On the Road Again 2012 #9

I , when I had gone to bed the previous night, had had a brief twinge of guilt over not hitchhiking a bit longer. After all the reason why I normally do not hitch past 8:30- 9:00 is that is is getting both too dark for me to see the cars or for the cars to see me. But last night when I finally went to sleep after 11:00 it was still bright outside. I could have been on the road for another three-four hours. Of course me standing there at 10:00 PM in no way guarantees that anyone would be driving anywhere I wanted to go. It was after all, the beginning of a long weekend.

To make up for my apparent slackness the previous night I was up and ready to go before 7:00. I handed in my motel room card and was on the road by 7:15.  All of my rushing about was somewhat wasted. I could in fact have stayed in bed for another hour and probably had some breakfast. In the first half hour of being on the road I saw only a handful of cars  and most of those cars were heading into town. Eventually I did get a brief twenty minute ride in a rather nice full size car which took me up to the intersection of  highways 2 and 35. My driver, an older gentleman who by profession was a truck driver for an oil exploration company promised me that there would be more traffic there. He was right. There was a bit more traffic but there were still five-ten minute spells when there were no cars at all. It took a while for one of those cars to stop.

My next ride was once again in one of those big pick-ups that seem so popular in Alberta. Although in this case at least the box was being well used. My new driver was a young thirty something man who ran his own small trucking company and was taking a few hours on a Saturday morning to deliver some tires to a garage in Manning. My driver had grown up in the Yukon where his parents and grandparents were determined to be self-sufficient. From my driver's perspective this meant that while he had to do without a lot of things he also developed some great skills in terms of repairing and building machinery (e.g. his first motorbike) and the value of hard work. And work hard he did. He had driven trucks for other companies but had decided to start his own trucking company in direct competition to the "big companies". He knew that he could be more flexible and customer orientated than the other companies and therefore he would do well. He also knew that within a year or so one of the big companies would offer to buy him out. At that point he would have enough money to start another company.

He had one four year old boy and so we discussed being a dad. We quickly got onto the issue of rules and discipline. For the most part he was a far stricter dad than I had ever been. His son already had small chores to do and got an allowance for it. On the other hand his four year old  had a small off-wheel quad. Dad was quite clear that while he would be a strict dad, his children would never have to do without like he had had.

We also indirectly discussed fuel mileage. He was quite please with the mileage he was getting in his truck.He seemed quite content that he was averaging  17 liters per 100 kilometers. I didn't have the heart that on a good day my magic number is about 5..5.

I only saw Manning from the highway so I do not have a clue how big it is or what it is like. I do not that there is a lot of local traffic and that there seemed to be an inordinate number of people visiting the local tire place. None of them offered me a ride. It was at Manning that I started to notices that there was some usual pebbles mixed into the gravel and picked up a few to play with. By the time I got to Yellowknife I had collected eight such stones. Sometimes I would find one I liked, keep it for awhile and then discard it when I found one I liked better. I don't know why eight became the magic number but it did.

One can perhaps tell that I was at this spot for sometime and that the scenery was not particularly interesting. Looking for stones kept me awake and moving.

After what felt like a long wait two young men who were plumbers offered me a twenty minute ride down the road. In the belief that turning down a ride going in the right direction angers the gods of hitchhiking, I took the ride and ended up on a stretch of highway that did not look promising. There were farmers fields around me and not much else. I did however find a few more interesting stones.