On the road again (heading east) #13

I was not even sure how to get out of Wawa. I had been there before but I had no conscious recollection of how I had left. It had been dark the night before when we had driven in and I had not been paying attention to such details. Why would I? I knew I had drive to Sudbury. That morning as I stomped with anger and frustration up the road towards the highway, it was dark and cloudy and windy. It was one of those morning that reminds one that fall is going to come sooner than one would like. I was pretty sure that I was going to get wet at some point that day.

Lots of vehicles drove by. Most of them were pick-up trucks and none of them gave me a second look. After standing at a rather poor spot just outside of town for quite a while, I decided to walk a bit further down the road. It looked as if there might be some sort of gas station/restaurant where a some of the trucks that had passed me by were turning off to. It wasn't much of restaurant but there were a lot of vehicles including some big trucks stopping. More importantly there were some reasonably wide shoulders and good sight lines. It did not look as if there was anything better further down the road, so I decided this was where I would make my stand. Visions of spending a couple of days on the outskirts of Wawa kept flashing through my mind. It was good that I had things to think about as I was there for a few hours, but finally a car did stop and I got in gratefully.

He was an retired engineer - at least I think he was, he said so - but I don't think he spent a lot of time in that field. I think he said that that he had never really liked the field. As a matter of fact, in spite of the fact that drove from the outskirts of Wawa to Sudbury - I got to know, at least in some aspects, very little about him at all. In other ways I got to know him quite well. But part of problem was me.

When I got into the car I was still pretty upset at being abandoned by my previous driver and rather than me appearing reasonably normal - polite and interested in my driver, I went into a rant about what had happened to me. I must have sounded like a flaming lunatic. My driver later said as much. In fact he was so concerned that when I asked him how far he was going he just pointed down the road and indicated that he wasn't going too far. I must have freaked him out. However I did calm down and by the time we got to Sault Saint Marie we were getting along fine and he did tell me that he was going to Toronto.

In keeping with the strangeness of the past few days, this ride had its own peculiarities. My driver was going back to Toronto to deal with some real estate issues. he and his wife own some rental properties and their commercial tenants were about to go bankrupt. He needed to sort out some of the mess in terms of rent etc. There was also a case of them being sued because someone had fallen outside of their building the previous winter. In all honesty I am not sure where he actually lived. I think he lived someone within the general Toronto area, but if that is the case he never said why he was in Northern Ontario - they may have had a cottage up there, but that seems to be a long way to drive just to be on a lake. I will never know if his reluctance to talk about the physical details of his life was because of my rant upon entering his car, or if because he was generally careful about what he disclosed. He did mention that he had picked up other hitchhikers who had had significant emotional problems so perhaps he was just being cautious.

I say he didn't talk about about the physical details of his life, that does not mean that we did not talk about other stuff. He said that he had anger issues - he knew that because his wife had told so. They were involved in some sort of rather strange therapeutic conselling process that sounded like a money grab. It was something to do with the suggestion that our eternal anger evolves from how our parents treat it and we need to deal with that issue before anything else can be deal with. Sounded rather Freudian and at the same time rather cultish. We had a long and interesting chat about this kind of stuff. I suppose what was so remarkable about my driver was that in spite of the fact that he was very much into this "treatment process", to the point that he was thinking about pay what seemed like a huge amount of money to be trained as a"therapist", he was very prepared to hear other suggestions as how to cope with stuff.

I talked to him about my practice of every night before I go to sleep to think about the day and then giving thanks. Something that I have done for much of my adult life - even on those days when life has been horrible. It makes it so much easier to forgive people, and the world in general for the "slings of arrows of outrageous fortune" that occasionally rain upon our heads. He liked it and I think he will do.

He got me to the turn off near Sudbury, let me out, and I thanked him not just for the ride but for the help in calming down.  As he was my last ride - my thanks to him was in fact a thank you to every one who had given me a ride. Twice on the way back I had met drivers who had given me a fresh perspective, a reminder of why I do what I do.

I am a hitchhiker. Oh I do many other things - I am a dad and a grand dad, I teach, and I spin and weave. I an adequate carpenter, plumber and electrician - but hitchhiking defines so much of what I am. For a few weeks every year, I shed my possessins, or at least most of them, and go out on the road to meet people, to trust people, to gamble that my view of the world is the correct one. So far I have been right - the world is a good place with people who will trust and help out a stranger on the road. Can anything be finer than being reminded of that?