookers and addicts who were murdered or died from AIDS. She never shared needles and always insisted her customers wear condoms.

  Her addiction grew into a $500-a-day habit. Besides turning tricks, she dealt heroin to keep up. The cops often busted her. She was on a first-name basis with bail bondsmen up and down the coast of California. Judges suspended her sentences, until one judge finally gave her 90 days. She pleaded for a drug program instead, but the judge would not relent, and Joan served her time. She figures the judge saved her life. She calls him every so often and lets him know she’s still
clean.

  She moved to Burton because she knew there was no dope there. She came to Nebraska with a girlfriend who also wanted to get clean. But the girlfriend moved back to the city and started using again. Joan was hired as a waitress, her first legitimate job, and found a boyfriend who’s drug-free. She tries to lead a quiet life, white-knuckling it on the prairie.

  “So now you know why I’m not afraid to pick up hitchhikers,” she says. “I’ve gone to bed with men I didn’t know.”

  Joan always stays at the same place whenever she travels to see her doctor, a budget motel across the Missouri River from Omaha, in Council Bluffs, Iowa. She says she used to sleep at a campground on the river where campsites cost only $3.50, and she offers to drive me there. I tell her it may as well cost $350 because I don’t have any money.

  “I’ll pay for it,” she says.

  A hooker with a heart of gold.

  We hit Omaha at rush hour. It’s the first big city I’ve been in since leaving San Francisco three weeks ago. I feel claustrophobic, and I reach for the dial to turn down the radio so I can concentrate. Then I remember it’s not my car, and I’m not driving.

  “I don’t tell people this, but since you already know I was an addict, I’ll tell you,” Joan says as we cross the bridge into Iowa. “I have to come down here every two weeks to get my supply of Methadone.”

  The city is always a risk, she says. That’s where the dope is. She doesn’t know where exactly, but it wouldn’t be hard to find. One time, a year ago, she was in Omaha visiting a friend from the bad old days. The friend mentioned where she could get some heroin. Joan let the image take hold in her mind. She asked her friend, how good was the heroin? How much did it cost? Twenty a fix, the friend said. Joan shrugged off the offer. If it only cost $20, it couldn’t be that good.

  “But then I said yes,” she tells me now. “And then I said no.”

  “Why?” I say.

  “I don’t know.”

  Joan gazes out the windshield. I realize how fragile her sobriety is: Three years is the same as three days. The dragon is never slayed. Every time Joan sees the Omaha skyline, it’s like her own journey to Cape Fear. But while I’ll stop at the Atlantic Ocean, there is no end to the road she travels. She is forever tempted, forever tested.

  Joan can’t recall the way to the campground. She turns down several streets and we get lost. We stop at a gas station in Council Bluffs for directions, but the attendant hasn’t heard of the place. Joan flips through the phone book. Nothing rings a bell.

  It’s getting dark. I worry about being dumped in the city. Then it’s as if Joan has read my mind.

  “Well, the worst thing that’ll happen is you stay in my room,” she says.

  All my anxiety seeps away.

  We drive around some more. Joan offers to buy me a hamburger. I decline. I’ve got food in my pack. Besides, the two bucks she saves on the burger might net her a fortune tonight at the bingo hall.

  She finally spots a road that looks familiar. We wend around a municipal golf course until we reach the campground, Friendship Park. It’s a pleasant looking place, with barbecues and weeping willows lining the river. Tent sites have jumped to $4.50. Joan pays with a five-dollar bill. She uses the 50 cents change to buy me an orange soda from the pop machine.

  Before she leaves, I ask Joan what her dream is.

  “I don’t know. That’s the truth. I’ve never had one. You probably knew you wanted to be a journalist. My boyfriend loves cooking. I don’t have a dream. Maybe that’s my problem.”

  I think Joan is too hard on herself. I know she has a dream, if only to stay clean so she can dream another day. We do what we have to, and if we’re able, we do a little more. Joan has done for me, and I hope I’ve done for her. Perhaps my journey has helped her say no to her demons for at least this trip to the city. I don’t know.

  As she drives away from the campground and disappears from view, all I can do is hope that she makes the right turns.

  CHAPTER 20

  I circle the campground, looking for the softest patch of grass. Somebody has fashioned a pathetic tube tent out of a piece of green plastic. The guy sits in his beat-up car, watching a black-and-white TV plugged into a campground outlet. I’m sure there’s a sad story in this, but I don’t want to hear it.

  I pitch my tent on the other side of a trailer.

  Before long, a retired couple comes out of the trailer. Mel looks like a professor, with glasses and white hair. Judie is plump and chatty. They’re from Skokie, Illinois, near Chicago.

  Judie walks over to my picnic table to visit. Mel hangs back by the trailer. When he hears me tell Judie I’m hitchhiking east, he urges me to stay at least 50 miles south of Chicago.

  “Parts of it are eee-vil!” he calls over dramatically, hands cupped around his mouth. Then mosquitoes chase him back inside.

  I ask Judie if they’re originally from Chicago. Mel is, she says. She was born in Austria. Eager for conversation, I tell her I passed through Austria last year on my way to Hungary. But Austria holds no happy memories for Judie. She lost nine relatives in the Holocaust.

  Mel and Judie have been on the road for seven weeks. Judie liked New Orleans the best. She wanted to tour rural Louisiana, but she and Mel were warned by other Jewish friends that they might run into trouble there.

  “In 1994, can you imagine that?” Judie says.

  “I can,” I say, remembering the redneck last night at the bar. “I think you can go to any state and find pockets of people like that.”

  Judie and Mel are visiting Omaha tomorrow morning. In the afternoon, they’re driving east to Dubuque, Iowa, to see Mel’s sister. Judie says I’m welcome to ride along. I thank her and say I’ll sure keep it in mind.

  “If there’s anything we can do for you, let us know,” she says.

  I crawl into my tent. I wish I’d asked Judie for a newspaper, but I don’t want to disturb them now. I lie back and listen to the sounds of the city. A train bridge crosses the river just south of the campground. The creaks and groans of boxcars rolling over the tracks drift in and out of my slumber.

  Condensation has turned my tent into a steam bath by the time I wake in the morning. My sleeping bag is soaked, as is my pillow—the old green coat the Oregon housepainter gave me. I set my things out in the sun to dry and head for the shower.

  Judie pops her head out of the trailer door.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she says.

  “That’d be great, thanks.”

  I don’t like to drink coffee on an empty stomach because it gives me the shakes. But it’s hard to refuse an act of kindness.

  “Forgive me, but there are a few grounds,” Judie says. “It’s the last cup.”

  Judie runs a brush through her hair, brown with flecks of gray. The coffee is black and thick, and with each sip I tingle and fill with good cheer. I remember when I was a boy, water tasted better when the neighbor lady filled a glass from her tap and handed it to me. It’s how I feel now with Judie.

  “This is good coffee,” I say.

  “Well, it’s old. It’s yesterday’s reheated. I drink my coffee until it’s gone.”

  The campground shower is hot, the pressure strong. I hang a clean shirt in the stall and let the steam iron out the wrinkles. It feels good to put on a fresh shirt and roll up the sleeves for the first time. It’s such a simple pleasure. I catch a whiff of the fabric softener Edie poured into her washer, way back in Idaho. I pull the collar to my nose and breathe in. It’s like an old friend is here by my side.

  I walk out into the brilliant day, down along the bank of the muddy Missouri. Factories across the river belch smoke into a sky the color of faded jeans. The limbs of fallen trees poke up through the murky water. A boat zooms upriver, sending beer cans and motor oil containers ashore with its wake.

  An unshaven man in a baseball cap tends three fishing poles.

  “What are you fishing for?” I say.

  “Catfish,” he growls.
“But I’m not catching any catfish.”

  He peels the cellophane wrapper off a cigar and throws it against the bank.

  I feel like taking a walk.

  “What’s the quickest way across the river into Omaha by foot?”

  The man jabs his cigar up at the train bridge. Water courses around its three stone pillars.

  “There room up there?” I say.

  “Oh yeah. There’s two tracks, and there’s usually only one train.” He grins. “They don’t like you crossing there, but I’ve seen guys do it.”

  He grabs one of the three rods and starts reeling. Something invisible tugs at the line, maybe only a snag.

  “Or you can go across there.” He points his cigar at another bridge, about a half mile north. “That’s where those two guys jumped from last week.”

  “What two guys?”

  “They were running from the cops. They caught one right over there on that bank.” He aims his cigar at a pipe that spews sewage into the river. “The other one drowned.”

  “He couldn’t swim, huh?”

  “Hell, it don’t matter if you know how to swim or not in this fucking river. Look at those undercurrents. It’s thirty-five foot deep out there.”

  Indeed, the merciless brown water swirls and churns like a whirlpool, reversing course in some spots and flowing back upstream.

  I walk away from the bank, then stop and turn around.

  “What was their crime?” I say to the fisherman.

  “They stole a car,” he says, and chomps down on his cigar.

  I decide on the distant car bridge, even though the highway patrol might stop me. I climb a gate and walk down a dirt utility road that skirts the golf course. The road passes under the bridge, tattooed with graffiti. I scramble up the littered embankment and slip through a hole in the chain link fence. I pop out onto Interstate 80 like a fugitive.

  There’s no sidewalk, only a slender cement berm, not even a body wide. The guardrail reaches my thigh. I take quick but careful steps as the morning traffic whizzes by. I duck under the sign at the state line to stay off the freeway.