Tonight I stopped at a taco shop that caught my eye with a “$1.59 tacos” sign, but the deal was for Tuesdays, so I got a burrito. I asked the taco lady if Tuesdays were really busy, and she said yes, but Mondays are actually busier, because Monday they prep all the stuff that they will sell on Tuesday. So I guess if you run a taco stand, you pretty much know how your Tuesday is gonna go.
I was sitting on my truck’s tailgate eating my burrito and a woman walked by asking for directions and then she said “my Uber isn’t working” and could she have a ride to a town that she thought might be 8 miles away, but I looked on my phone and it was only 2 miles away, so I told her I’d drive her. She was carrying two bags of stuff and said she needed to go to Walmart to buy a sweater because she was cold. She just had a t-shirt and it was 55 degrees out and the temp was falling because the sun was going down.
She seemed to indicate that she needed to go to US Bank before Walmart, so I drove to the nearest US Bank, but when we got there she asked why we were at US Bank and not Walmart, so off we went to Walmart. She wasn’t quite with it and our communication wasn’t great, but I think she was homeless, though she seemed harmless, which is my criteria for giving people rides.
Once in Minneapolis a guy was walking in the middle of the street and he stepped out in front of my car at a light and asked for a ride and so I drove him a few miles somewhere, but I was thinking the whole time after he’d gotten in that it was a mistake, that he looked like he was in pretty good shape and probably could stab me a bunch before I could really defend myself, so now I only give rides to people who I know I can beat up if I need to.
My mom is almost 80 and she gives rides to people she doesn’t know all the time. My dad was just telling me that the other day some guy asked her for a ride and before she knew it she had his TV in her trunk and was driving it and him somewhere. She tells these stories to my dad and he gets mad and worried and tells her to stop giving people rides all the time because she could get hurt or robbed, and I told her that too, because if she is using the same criteria as me—which she should be—she would get her ass kicked by just about anyone, so she can’t be giving rides. She doesn’t move very well and has bad arthritis, so a 9 year old could probably whip her. She could maybe pick up babies who needed rides, but how often is just a baby flagging you down for a ride? Basically never.
On Sunday I drove about 100 miles south to Pismo Beach State Park campground, and it’s nice to be back in civilization. North at Kirk’s Creek, the nearest town, Gorda, CA, is a dozen miles through winding roads and it only had one store, where gas was $9 a gallon and I paid $7.50 for two granola bars and a small piece of cheese. They really stick it to you when you don’t have any other options. One day after a ton of rain a small section of road closed south of Kirk’s Creek from a mudslide, so the road was closed both north and south of me, but they cleared it with plows that look just like the snow plows in Minnesota, except here they use them to clear rocks and mud.
After I dropped the lady off at Walmart she asked if I wanted her phone number. “We could text,” she said. She seemed incredibly lonely and I immediately felt sad and terrible but I said that I didn’t want to exchange phone numbers. I was thinking that if I did, I’d for sure be driving her to US Bank tomorrow.
On the other hand, I think she’s the first woman who’s asked me for my phone number basically ever, but I still felt sad about it. I started to slow down to cry a little in the Walmart parking lot, but I powered through and got back out on the road instead. I think it’s hard to live in this world even if a lot of things are going right for you, so I can’t imagine how hard it is when everything has gone wrong. In my experience, I think about half the world is in one boat, and half the world is in the other.
In the end, this woman thanked me and gave me a Winston cigarette, which I put into a shoe for safe keeping. I quit smoking 20 years ago, but if I have a campfire I really like to have a cigarette, so at some point I’ll smoke it. So far I’ve only had one campfire on this trip, but no cigarettes.
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