The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America (4 page)

“I could wear heels everywhere,” she says.

We all erupt with laughter.

The check arrives, and Diana snaps it up with her sausage fingers. I’ve planned this journey in my mind for a year, but I never came close to imagining who would be buying me my first dinner.

I look at Diana and think,
Kindness is strange, but never long a stranger
.

CHAPTER 5

I load my pack into Linda’s minivan, and we head for her house. She stops at the supermarket in Redway and asks if I want anything. I’m too shy to say, so she fills a plastic bag with trail mix. Perfect. At the checkout, we see Diana come in and grab a cart. She waves. The whole scene now seems normal.

Linda is 42 and twice divorced. Besides Iona, she has two other daughters: Fauna, 10, and Sequoia, 16. Iona and Fauna split time between Linda and their father, who lives in the same neighborhood. They attend one of Humboldt’s many self-styled alternative schools. Sequoia, who studies dance, lives with Linda’s first husband, in Santa Cruz. Linda and her second ex founded two hugely successful mail-order record companies, specializing in children’s and world music. A Hollywood entertainment conglomerate recently bought them out. Linda is a rich hippie.

She grew up poor in San Francisco, the only child of an Irish merchant seaman and a Swedish maid. Her mother was an alcoholic who died in an insane asylum. When Linda last saw her, she was strapped in a straitjacket, her head shaved for electroshock therapy. She swore at Linda in Swedish, blaming her daughter for her wretched life.

Ashamed of her background, Linda compensated by entering the glamorous world of high fashion. She became the buyer for an upscale San Francisco department store. A blond woman with stunning Scandinavian features, she was squired about town by wealthy men. When that lifestyle rang hollow, Linda dropped out to study herbal medicine. She arrived in Redway in the 1970s, part of the second back-to-earth wave of hippies to invade Humboldt County. She delved into yoga, astrology, Eastern religions, quantum physics and Indian mysticism. She set about repairing her soul.

Linda owns one of the area’s original hippie mansions, a two-story octagonal structure built with scraps of redwood left behind by logging companies. A skylight in the shape of a pyramid crowns the roof. Wooden decks circle the house. The trees are so close you can reach out and touch them. It is a most unconventional home. Forty African drums fill a corner of the living room. There is no TV, no curtains in the windows, and the girls call their mother Linda.

After the girls have gone to bed, I sit with Linda on a wicker sofa, gazing out the picture window into the dark forest. The house is still. Linda says she’s inspired by my journey. After a decade as a cynical journalist, I’ve developed a pretty accurate bullshit meter. Nothing registers on it now. Linda seems to possess an inner calm, an unshakable sense of her place in the universe. I feel like a sham in comparison. I want what she has. I confess to her that I’m not brave and wise. I’m a frightened boy in the body of a man. I’m afraid of the dark, the wind in the trees, the animals in the forest.

Linda smiles kindly. “When I first came here, I lived in a cabin I found out I shared with raccoons and skunks and bats. They’d all nestled away in there. I snipped pot for a living, ten dollars an hour. I did it at night by lantern. The bats swooped all around me, and I worried. But I learned that they weren’t going to hurt me. They’d fly past and swirl around in these same patterns. After a while, I saw that they recognized me. They knew who I was.

“An Indian taught me something I’ll never forget. He said, ‘We don’t have a word for loneliness in my language.’ I said, ‘Why, because you’re always surrounded by uncles and aunts and grandparents?’ He said, ‘No. It’s because we think of nature as our kin, so we are never alone.’

“I thought, ‘How great. When you realize that the bears and the bats and the trees are all your relatives, you can never be lonely.’ “

Linda looks at me and says in a solemn tone, “Reverence. You can’t repair your soul until you have reverence. Don’t be afraid of the dark, Mike. Don’t be afraid of nature.”

We talk late into the night, and then Linda shows me to the guest room. A bed! With flannel sheets, no less. I drift toward sleep, feeling safe and warm and profoundly grateful. Diana bought me dinner, but Linda gave me food for thought. And sometimes that’s the best meal of all.

In the morning I shave and shower, washing my hair with Linda’s Irish moss shampoo. The shower is made of stone and stands in a corner of the greenhouse, butting up against a wall of glass. I bathe, naked to the world, or at least to my cousins, the redwoods.

Linda fixes French toast, with honey in the batter, as I eat sliced cantaloupe and sip grapefruit juice. Fauna and Iona turn cartwheels across the hardwood floor. I’ve never been a comfortable guest, even in good friends’ houses. But I feel totally at ease in this stranger’s home. My stomach churns, but not from hunger. I must soon leave, and I know the uncertainty of the road is about to resume.

Linda hands me the bag of trail mix, along with a Mutsu apple and two lemon zucchinis from her organic garden. The load adds a good seven pounds to my pack, but it’s weight I’ll gladly carry.

She and the girls drive me back down to the highway in Garberville. I thank Linda and tell her that if the rest of my trip goes a tenth as well as it has here, it will be a great journey.

“Well, if you settle for ten percent, that’s what you’ll get,” she says. “On your journey, don’t compromise your vision. You’re on a vision quest. You’re an archetype. You represent Middle America, who just got fed up and wants to discover the real America. Maybe America is now spelled with a small
a
, and you’re out trying to find the capital-
A
America.”

Linda leans over and hugs me, and gives my cheek a kiss. I say goodbye to the girls and step out of the van. I’m standing in the same spot where I found the cauliflower yesterday.

“Remember,” Linda says through the open window, “don’t compromise your vision.”

CHAPTER 6

I compromise my vision in Arcata, California.

A guy with a goatee offers me shelter and I quickly accept. His name’s Stitch, and he’s come to this coastal college town to play a gig with a band called Freeland. He says I can crash with him at the apartment of a friend of a friend of the lead guitarist’s. I stand through four hours of jazz-blues-funk, applauding wildly at Stitch’s ponderous bass solos. After the last set, he lingers with a pair of Freeland groupies. I hover at the edge. Stitch doesn’t know me now, and who can blame him?

I wander off to sleep in the city park, just inside the tree line, too scared to go any further into the woods. The sweeping headlights of passing cars keep me up most of the night. Serves me right.

At dawn, I walk out to Highway 299. I’m finally aimed east.

A man of about 50, with baggy ethnic pants and a drum the shape of a TV picture tube, walks up and introduces himself as Brother Tom. He hitchhiked his way through the sixties and seventies, but now restores houses and cares for his two teenaged daughters. He’s returning to his roots this weekend, thumbing to a music festival in the mountains. As car after car ignore my sign and his thumb, Brother Tom lays out the Zen of hitchhiking.

“See all those cars passing you? Don’t worry about them. They’re not your ride. Your ride’s comin’.”

My ride turns out to be a small camper truck. The driver hops out to open the back, and Brother Tom gives her a hug. “Mike, I want you to meet my beautiful sister Mo.” She’s 20, in cutoffs, with long brown hair and ample breasts barely contained by her bikini top, and from the way Brother Tom holds her, I’d say they weren’t siblings.

Mo is an engineering student at the college in Arcata, but this semester she’s working and living on an organic farm up the road. She should be in the fields this morning, but Brother Tom talks her into catching the concert with him. We stop by the farm, so Mo can get her sleeping bag. She asks if the rules of my journey permit me to accept food. No, I tell her, I’m a breatharian. She sees I’m kidding and fills a paper sack with organic tomatoes, zucchini and melons.

I lie in the back of the truck and talk to Mo and Brother Tom through the sliding window. Mo says as long as she’s skipping work, she’d like to climb Mt. Shasta. But that’s more than 14,000 feet of mountain, and Brother Tom’s wearing slippers. A bit farther on, Mo decides what she really wants to do is go see a friend up in Ashland, Oregon. Brother Tom takes a pass; he can’t miss the all-percussion group that kicks off at midnight. I wish Mo would ask me.

She looks at me in the rearview mirror. “You’re welcome to come with me,” she says, smiling.

“That’d be great, if you don’t think I’d drag you down.”

Brother Tom says, “Mike, you’re not dragging anything. Maybe you were, but you’re in an up-tempo mode now.” He bangs on his drum and adds, “This is a most harmonious harmony we’re having here.”

“I’d love the company,” Mo says. “Then tomorrow you can look at your map and see which way you’ll go across Oregon.”

We drop Brother Tom in Weaverville, and drive north on Highway 3. The road winds for two hours through the sawtooth peaks of the Trinity Alps and deposits us in Yreka, just south of the Oregon border. Mo shares her tofu and pita bread with me. I’ve never had tofu, and doubt I ever will again, but right now it tastes swell.

Rain greets us at the state line. This would unnerve me if I didn’t have a place lined up for the night. But I’m staying with Mo and her friend, so it can rain cats and dogs and elephants, for all I care. How wonderful to come penniless into a strange town on a stormy night and be free of anxiety. Mo’s friend is a cook. Maybe we’ll drop by his restaurant for a meal on the house. Maybe there will be a few beers in the deal.

Mo’s voice pulls me from my reverie.

“I’ll probably have to wing it like you tonight,” she says. “I’ll want to visit with Matt, but he’s got a small place, and I know his girlfriend won’t want me to stay over.”

My heart races. This can’t be happening. Not two nights in a row. But it is. Mo’s parking in downtown Ashland. She’s opening the back to her camper. I’m grabbing my pack and my bag of vegetables. It’s pouring. The butterflies in my stomach feel like pigeons.

“Stay dry,” Mo says.

I nod and swallow hard.

Ashland is renowned for its annual Shakespeare festival, drawing tourists from around the world. Years ago, I was the theater columnist for
The Washington Post
. I always dreamed of going to Ashland. Now that I’m here, I can’t even buy a playbill.

A woman with a teardrop tattoo under her right eye tells me there’s a free meal in the park. I follow her to a gazebo, where Ashland’s homeless have gathered to feast on barbecued chicken, burgers, and vegetarian egg rolls. They are mostly a band of futon-hopping hippie urchins, who live on faith and psychedelics.

I talk to a guy my age named Sumi. He says he hurt his back and lost his landscaping business. The room he rents eats up his disability check. There’s nothing left for food. I tell him about Guatemala, how gringos can live down there comfortably on a fraction of what it costs in the States. After his third trip through the beggar’s banquet, Sumi swears he’s moving to Guatemala. He thanks me over and over. He’d like to let me sleep on his floor, he says, but his place is too small. He’s sorry. That’s okay, I say, though I’m more sorry than he is. I give him my bag of produce, keeping only a honeydew melon.

I want to rush to a payphone and call Anne collect, but can’t. I told myself I wouldn’t call home until I get close to the end. The slightest bit of concern or doubt in her voice will be all I need to chicken out. I don’t want to be like a high wire artist who looks down and sees he’s working without a net.

Diners dressed in the rugged, yet tony attire of the Northwest upwardly mobile emerge from trendy restaurants, carrying wide umbrellas. I inspect the storefronts, trying to look at once fascinating and needy, hoping a local citizen will stop and say, “Hey, I bet you’d be a great houseguest.” But I’m invisible. After midnight, I resign myself to another dreaded inevitability of this journey.

The police arrest people who camp in the park. If I want to sleep tonight, I must do it in the Rogue River National Forest, about a mile above town. A fellow vagabond tells me to look for a gate that blocks a dirt road. The cops won’t bother me beyond there.

Yeah, but what else will?

My umbrella won’t cover my pack and me, so I pull a plastic bag over my pack and walk up a narrow road. I pass spacious houses spread over a wooded hillside. Each porch, lighted and dry, is a picture of despair. The last street lamp fades behind me. I hear the creek, falling from the reservoir on my left, but can’t see it. The road bends, and I find myself in total darkness. My pace slows, and I stop walking, unable to take another step.

I haven’t always been afraid of bears. I only got scared when my friend, the Sawman, let it slip on a backpacking trip that the lumbering beasts are faster than any human. That was 11 years ago, and I haven’t slept in the woods since. I know that this fear is irrational. I know that, statistically, I’m in greater danger asleep in my city apartment. But my intellect always gets its ass kicked by my imagination.

Tonight can be different. I have a choice. I can step into the blackness, deal with the fear, and get some rest. Or I can turn back to town and sit up all night, a lamppost as my baby-sitter.

I turn back.

Suddenly there’s a shadowy figure before me. “How far to the gate?” I blurt, partly startled, but mostly ashamed to be seen walking away from the forest with a backpack.

“Are you going to sleep up here?” the man says.

I can make out a rain hat and glasses, but I can’t see his face. I figure he must live in one of the big houses down the road. Maybe he’ll take pity on me and let me sleep on his porch.

“Yes,” I answer tentatively.

“Do you have a tent?” he says.

“No.”

“Do you have a tarp?”

“No.”