Slowly becoming conscious this morning was unpleasant—highly
unpleasant. My sleeping bag was soaked. My tarp had pools of rain water
collected in it. Drops of water dripped out of the trees constantly. I felt
relatively dry in my cave, but it was a disgusting, sticky sensation. I was
frustrated. And wanted to give up.
Which explains why I’m here in Baldwin already, at a laundromat, drying myself and my possessions out (I wish I could crawl into a
dryer!)
My gear was so soaked—and my feet so wet—that I concluded I
needed to get off the trail. I was camped right along 8 mile, and after looking
at my map I realized it was only a few miles to the 37. There wasn’t much of a
town there—Brohman—but, I figured skin sloughing off my feet constituted an
emergency, so I decided to hitchhike.
Four or five cars passed me on Pierce—I stuck my thumb out,
but I figured I would do my serious hitchhiking on the main road. Got to
Brohman, and, after being passed by ten cars, got discouraged and decided I
needed the fortification and warmth only coffee could lend. There was a gas
station there—a BP—and I set my sights for that, but then at the last minute I
changed course and went for a charismatic-looking little (and I mean
LITTLE) restaurant called Abner’s (it had a picture of one of those black and
white mini-bulldog thingees on the front). Anyway, I walked in there, and
charismatic it was indeed! Only one table was taken—a bunch of old guys,
probably locals—and the walls were plastered with all sorts of bumper stickers, about dogs and
whatever. I was quite nearly incoherent in my sodden and chilled misery, but I
managed to ask for a :small coffee to go. Conversation at the local table came
to a standstill. Very, very awkward. Got my coffee, and as I was walking out,
one of the guys said, “Nasty day for a walk, huh?”
I shrugged as I went out the door and said, “Eh, could be worse, there could be lightning!”
I shrugged as I went out the door and said, “Eh, could be worse, there could be lightning!”
Got back on the road, sticking my thumb out whenever a
vehicle came up behind me. The coffee had emboldened me, but still, I felt very
forlorn as car after car passed me. I had almost resolved that I would have to
walk all the way to Baldwin when a maroon pickup that passed me pulled over and
started backing up! I picked up my pace, quickly looked in the window—two
oldish looking guys—threw my backpack in the truck bed, and hopped in. The guy
in the passenger seat scooted over to make room for me on the bench.
“Don’t see people hitchin’ much anymore,” remarked the
driver.
“Yeah…desperation..” and I rambled and babbled about being
out in the rain for the last two nights and days.
“Where you headed? North?” said the driver.
“Yep…Baldwin.” I replied.
“We can handle that…we’re going to Wolf Lake to get some
parts at a junk yard, then out…[somewhere] to get a number on some machinery for
sale…”
Exceptional luck, I couldn’t help but think. Two nice guys
and they were going straight through Baldwin! Out of the corner of my eye, I
inspected my benefactors. Old, both of them, at least in their sixties. A
couple packages of chew rested in the corner of the dash. Jeans, flannel—looked
like classic northern Michiganders. Spoke like it, too, with a slightly
backwoods accent, complete with “Oooohhh yeaahs.” Turns out they were loggers
(!) from White Cloud. When they weren’t interrogating me, they were talking
about cedar and telephone poles and saws.
Eventually they remembered me…”So, what do you do, young
blood?”
“I’m a student at Calvin College in Grand Rapids,” I said,
or something to that extent.
They chuckled a bit. The driver jovially said, “My friend
here, he’s got a PhD in the School of Hard Knocks, and me, I’ve got a master’s
in “Get It Done.”
They talked more about logging and excavating and then,
after asking what I wanted to be, advised me to go into logging. “Whaddya say,
Wayne, we make him into a logger?” From there, they started joking about
retirement, so I asked, “Is it true that you can never retire?”
They laughed a bit, and then the driver said, “Oooohh yeaah,
I was in excavating for years, retired, then started working at a retirement
home, for ten years! Fun job—never wanted to get too close to them, I only was
ever friends with about half a dozen of them…otherwise, it gets to ya quick!
Then I started logging.”
Let’s see, what else did they say…when I mentioned I was from
California, the driver said, “Woah, you must be thinking you’re in the middle
of hell!” To this I had to respond with the whole growing-up-in-Detroit
part of my life story, to which he responded, “Sounds like ya went from bad to
worse!”
Eventually we got to Baldwin. They joked about dropping me
off at the slammer—“…90% blacks in that tank…don’t know how they’d take to a
little white boy…”
So yeah, I survived my first hitchhiking experience, and it
was awesome.
I didn’t really know what to do with myself, then, since
Baldwin was my target destination for the day, and it was only 9AM. I wandered
into Dollar General, realized I wasn’t ready to go shopping yet, bought a
package of mini-oreos, and walked out munching on them. THEY WERE SO GOOD. My
debit card hadn’t been working, so the cashier put it in a plastic shopping bag
and swiped it. Voila! “You learn things working at Dollar General…”
Now, to get dry…a laundromat was what I needed. I poked my
head into the door of a weird tourist-trapping little shop and asked, “Is there
a laundromat in town?” The cashier, a northern Michigan stereotypical guy with
a paintbrush moustache, simply pointed south and said, “Three blocks, on the
left.”
Epilogue: My dryness that day was fleetingly temporarily. Within fifteen minutes of being back on the trail (I had gotten a ride back to the trail with a kind lady from the laundromat, but that's another story in itself), I was already soaked through again. In the end, I survived, hiking perhaps 120 miles in all.
