Wednesday, May 8, 2019
A Bible story says that Abraham heard a voice that told him to sacrifice his boy Isaac. Up the mountain marched the pair. As father held knife to son's throat, another voice said Abraham had proven his faith and need not sacrifice Isaac. A goat tangled in a nearby bush would suffice. Father and son returned home unharmed, unlike the goat.
This morning I tried and failed to hitchhike to Prince George, 240 kilometres north of our Williams Lake home. I walked to the junction of Highway 97 and Mackenzie Avenue, an intersection with a traffic light, at the edge of town, five kilometres from our apartment building. I stood on the highway for an hour but got no ride, including from the driver of the half ton truck sporting the logo of my spouse's tribal council.
My spouse's Prince George niece offered her a Honda Accord at a good price, but the niece is too busy to drive the car to us. Our Toyota Echo engine died in February and we sold the car for $500 to a mechanic.
Yesterday's effort to reach Prince George also failed. Another niece found on social media a man driving from Kamloops to Prince George, a route that passes through Williams Lake. He said he'd stop in Williams Lake and pick me up on the way. I waited for two hours after the appointed time. He never came.
These social media and hitchhiking mishaps brought Abraham and Isaac to mind as I walked home under a sunny spring sky today.
Crime is down but its reporting is up, a Los Angeles social science academic told filmmaker Michael Moore in the late-1990s film Bowling for Columbine. Such reporting, now much worsened by the hate, fear, and bad news people exchange on social media, makes a mass culture of fear and paranoia. It's a small wonder that nobody picked me up today. A few drivers waved. A few shrugged. Mostly brazenly passed by, including those who could see me when they stopped at the nearby traffic light.
I'm glad I'm me, not them.
Such an experience would make a cynical person doubt the goodness of human nature. I think people are good, but misled and stampeded toward bad behavior, or at least indifference. I was going to give to anyone who picked me up money, and something rarer, a tote bag from the Centre for European Nuclear Research (CERN) on the Swiss-French border. My sister, who retains her good human nature, mailed me several such tote bags after she visited CERN.
Enter Abraham and Isaac, and grace. For picking me up, some driver would have gotten a CERN tote bag, and perhaps money. I would be acting like the voice that rewarded Abraham's faith by letting him keep the gift that was his son. Now I veer toward acting like Abraham, by planning to sacrifice a good thing, hitchhiking, as he planned to sacrifice Isaac.
I think someone would eventually have picked me up; not everyone has been brainwashed into paranoia by social and other media. As well as Abraham and Isaac, I thought of expectancy theory as I walked home from the highway today. That branch of probabilistic mathematics I studied in a university statistics course uses equations to predict when a given event will occur. I found such mathematics elegant and useful.
I find you elegant and useful for reading this.
My retirement from hitchhiking is a time to recall past hitchhikes. I'll describe one notable hitchhike from each of the four provinces where I have hitchhiked.
In January, 1983 west of Mayerthorpe, Alberta, my car broke down in -25 weather. I hitched a 25-kilometre ride to Whitecourt, where I then lived and was a newspaper reporter. I was quitting that job the next month. My car quit earlier than I. I borrowed a vehicle from my dad to finish my job. The day in late March that I called to say I was moving back to his Edson acreage, my six-month apartment lease having ended, he told me that my older sister Jeannette had died. I was 21 and she was 26. She hitchhiked to Vancouver as a teenager.
My Whitecourt car was not great, a noisy, cranky 1972 Toyota Corona five-speed I'd gotten from the Whitecourt distributor of the Edmonton Journal. He needed something bigger, the 1975 Dodge Monaco station wagon, the first car I ever owned. He gave me his car and $800 for my car. The Dodge guzzled gas but it was powerful. I proved that one day by driving as fast as safely possible from Whitecourt to Mayerthorpe, my Wednesday news newspaper distribution and news gathering trip. The papers had come late from the Leduc printing plant 200 km to the southeast. We collated sections and flyers with demonic speed in the shed behind the newspaper office, to get me on the road to Mayerthorpe, fellow reporter Joe on the road to Fox Creek, 80 km in the other direction, and Shelagh on the road around Whitecourt to places that retailed the paper (circulation 3 700).
Stella McDougall, an then an old woman and columnist in Mayerthorpe, told me she remembered Dad, who lived with his family there in the 1930s when he was a teenager. I don't know if I kept my consequent interview with Stella. You who know Alberta geography might know the places I reported from near Mayerthorpe: Blue Ridge, Sangudo, and Rochfort Bridge.
In May, 1985, I hitchhiked from Riviere-du-Loup, Quebec to Halifax, Nova Scotia, several hundred kilometres, with one ride. I'd finished my university business degree in Edmonton and found in the local paper's classified ads a plane ticket to Toronto for $100. It was the return leg of a round-trip Toronto-Edmonton ticket. I bought it, flew, to Toronto, bought a one-month VIA Rail Pass for $350 or so, and rode the train east through Montreal to Riviere-du-Loup.
I had a long enough Montreal stop to meet my Montreal friend Tony, and my Edson high school friend Jennifer, in Montreal for university. Tony challenged me to eat a Svenson's Ice Cream Parlor Earthquake, a massive confection of ice cream, bananas, berries, nuts, whipped cream, and syrup. I did, and I wasn't hungry until the train pulled into Riviere-du-Loup the next morning.
Another English-speaking passenger and I decided to hitchhike directly east rather than take the train northeast along the Gaspe Peninsula and into New Brunswick near Campbellton, or wait for the train through Fredericton, which by then I don't think went through Maine to New Brunswick anymore anyway. He and I ate at a roadside diner on the hill going west out of town, and walked to the junction with the highway that went through Cabano into New Brunswick and Fredericton. He suggested we hitchhike separately. He walked a couple hundred metres ahead of me on the highway. The last I saw him was when I waved as the car that had picked me up drove past him.
The driver, a bread wholesaler, had left Thunder Bay, Ontario the day before and spent the night in Quebec City. As his car got closer to his and my destination, Halifax, we turned up the music to keep him awake. He dropped me and my yellow backpack off after we paid the 25-cent toll on the bridge that connects Dartmouth and Halifax. Born and raised in Halifax, he told me that when the city torn down the old piers years earlier, there were rats as long as his compact car's dashboard living under them.
In May, 1989, I hitchhiked from Port Hawkesbury to Sydney, Nova Scotia, with that same yellow backpack, which my sister Maryanne bought years earlier, gave to me, and which I still have. Again traveling on a train pass, I promised our friend Tim, who lived in Ottawa, that I would stop in Port Hawkesbury to visit his mother on my way to Sydney and the ferry to Newfoundland. I'd paid $12 or so the night before for a room in the residence of St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, where I found others watching something other than the National Hockey League playoffs on the lounge television. Nova Scotia bars being closed on Sundays then, I found a taxi stand with a tiny tv on which to watch a game of the final series between the Calgary Flames and Montreal Canadiens, the last time two Canadian teams played for the Stanley Cup.
The short train ride from Antigonish to Canso and across the causeway from Port Hawkesbury gave me time to get to Tim's mother by day, but the next train was the next day. After I visited her and her cat, I therefore hitchhiked from Port Hawkesbury to through Baddeck and the Bras d'Or Lakes, two places where people teach and speak Gaelic, to Sydney. The older woman alone in her car who gave me a ride was going to see her sister in New Waterford, I think. For being trusting enough to pick up a backpack-carrying longhair, I gave her a hat with the logo of the Edson Red Brick Arts Centre on it.
Alas, it's a 15-km walk from Sydney to the ferry dock at North Sydney, I discovered. I started walking, hoping to reach the ferry scheduled to leave for Newfoundland that evening. A police car stopped alongside during my walk. The cop asked where I was going and I told him. He doubted I'd walk there in time for the ferry. He said if he came by again and found me walking still, he'd give me a ride. As I type that, I realize that this cop knew and accepted hitchhiking, technically illegal. Indeed, when he found me walking the next time he passed, he gave me a ride to the ferry. I wondered then, and I sometimes wonder since, if anyone in the crowd of passengers and ferry workers who saw me get out of a police car thought I was a dangerous person being deported from Nova Scotia.
Not only did I get to the ferry on time, and see everyone bed down on benches and the floor for the overnight trip to Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland. I also found a television in the boat's bar on which to watch the Flames-Canadiens game, live from Calgary, and therefore at a late hour in the Newfoundland time zone. The only hindrance was two young men Bible thumpers, apparent insomniacs, trying to sell me their religion during the game.
I got to Newfoundland, rode a bus to St. John's, stayed a couple nights in the Seaport Inn, rooms above a bar on a waterside street with tattoo parlors, bused back to Deer Lake, rented a car and drove up the west coast to Windy Point, where I couldn't understand the old timers talking in the Bonne Bay Legion, and returned to the mainland. Newfoundland has no more trains or tracks.
I ran the wheels of the rail system with that 30-day pass, boldface places being where the train was cut that summer forever, despite anti-cut petitions in many stations ("Save VIA Rail, Ax Mulroney" the sign said by the table with the Vancouver station petition): Toronto, Montreal, Riviere-du-Loup, Halifax, Yarmouth, Digby, St. John, Sudbury, North Bay, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Dauphin, Churchill, Regina, Calgary, Revelstoke, Kamloops, Vancouver, Victoria, Courtenay, Comox, Prince Rupert, Prince George, Jasper, Edson.
In May, 1998, I hitchhiked from Wildwood, a few km north of Williams Lake, to Chetwynd. Usually I rode Greyhound buses from Williams Lake to Chetwynd every month from February to June of that year, then hitchhiked 25 km out of Chetwynd to Saulteau, where I taught adult education after the teacher quit to return to university. This time I hitchhiked because our daughter's spring concert was that night, too late for me to ride the usual bus north. My spouse us to Wildwood after the concert, wished me luck, and went back to our Williams Lake apartment, in the same building where I type this. I got a few short rides, and south of Quesnel one long one, finally, which took me to the Prince George bus station. I arrived 10 minutes after it closed after sending the midnight bus north to Chetwynd. There was a 3:30 stopover in Prince George, not a 3:40 one.
It was a long walk through Prince George, across the Nechako River, and along the Hart Highway to the city limits. I stood on the highway for a couple wee hours, then got one ride 300 km to Chetwynd, which I reached around six in the morning. Another ride got me to Saulteau by 7:00. I changed in the house where I boarded and walked the two km to the school.
Thanks for reading this. Send any comments to cmcwynne@yahoo.ca.
