The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.
~Charles Kuralt, On the Road With Charles Kuralt
As a single woman in my thirties, I bought a three-bedroom house. Now that I share it with my partner, he laments that we heat so many unused rooms in winter, and in summer we dehumidify them. It’s wasteful, he says, and we don’t have the money.
He’s right. We sketch drawings for our future — a tiny house with a loft bedroom, just big enough for two.
“We need an outbuilding for guests,” I insist, and he nods, distracted. It’s an old conversation by now, my need for a guest room, and although he doesn’t fully understand, he knows it’s important to me.
Years before, I hadn’t been in any position to buy a house. A couple of weeks after finishing college, my friend Jennifer and I moved into my Ford Escort station wagon. We’d become friends in our American Studies classes, reading about westward expansion, Jeremiah Johnson, John Muir, and Gifford Pinchot. When the professor passed out a blank map of the United States in our last semester, we realized how much of our country remained blank to us, unmapped in our own minds.
Armed with about $2,000 each in graduation money, camping gear, and two audio collections of Charles Kuralt’s essays, we set off to see as much of America as we could before our money ran out. It was five years, forty-nine states, and dozens of seasonal jobs before I returned in any settled way to New England, to graduate school, and to the safety nets of my family and my education.
Although we carried pepper spray, a lead club, and personal alarms to guard against stranger danger, we never needed them. While Jennifer and I, and then I alone, crossed back roads and highways from east to west, north to south, we relied on the kindness of strangers.
In Madison County, Iowa, we searched for a free campground we’d read about in our AAA guide. We stopped to ask directions at the local pharmacy, one of the disappearing icons of the American Main Street. The pharmacy counter and divider still sported the original stained-glass panel, and instead of the half-dozen pharmacy techs we’d have seen at any of the larger chains, a single elderly pharmacist gave us directions to the campground. He added a small, hand-drawn map to his house. “I’m not sure if the campground is still in use. If it turns out you need a place to stay, follow these directions home. The door is open. My wife should be there. Just tell her I sent you, and she’ll take care of you.”
We didn’t take him up on his offer, and I think we must have found that campground, but I don’t remember it. Like Charles Kuralt, who wrote about his regret over a Boundary Waters trip not taken, I regret not walking through that pharmacist’s open door. Had we stayed in his farmhouse, had we eaten at his wife’s table, I’m certain we’d remember that night.
But there are others I do remember.
In Breckenridge, Colorado, Jennifer and I walked into a high-end hotel and asked for a discounted room. The young men behind the desk said they couldn’t alter room rates, but they could let us use the pool. After we swam and showered, one of the men behind the desk, Chris George, offered us shelter in his shared apartment. He had queen bunk beds, and Jennifer and I slept on the top while he and his friend slept below. The following morning, Chris woke us with blueberry pancakes before heading out to ski. “Just lock the door behind you,” he said.
In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Jennifer and I spent twelve minutes on an aerial tram with a retired couple, Ray and Marge Smith. Ray had been a history professor in Fresno, California, and he was curious about our travels. When we disembarked at the top of the mountain, Ray gave us his business card and said, “Look us up if you’re in the neighborhood.”
We hadn’t planned to use their phone number, but months afterward Jennifer came down with the flu in Death Valley. She couldn’t bear another night in the tent or stretched out across our bags in the back seat, so she called the Smiths. A few hours later, we were in their living room, Jennifer’s head bent over a eucalyptus steam bath and I on a tour of the family photographs. We spent the night, and Marge made us scrambled eggs and bacon the next morning. Two decades later, the Smiths still write to us at Christmas. Although they were the ones who opened their home to strangers when we needed respite, they always write, “Your visit was the best thing that ever happened to us!”
Near the Canada/Alaska border, I met Dustin Renner at a truck stop. He invited me to visit his family, who’d built a homestead in the woods outside of Palmer. He took me to dinner at the local diner, then hiking by the light of the midnight sun. He taught me to identify the carrion smell of bear and wolverine, his father read to me from the Bible, and he and his siblings taught me how to shoot a rifle. Two days later, Dustin drove the winding roads in front of me, leading me back to the highway.
In another small town in Alaska, before the last of the frost had melted, I met a woman on the street who asked where I was from and where I was going. She invited me to do laundry at her house while she fed me a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. She said people had always been kind to her when she traveled, and she wanted to pass that along.
Over and over again, people opened their doors, schedules, tables, and wallets to show us this country we call home. I hardly remember Mount Rushmore, but I’ll not forget the names of those who fed and sheltered me along the way, the taste of Marge’s scrambled eggs, the way the light played off the stained glass of the pharmacy in the afternoon sun, and the sweet relief of clean clothes when I least expected such kindness. Traveling, vulnerable, I saw the best in people. Now I want to be the best for someone else. I need a guest room.
Last fall, my partner and I were on the road in South Dakota. He’s Finnish, an immigrant, and we’re twenty-seven states into my piecemeal attempts to show him this country. A friend of ours phoned, and we learned she was between graduate school and employment, moving as unobtrusively as she could between her mom’s in New York, her dad’s in Connecticut, and her sister’s in Massachusetts while she interviewed for jobs. She didn’t have money for an apartment and didn’t want to sign a lease before she knew where she’d be hired. I told her where she could find our keys.
“Help yourself to the garden tomatoes,” I told her. “We’ll be back in three weeks, but please plan to stay as long as you like. We have plenty of room.”
~Sayzie Koldys
