Just before dawn, we pull into a rest area outside of Amarillo, Texas, and we all stagger out to use the bathroom. I don’t remember the end of the meteor shower, or falling asleep, but both seem like they happened a while ago. Jesse needs to sleep and no one else feels like driving, so we pull out the sleeping bags and curl up in our various spots on the van floor. G and Lyle take the pop-up. Jesse and Tim have the front seats, which leaves me and Emily in the back.
Emily snuggles up to me, her back to my front. I think it’s called spooning. She pulls my arm around her, and I shake my head a little to avoid being suffocated by her dreadlocks. She still smells sweet, like Skye’s homemade orange and almond lotion. It’s moments like these that make me seriously rethink the offhand comments I make about going home.
It’s only a few hours before the warmth and brightness of the daylight make sleeping impossible. I walk unsteadily out of the van and splash some water on my face in the rest stop bathroom. Coming out of the bathroom I run into Jesse, who is heading for the convenience store to buy some milk for our granola. “I doubt they’ll have any soy milk, but Emily can eat it plain,” he says. I fall in beside him, ignoring the stares from the family with three small children piling out of the minivan parked next to Shirley.
I scrub a couple dollars from Jesse and leave a message on Mom’s machine when I know she’ll be at work. It’s a total chicken move, I know, but this way Mom will know I’m alive, and I won’t have to explain to her for the thousandth time why I’m not on a bus heading back to New York. The message I leave is long and rambling. I tell her stuff about the farm and killing chickens and digging up my food out of the dirt—stuff I didn’t even plan on telling her. I don’t say anything about when I’ll be back. Better not to get her hopes up.
After I leave a message I feel a lot better. Skye’s granola is amazing, and once we’re back on the road I’m free to sit back and watch the rolling hills of Texas turn into the dry desert country of New Mexico. Jesse tells me the place we’re going is just north of Roswell on Route 70. I find it on the map and watch as the tiny desert towns flash by outside the van windows. Everything is beige and brown and dusty green. The buildings aren’t more than two stories, and down every side road it’s possible to see where civilization ends and the desert takes over.
We stop by the side of the road for lunch by a washed-out creek bed, but there isn’t much food left in our supplies. Emily makes some pasta, but all we have for sauce is some olive oil and garlic powder. It’s pretty gross, actually, but I manage to choke it down with a few more bites of the last of Skye’s granola for dessert. Jesse surveys our supplies. “We’ll have to stop in the next big town and do some serious scrounging,” he says. “We’ve got a little cash for groceries, but I’d rather save it for gas. And I don’t want to show up completely empty-handed.”
“Clovis looks like it might have something,” I say, poking at the slightly larger letters on the map. Jesse looks over my shoulder.
“Yeah, we’ll try there.”
In Clovis we find a local supermarket called Callahan’s with a bountiful dumpster. With the memory of pasta and garlic powder fresh in my mind—and on my breath—I have no qualms about jumping right in with everyone else and sorting through the bags. We score some slightly browning bananas, bags of precut lettuce, bags of carrot sticks, several containers of yoghurt, some individual-sized Jell-O pudding cups, and a whole bunch of Halloween-colored Oreo cookies. Tim tears into a package of these and stuffs several orange-and-black cookies in his mouth before anyone can say anything.
“Those are made with horse hooves,” Emily announces.
“That’s a myth, actually,” Lyle says quietly.
Either way, Tim is undeterred. “Mmm, horse hooves are my favorite.” He rubs his belly and sprays Oreo crumbs. Emily mostly looks annoyed at Lyle. When she turns away, I grab a stack of Oreos from Tim and shove them into my mouth. They’re hardly even stale, and the sugar explodes on my tongue. The final coup from this particular dumpster is the unearthing of four slightly squished premade pies from the bakery section: two cherry, one pecan, and one apple. Jesse suggests that we put these aside to share at Burdock. We pick through for a while longer, but aside from a few more bags of carrots nothing else is uncovered. It seemed like a good haul, but when all the food is laid out in front of us there’s not that much to make a meal out of.
Jesse looks at his watch. “Should we try one more? I’d like to make it there before dark.”
“We could drive around and see if there’s a Super K or a Walmart on the way out of town,” G suggests.
“Yeah,” Jesse agrees. “Strong concerns? Major objections?” No one has any, so we pile back into the van and head west, looking for the nearest big-box establishment. Before going on the road with the Freegans I never realized how many small towns have Super Kmarts or Super Walmart. It’s kind of sad when you drive down Main Street and half the storefronts are boarded up. At the end of Main Street there’s usually a traffic light and then a few fast-food restaurants and a big chain store, sometimes even two.
For right now, though, I’m glad to see the familiar markings of a Super Kmart since it means I might have more than yoghurt and lettuce for dinner. The first thing we pull out of the Kmart dumpster is a big box of macaroni and cheese packages that an overzealous employee nearly shredded with a box cutter. Each of the individual boxes is slashed open with a sharp cut down the middle. The pasta and artificial cheese packets are in perfect condition, so we pull these out and place them next to the van. In the back corner of the dumpster I find a bag that’s impossibly heavy and start tugging on the top. Tim looks at the bag stuffed in the corner and shakes his head. “If it’s that heavy, it’s probably not worth it man. It’s probably some kind of industrial garbage.”
“I don’t know. I have a good feeling about it.”
Tim shrugs his shoulders and helps me free the bag, tugging on the bottom while I lift from above. “Dude,” he says, “if this turns out to be an exploding bag of dirty diapers, I’m going to kill you.”
“Whatever it is, it’s metal,” I say, pointing to the way the bag is bulging in distinctly can-like formations. We wrestle the bag over the top of the dumpster and onto the ground, where Jesse pulls it apart. It’s filled with unmarked canned goods.
“Sweet,” Jesse says. “Mystery cans.”
“Where did the labels go?”
“They peel them off so people like us won’t be as tempted to go rooting through their trash.”
“That’s lame.”
“Yeah, speaking of which, we should get going,” G says. “We’ve been out here for a while.”
“So, the worst that can happen is they tell us to move along, right?” I ask a little nervously.
“It depends if they really feel like being dicks or not,” Lyle says. “Technically this is abandoned property, and there’s nothing illegal about going through the trash. But the dumpster itself is private property. A lot of people, especially in small towns, have ended up with a night in jail on trespassing charges. It’s not really worth fighting it. They usually let you go the next day. It just kind of depends how uptight the locals are.”
I hop over the side of the dumpster and wipe my hands on my jeans. “Let’s not find out.”
“Hang on a minute,” Tim says. “I think I just found something cool.”
“Edible?” Jesse asks.
“No, wearable. Dude, check these out.” Tim hops over the side of the dumpster, wearing a thin cotton T-shirt with a bright blue cartoon character on it and orange bubble letters. It’s about a size too small for him, and over his clothes it’s skin-tight.
“What are the Smurts?” Emily asks.
Tim looks down at his chest. “Not the Smurts, the Smurfs. You know, the little blue guys—Happy Smurf and Handy Smurf, Grumpy Smurf and Smurfette. There’s a whole bag of these shirts in there.”
“No,” G says, “it definitely says Smurts.”
“That’s must be why they’re in the dumpster,” Jesse says. “It’s probably a misprint.”
“I’m keeping these,” Tim says happily. “They’ll probably be collector’s items one day. Of course, you all can have one.” He pulls a T-shirt out of the bag for each of us and throws it at us. They’re all children’s size large, which explains why they look so tiny on Tim. “You’ll thank me one day,” he says assuredly.