While I am always glad to get a ride - the first ride I got after spending the day in the rain was especially sweet. It was not a glorious vehicle nor did I get very far, but it was a ride, the driver didn't care if I got the seat wet and the truck had a heater. It felt like heaven to me.
It was a one ton flat bed work truck that looked and sounded as if might be, if not falling apart, well on its way to that status. There was junk in the back and lots of bits and pieces in the front seat. There was room for me and my pack, but not a lot of leg room left by the time I got all of me in and the door shut. My driver was a hairy fellow, with a beard as shaggy as mine. He had on old greasy work clothes and if he had been on the sidewalk somewhere along Hastings Street in Vancouver, well he would not have looked out of place. But then I suspect I would have fitted right in too.
In our short ride together I didn’t quite grasp what he did, I think it was something to do with hauling construction machinery around. He seemed to have it pretty well organized and was happy with his life. Every December he went to Australia for a month or so to celebrate Christmas with a construction crew he had met while they were building a bridge somewhere in the lower mainland of BC. What are the odds of that? But that is what he did every year. It sounded like a great plan to me.
We didn’t get chance to talk for very long, but I really like him. Not just because he had offered me a drive, but because I like his gentle nature and good humoured way of looking at the world and the little problems than can pop up. Given where he had picked me up and my minor rant about my great spot being ruined by construction and the general advancement of all things new, it is perhaps not surprising that we started off our brief chat talking about roads, road repair and the need for even more lanes. Somehow we then drifted into talking about the state of the Vancouver docks. It was strange in a way that my last conversation with Jesse as we headed into Vancouver had been about road repair and the ever constant need for the more lanes, and here on my first ride out of Vancouver, I was having the same conversation.
I was let off somewhere outside of Greater Vancouver. My driver said that it was a better spot. It didn’t look a lot better, but at least it was safer and I could see a gas station down the road a bit. Now if I needed some water (which seemed highly unlikely) or something to eat, there was somewhere to buy it. It had stopped raining but because I was in a more open spot I was exposed to a nasty little breeze that was rapidly sucking away what little body hear I had left. I took off my rain jacked, pulled my heavy fleece out of my bad and put my jacket back on. The top part of my body was warmer but my thin, quick dry pants that had been so nice a comfortable in the hot days of July were now offering very little protection or warmth.
There was a fair amount of traffic along the entrance ramp and it was going slow. So people had lots of opportunity to see me and make a decision. I suspect however that most of the vehicles were not going very far and so most of the drivers avoided eye contact. I then noticed that cars were starting to do u-turns and head back the way they had come, away from the highway. The traffic on the highway was slowing down to a slow crawl with all lanes blocked. It looked as if there was an accident. What this meant for me was that what had looked like a promising spot with a reasonable flow of traffic had become a parking lot.
However with traffic going by me at a crawl, an older car did stop and wave me over. It looked like I was going to get out of the city.
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