July 30, 2004

• Mike from
  Krakow

  I picked up a hitchhiker on my way to town today.   I don’t
  stop for every hitchhiker.  I play it by ear, sorta, or by
  something between my ears.  It’s not the rational left brain I use
  to decide who to pick up and who to let stand there.  On the way
  home tonight, there was one in Willow that I passed up.  I hadn’t
  even gotten close enough to see his face or the little black dog with
  him, when I decided not to stop.  It just didn’t feel right. 
  But the one this afternoon on the way into town felt so right that I
  screeched to a stop for him even though I was nearly up to him when I
  first saw him there.  The thought crossed my mind that he was the
  reason I’d dawdled around here and left so late.

  When he asked if I was going to Anchorage, his English was good, but
  his accent spoke of Eastern Europe.  When I said I was going to
  Wasilla, “about half-way,” the grin and the one word, “Perfect!” spoke
  of an experienced hitchhiker happy for any ride that takes him more
  than a few miles and doesn’t drop him off in the middle of
  nowhere.  Where I picked him up must have seemed like the middle
  of nowhere to him, not far from where I live here on the edge of the
  back of beyond.

  He had a big back pack and a small day pack.  The big one had to
  go in the hatch.  I got out to open it for him, and as he tossed
  the pack in I saw written on it in marker, two words.  One went by
  too fast and was on the other side of the pack when it thumped heavily
  into my car, but the other word said “Krakow.”  Krakow has a
  special place in my heart and in my whimsy, because it’s one of the
  “words” my cat Pidney used to say.  She’d say “Raoul” and “map”
  and “Krakow,” and from that I fantasized a tale of her jet-setting lost
  love and her intention of setting off on her motor scooter to find
  Raoul.  Not another city in the world could have tickled my fancy
  more than Krakow.  Fancy that.

  As we got back onto the road, I asked if he’d been to Denali.  I’d
  gotten a good enough look at him to know he wasn’t a climber: 
  none of that deep high-altitude sunburn, with the white goggle-marks,
  that we see on the occasional extraordinarily fit hitchhiker.  He
  seemed fit enough, and he handled that heavy pack okay, but he was
  obviously not here just for the mountain.  He said yes, he’d been
  to Denali and added, “I like it,” with a big grin.  I said I like
  it, too, and that started a conversation that lasted for the next 45
  miles or so.

  In response to my question, he told me he’s from Poland, confirming
  what the “Krakow” on his pack had suggested.  He wanted to know if
  there were any special places around here that I like a lot, and I
  recommended Thunderbird Falls between here and Anchorage, Cook Inlet
  beyond Anchorage, and the Portage Glacier on the shores of Cook
  Inlet.  We talked local geography for a while and established that
  he’s on his way to Seward, so all of those places are along his planned
  route.

  I asked how long he’d been in Alaska (two weeks) and how much longer he
  would be staying (another week).  He had flown to Denver and got a
  bonus flight on into Montana somehow (traffic and his accent kept me
  from catching all the details of that).  He started hitchhiking in
  Montana, and said that hitching rides is much easier in Alaska than it
  is in the “continental” U.S. (what I’d call the lower 48), and that in
  Canada it is very hard to catch rides. 

  He had come through the wildfires in the border country, and asked me
  if we’d had any bush fires here.  I said not this year, except for
  a little one near home that was quickly put out.  We talked a
  while about fire and forests and how quickly they regenerate.  In
  answer to his questions I pointed out some areas that had been burnt in
  the 300,000 acre Millers Reach fire eleven years ago, and told him that
  the entire area we were traveling through had been burnt off about
  eighty years ago during construction of the Alaska Railroad.

  He told me he had gone from Yukon Territory to Fairbanks and then
  hitched all the way to Prudhoe Bay before coming back by way of Mount
  McKinley (Denali).  That impressed me.  Not many people even
  drive to Prudhoe Bay.  Most of the traffic up there is by air, and
  few people other than those who work in the oil field fly in and out of
  there.  Today, he’d been planning to hitch the Denali Highway over
  to Valdez, but the sky that way was threatening storms, so he headed
  toward Anchorage.  I said it had probably been a wise choice,
  because the Denali Highway is only paved for the first few miles, then
  beyond that it’s a long, slow, gravel road with very little
  traffic.  That led him to talk about some of the long walks and
  waits between rides, both on the road to Prudhoe Bay, and last year in
  Australia.

  We shared some of our experiences, his in Australia a year ago and mine
  in the Southwestern U.S. three decades ago.  We talked about laws,
  those regarding hitchhiking and those regarding fireworks, as we passed
  the cluster of fireworks stands at the Big Lake turnoff.  He
  expanded on some of his experiences in Canada, and I talked about the
  reasons for the anti-hitchhiking laws in Arizona.  Both stories
  involved crime and public reactions to them.  Apparently there are
  few people hitching rides on the roads in Canada now, because of a
  series of crimes against hitchhikers, he said.  I told him about
  one particularly gruesome crime in Arizona in the 1950s, in which a
  family was killed by someone they’d picked up, that led to hitchhiking
  being outlawed.

  Then after a quiet half a mile, he asked if I like Anchorage.  I
  said no, I don’t like cities, and he anticipated the word, “cities”,
  saying it in unison with me.  I explained that Anchorage was big
  enough to be dirty and violent, but too small to have many of the urban
  amenities of bigger cities.  I said there was a decent museum and
  some theater, but mostly just tourist traps.  I told him the city
  depends economically on the two military bases, has a transient
  population of military personnel and dependents, and has somehow
  collected a varied permanent population of Asians and Pacific islanders
  from places like Tonga and Samoa.  I told him that the Tongans and
  Samoans are frequently in the news because they brought their
  longstanding enmity and blood feuds with them when they came
  here.  He said, “some people are crazy.”  I answered that
  most people, average people, are crazy and he agreed.

  This was no average guy, not even the run of the mill backcountry
  hitchhiker.  I wouldn’t have minded a few hundred more miles of
  his stories.  But I had that van-driving commitment to keep, and
  he had many miles to go.  I stopped across the highway from Felony
  Flats, opened the hatch for him to get his pack, and handed him my
  card.  He grinned again, thanked me and said goodbye, shouldering
  that pack as if it were light.
  

  • 4:52 am
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