On the Road Again 2012 # 10

There were times this trip I thought about calling the trip "death by a 1,000 rides" (as opposed to On the Road Again"). I really do love meeting people but there are times, especially after a number of short rides that leave me in the middle of nowhere that all I want is one decent long ride.

As I stood on this lonely stretch of highway some north on Manning, I started to count the number of cars that would pass me in a specific length of time. As a car passed me that could have offered me a drive ( I didn't count corporate or transport trucks) I would transfer a pebble from one pocket to another. After all the stones were transferred I, based on the number of cars that passed me in ten minutes, calculated the number of cars an hour that were passing me. There were times that it appeared that only 15-20 cars an hour were going by. Some of the occupants of these cars waved, others vehicles moved to the other side of the road (out of politeness or fear I am not sure), and some occasionally slowed down so they could get a better look, not to offer me a ride but rather as if I was some curiosity to marvel over. Once a pickup going the other direction stopped, a young man rolled down the window and just stared at me for 30 seconds. I guess they don't see many hitchhikers in this part of Alberta.  By my guess, after exhaustive investigation, it appeared that I need a traffic volume of approximately 50 cars an hour to get a ride fairly quickly. That was not going to happen on this road.

However eventually a large pick-up truck did stop. I threw my pack in the back seat - I didn't care where he was going. As I got in, the driver who looked to be around my age, asked if I had a gun or a knife. As I was already in the seat, it seemed like a slightly irrelevant question. But I answered it anyways.

Jake was just off to High Level. I of course was not too sure how far away it was but I had to assume that any town would give me access to more vehicles than where I had been for the past few hours. It turned out to be about 150 kilometers. Not the great long drive that I had been hoping for but it was the longest drive of the day. If the drivers (however few they might have been) were not so nice I would have gotten really discouraged. But they were nice. They all had lots to talk about and while the rides were short - that was not their fault - they generously drove me as far as they were going.

Jake amongst other things was a hunter. He said he only hunted for food for his family. I think he liked and appreciated animals. For example we saw a few black bears along the side of the road and he stopped so that he (and I) could enjoy the sight of a two year old bear eating and playing in the grass. We also talked about rules and why some people follow them. The example he used was hunting from his truck. (apparently you can be standing beside your car and shoot or you can, from a stand up a tree, shoot at a bear that has been trained to eat garbage out of a steel drum, but you can't shoot an animal from a truck?). His point was, if you do it and no one sees you do it, what moral law has been broken? Who has been hurt? Clearly, except for the animal no one has and the animal would have been shot anyway. I suspect he had done it more than once. Hunting was not a sport to him - it was shopping for the winter's meat.

We also talked about kids and their expectations. His young adult daughter wanted him to co-sign a car loan. He was prepared to do that but he thought she should probably not buy a brand new car and that she should get a job first. It was hard to argue with him.

Jake let me out at the southern end of High Level at a place that he said trucks stopped. It was a small gas station and I decided to walk to other end of town (which was only a ten minute walk). It was only around 6:00 so I knew I had lots of time left to get a ride further north. I knew the sun was not going to set anytime soon.