3.

The Hitchhike

COLORADO, WYOMING, MONTANA, ALBERTA

September 2012

Apart from a moment or two of cold feet, I walked toward the busy I-25 in a flurry of ecstasy that began in my belly, coursed up the length of my spine, and erupted out of my mouth in wild cackles of exultation that I tried to hide from passing drivers for fear that they’d think I was crazy.

I was aglow, thankful for life, this life, with which, it was so apparent right then, I could do anything I fancied. I was living! Fully and unabashedly, wholly and unfettered! Life! It’s all mine.

The beginning of an adventure . . . Yes, there will be misery and, yes, I will be miserable, but right now, at the beginning, there are only sunny skies and grand visions of what my newly adventurous future holds. There won’t be any more schedules. No more bosses. No more dishes, no more bills. I am on the open road carrying only a backpack full of gear and a far-fetched idea: to get to Alberta and then walk every step of the way south to Texas. Whatever trials and triumphs that lie ahead are unknown. What will I see? Whom will I meet? Who will I be by the time I reach the end?

I was heading north toward the deep, dark, green forests of northern Alberta where, before I could commence my hike, I needed to see the tar sands—the source of the oil that would travel through the Keystone XL.

Where would I get my water from? How would landowners react to my trespassing over their property? How was I going to deal with all the animals—especially the cows? I’d have to walk through countless herds of them . . .

My only comfort was in knowing that I wasn’t carrying some stiff, stubborn, stagnant plan but the living, breathing, heart-thumping philosophy that had worked for me so well in the past and that I believed would work for me again: I’ll figure it out.

•   •   •

Much to my surprise, there was another hitchhiker on the entrance ramp standing where I’d intended to stand. He waved me over and introduced himself as Chris. He said he’d been standing there for hours. Chris was fortyish. His head was shaved bald, and he had a pair of burly, hairy, butcher’s forearms. I didn’t blame the drivers for passing him by; as scary as Chris looked, I probably would have, too. He told me that he’d just gotten out of jail and was headed to California to talk with his ex-girlfriend, who out of spite, apparently, cut up all of his IDs. He asked me how much money I made hitching rides, and I said, “None. I don’t like to take money. Just rides.” He said that begging drivers is the way he makes money and that he once left Kentucky with four hundred dollars. I gave him three candy bars and began walking up the I-25 with a cardboard sign strapped to my pack reading NORTH.

After half an hour, I was disappointed to note that my feet were already sore. While I’d jogged for weeks to train for the expedition, I hadn’t accustomed myself to walking with a forty-pound backpack. The only thing that would prepare me for a long-distance hike, I realized, was a long-distance hike.

I walked on a side road that paralleled the interstate next to a cornfield where thousands of grasshoppers clumsily leaped into a jungle of sturdy green stalks and sagging, tongue-shaped leaves. An older gentleman in a white Volkswagen prowled beside me. I nodded hello. He drove off, turned around, and picked me up.

His name was Richard and he was coming from Denver, where he had attended a model train sale. He told me he was headed home to Cheyenne, Wyoming, as he handed me a napkin and a juicy plum. He talked about his Volkswagen’s impressive mileage per gallon, and I casually mentioned something about how fuel-efficiency standards had recently been raised by President Obama, who, at the time, was in a dead heat in the polls with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. While Richard didn’t seem to have anything against the new standards, he harrumphed contemptuously at the very mention of the president’s name, as if it were poison to his ears, as if it were some garlic-breathed satanic verse whispered in a schoolchild’s ghostly Sanskrit. O-ba-ma.

Trying to address his harrumph courteously and apolitically, I asked him which of Obama’s policies were not to his liking.

“All of them!” he cried, as if it were the only reasonable thing to say.

He glanced over at me suspiciously, and said, “You don’t like the guy, do you?”

“I wouldn’t call myself a fan,” I said. “But I’m not anti-Obama.”

Truth was, I went door-to-door for Obama before the 2008 election as a doe-eyed progressive, hoping he’d be the revolutionary leader who would take us from the medieval “drill-baby-drill” Cheney era into the free-thinking, the-climate’s-getting-a-little-hot-so-maybe-we-should-(you-know)-do-something-about-it twenty-first century. But after four years, like many progressives, I was disillusioned with the broken promises, the galling compromises, the weak-kneed, pragmatic politics when the country needed a good, hard progressive kick to the seat of its pants.

“Well, if you say another good word about him, I’ll throw you out of this car,” Richard said in a joking-yet-not-really-joking sort of way, clearly dissatisfied with my response.

“I’ll hold my tongue,” I said obediently.

I tried to bring up his toy-train collection to move the conversation onto less hostile terrain, but something always made him think of Obama.

“He’s done everything wrong!” he screeched. “Everything!”

While it was true that I, too, was disappointed, I’d like to think my disappointment was rooted in rationality. But I could tell that Richard felt something closer to hatred, which was rooted in something else entirely.

Richard was actually really nice when he wasn’t talking politics, and he gave me his number in case I got stuck in Cheyenne, where he dropped me off.

“I’m sad to see you go,” he said. “Give me a call if you get stuck, and I’ll come pick you up.”

I got a ride to Casper, Wyoming, from a National Guard JAG. We talked about his tour in Afghanistan as I looked over the Wyoming scenery—a dry, flat, brushy landscape empty except for a surprising preponderance of energy oddities: a giant two-chimney coal factory, a herd of black pump jacks pumping oil from the ground, and in the distance, the twirling arms of windmill robots. Without any roads or homes or people, these structures seemed as if they’d been dropped off by some cold, utility-minded alien race. (Unbeknownst to me, Wyoming is an energy giant. In 2012, Wyoming produced, out of all the states, the eighth most oil, the fifth most natural gas, and the most coal, more than three times second-place West Virginia).

The JAG dropped me off in Casper just before dusk. I held out my sign on an entrance ramp again but had no luck. I could see that the I-25’s narrow-shouldered culvert would be dangerous to walk, so I limped along and took a side road through the low-income industrial part of town. It was getting dark, and I heard an ominous pop in my sock, which was a blister breaking. With each step forward, I stretched the loose skin of my broken blister. My little toe throbbed.

I pulled off my backpack, got out my medical kit, cleaned the wound with rubbing alcohol, and draped bandages over the suppurating blister while sitting on my pack on a cracked sidewalk overgrown with weeds. I hobbled down the road, nervous now. It was dark, and in this industrial sector of town, there were no trees where I could secretly set up and hide my tent. I happened upon an RV campground, but it was full, and even if it hadn’t been, I didn’t want to spend twenty dollars for a camping site. I continued my search until I spotted a small creek lined with big bushes next to the railroad tracks behind the campground. As long as I didn’t set up my tent, I thought I might remain concealed there for the night in my sleeping bag.

The spot was far from ideal. A train clamored by every hour, and the smell of the polluted creek forced me to override my involuntary nose-based breathing patterns with an exhausting open-mouthed deliberateness. The spot’s only saving grace was the incredible nighttime image of the trains that would slowly creak past my camp carrying giant windmill blades, the moonlight rolling over the smooth, steely curves and animating the march of metal into a promenade of gigantic blue whales.

In the early hours of the morning, I cooked a pot of ramen stew with my cat-food-can stove and scarfed the noodles down even though the water was too hot. I was worried about getting caught by laborers arriving to work at the nearby gravel mounds. A tramp of Native-American descent ambled north along the railroad tracks. He nodded to me, and I nodded back.

•   •   •

I got a lift from Blaine, an oil worker headed home to Billings, Montana. He’d just finished a twelve-hour shift after twelve straight days of work. “Long, hard, and dangerous,” he described the job. “And everyone’s an asshole.”

He’d been working for the oil industry, grudgingly, for the past six months. His mom had cancer and couldn’t work, so he took it upon himself to become the family breadwinner. He told me about all the dangerous chemicals he was daily exposed to and the high cancer rate in local towns. Recently, some of the oil had contaminated a local water supply, so large cisterns had to be set up in town, though the people still showered in the contaminated water.

He warned me about my hiking route, telling me about the wolves that had spread out across Montana from Yellowstone, not to mention the cougars, grizzly bears, freakishly strong winds, and snow that could come to Montana as soon as September, which was, unsettlingly, now.

“Do you have warm clothes?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said.

The desolate Montana landscape made me shift uneasily in Blaine’s passenger seat. We drove over flat land then through slightly lumpy, hilly land, shaggy with tall dry yellow-brown grass. There were no trees, no creeks, no rivers, no buildings, no people—just grass and hills and deer and black cows and nothing else. What was it going to be like walking across this? It seemed as if it would be so easy to get lost, to go thirsty, to be whisked off your feet and dropped to a gory death by an angry prairie gust. I shuddered when I remembered how disoriented I became when walking the tundra plain in northern Alaska.

Later, I got a lift from Molly and Josh, a couple in their twenties from Maine who were heading up to Glacier National Park in northern Montana on a cross-country trip to California. We camped at a national forest, and the next day they dropped me off thirty-five miles south of the Canadian border in Shelby, Montana.

I walked most of the way to the border except for a short ride with Doris, who lived in the town of Sunburst, where she owns a herd of cows. I knew I’d likely be walking through herds and herds of cows over the course of my hike, so I asked her if she thought I’d get attacked by any and what I should do if I was.

Having been raised in a suburban neighborhood, my experience with cows was, to say the least, limited. My only exposure to them had been on TV, where I’d seen them chase people in Spain, violently fling cowboys off their backs in Idaho, and horrifically gore bullfighters in some When Animals Attack! episode. To me, cows were not the docile bovine creatures that they were to most people but, potentially, a swarming herd of ill-tempered water buffalo that could fend off a pride of lions with their organ-rending horns and flank-to-flank formations. The very last thing I wanted was to end up on the news as the cultural spectacle of the latest person killed by an amiable animal in the once-every-few-years “Man killed by goat” story. Animals would be no small obstacle. Every year in America there are 2.8 deaths by bear, 31 by dog, 20 by cow, and the odd coyote, cougar, and mountain goat fatality. Most mammals focus in on men (71 percent of the time) and whites (91 percent of the time), making my pasty white-man butt a prime, albeit fast-moving, target. And, of course, there were people to worry about, too, with about 15,000 yearly homicides in the U.S., plus close to 1,000 hunting accidents and up to 100 annual fatalities.

“Just look them in the eye and talk to ’um manly,” Doris said, about the bulls. “When they charge, just step to the side of ’um. Tire ’um out like that.”

When they charge? Before they hit me? Tire them out? Talk to ’um manly?

This was not what I was hoping to hear at all! I had little faith in my ability to evade a thousand-pound hulk of spiky-headed beef and absolutely none whatsoever in my being able to maintain a masculine tone.

“But you don’t have to worry about those Canadian cows,” she said disdainfully. “Them are all grain fed.”

Doris’s advice gave me reason to believe there was some reasonableness behind my fears, but Doris, whom I spotted giving me a concerned look out of the corner of her eye, was clearly in the process of gravely bringing my intelligence into question.

“You know they’re herbivores, right? That means they eat plants.”

She insisted that I go back to her place for a sandwich. Doris’s ex-husband, whom she’d called an “asshole” in the car, was on the couch and chose neither to get up nor look my way. When she told him she’d brought a guest home, he muttered, “Why’d you brang him here?”

Doris dropped me off on the I-15, and I stumbled on toward the border. It was dark, and no one was pulling over for me, so I walked down a steep slope next to a field where I laid out my sleeping pad and sleeping bag on a bed of grass where I was positive neither farmer nor driver would spot me. I turned on my iPad to read, but I was quickly distracted by the sky, a dark ocean lit from beneath by a wiggling world of bioluminescence. It felt as if it had been years since I’d seen the sky in all its nighttime splendor, years since I’d been on an adventure, years since I felt like I really, truly, owned my life, and all I could think of was how good it was to be alive . . .

•   •   •

Probably because I was so close to the Canadian border, no one picked me up the next morning. I walked the rest of the way to the border and stood in line behind a car at the inspection booth. I declared my bear spray and knife, and the agent speedily sent me into the office for further questioning. I knew what I’d planned on doing was extremely unusual and would probably be frowned upon by Canadian authorities, but I hoped my plan of lying my pants off (or until they were on fire) would do the trick and get me over the border.

“I’m going to walk across the province and write a book about the Alberta prairie,” I said, with surprising aplomb, casually adding that I had my first book coming out the next year and taking care not to mention anything about the tar sands, pipelines, or my disappointment in Canada’s newfound adoption of remorseless planet-destroying environmental habits. (According to the Center for Global Development’s Commitment to Development Index, an annual report that ranks twenty-seven of the world’s richest countries, Canada was ranked dead last in the category of “environment” from 2012–2014, in part because the tar sands place Canada among the worst greenhouse-gas-emitting countries per capita in the world.)

“Where are you going to sleep?” the official inside asked, looking curiously at my pack.

“Provincial parks whenever I can,” I said.

“And motels, of course,” I added, flashing her a boyish smile, as if to say, “I mean, what, do you think I’d sleep in a farmer’s field?” (Sleeping in farmers’ fields was exactly what I’d planned on doing.)

She carefully inspected my passport, noted how I was carrying a few hundred dollars in cash, and, much to my relief, let me over the border.

•   •   •

Canada! The boundless land of the north! The land of hockey, of boreal forest, of politeness, of universal health care! Between the unbelievably treeless, grass-waving prairie landscape and my presence in a different country, I began to feel that I was truly in foreign, exotic terrain. Yet, at the same time, it felt like a homecoming.

Twenty-nine years before, I was born in Hamilton, Ontario, to an American mom and a Scottish dad. Even though we moved to Niagara Falls, New York, when I was six, Canada would always exist in my mind as my first home, my birthplace, my maple syrup–filled womb. And as I continued to walk north on the highway, I wondered if there was something about my multinational history that had drawn me to the XL. As I did, the Keystone XL pipeline will begin in Canada and move south into America. It will be, as I am, a Canadian as well as an American product—a hybrid. I just hoped that this was the end of the metaphor since I didn’t want to be refined into distillates in Texas and shipped off to China.

Now back in my native land, I took my picture with the self-timer function on my camera with my arms triumphantly raised beneath a giant WELCOME TO ALBERTA sign. I quickly got a ride with a young man attending college in Lethbridge, who told me about his travels in Japan and his education in psychology. “You didn’t look like a vagrant,” he said, when I asked him why he chose to pick me up.

“Thanks,” I said, feeling complimented. “I prefer to think of myself more like a hitchhiker. A philosopher-tramp, maybe.” Later, he took me to his parents’ house so I could fill up my water bottles, and he introduced me to his sister as a “philosopher-bum.”

My next ride was to Leduc, Alberta, with Jake, who worked on an oil rig near Edmonton, where he said he put in sixteen to twenty-four hours a day, oftentimes with only two to four hours of sleep between shifts.

I spent the night in my sleeping bag on the fringes of Leduc in the high grass next to an abandoned barn a short walk from the town’s shopping district. The next day, I took care of a host of logistical matters. I printed out last-minute maps at a Staples, got Canadian cash from an ATM, did edits for a magazine story at the library, and tried, and ultimately failed, to figure out a way to get my defunct phone working again or get my cellular data plan working on my iPad. Since I was bringing a broken toe on a hiking trip, it seemed fitting to be bringing a bunch of completely useless communication equipment, too.

It wasn’t until I was in Leduc, surrounded by people, that I realized that I cut a curious figure. Between my new backpack and fashionably stubbled facial hair (I hadn’t shaved for four days), I’d unknowingly gone from ordinary person to mysterious adventurer. I found myself being ogled by female servers at the local Tim Hortons coffee shop, who muffled coquettish giggles behind cupped palms.

The next day, I took a bus to the north of Edmonton. I walked and walked, and the pain in my little toe grew more troublesome by the hour. I walked on the ball of my foot, and after that got too painful, I tried to place all the pressure on my big toe. But nothing worked. By changing how I placed my foot on the ground, I merely distributed the soreness to all sectors of my foot. I thought about standing still on the side of the road, but I had to keep walking so that I could find a good spot for cars to pull over, or better yet, an intersection where there’d be more traffic.

I tried an assortment of hitchhiker tactics: I walked with my thumb out; I walked forward with a sign strapped to my backpack; I walked backward with my thumb out. Nothing was working. I changed my sign from FORT MCMURRAY to ATHABASCA, hoping that I’d attract drivers going to this relatively nearby town rather than hoping for a driver going the whole distance. I’d hitchhiked nearly ten thousand miles across North America over the past five years, yet, in moments like these, I still managed to convince myself that despite there being no legitimate precedent to come to such a conclusion I might get stuck in this spot forever.

I was on Highway 2, which had very little traffic. The cars that did pass me were heading up the road at speeds that made me place a hand on my head to hold down my baseball cap from Frisbeeing into the woods. Finally, as evening approached, a Native American man pulled over for me and took me to Athabasca, telling me about how he and his brothers used to paddle down that road before it was a road, when it was nothing but forest and muskeg.

He dropped me off short of town. Within moments, I had another ride, with a middle-aged gentleman in a respectable-looking SUV.

“Where ya headed?” he asked.

“Atmore,” I said, because that’s what I had written on my sign.

“Come on in,” he said. “Why are you headed to Atmore?”

“Well, I’m not headed to Atmore exactly. Sometimes it’s just better to make a sign for the next closest town rather than trying to find a ride to your final destination.”

“So what’s your final destination?”

“The tar sands. Fort McMurray. I don’t think I’ll get there tonight, though. It’s another three hundred kilometers.”

“Well, it’s your lucky day.”

“Why’s that?”

“’Cause that’s where I’m headed.”