Serendipity and a Silver Tacoma

[ Day 7, Part 1 – June 19, 2012 ]

By 8am, I’d positioned myself at the edge of town, standing on the northbound shoulder of SR 395, across the street from a gas station. My bike leaned against a billboard post nearby.

I’d made a sign the night before using a borrowed marker and discarded piece of cardboard. In a lull moment between passing vehicles, I appraised my sign with skepticism. On about two square feet I had crammed the following:

My novella of a hitchhiking sign

These fifteen words were probably fourteen too many; the script would be illegible to all but eagle-eyed, slow-moving, unusually observant passers-by. I hoped that the sign would at least complete my image as a hitchhiker, eliminating any doubt as to why I was standing beside the road. As the next vehicle approached, I held out the sign and tried to look as respectable as possible.

Thumbing it without a bicycle is a relatively straightforward affair: you point in the direction you want to go and hope for human kindness and a open seat. Hitchhiking with a bicycle is a trickier proposition. Most vehicles simply aren’t equipped to carry a bicycle, which significantly narrows the number of drivers willing and able to pick someone up. When I was riding across rural Minnesota in 2008, my rear rim exploded, requiring a completely new wheel. The nearest replacement was 60 miles away in St. Cloud; my best option was to hitchhike. I stood beside the ramp to I-94 for almost three hours before a willing driver with a compatible vehicle picked me up.

Now in Bridgeport facing much lighter traffic, I feared my wait would be even longer.

To my surprise, good fortune rolled up in a silver Toyota Tacoma, no more than fifteen minutes after I’d first stuck out my thumb. I walked up to the passenger-side door and peered into the cab, where a healthy-looking man in his early fifties greeted me with a smile.

“Where you headed?”
“Tahoe!”
“I can take you most of the way; hop in!”
“Do you have room for a bicycle?”
“Sure—it’ll fit in the back.”

I marveled at my luck as we loaded my bike into the cargo bed. I could have waited by the gas station all day and not met a more accommodating combination of driver and vehicle. With my bike safely stowed in the back, we took our seats in the cab and started down the highway.

I’d hitchhiked enough in the past to know that the driver sets the expectations for conversation. I thanked him for picking me up and left the ball in his court. Dean, as he soon introduced himself, was an outgoing guy and conversation flowed easily.

He asked what had brought me to Bridgeport and I briefly explained my plans for adventure. He’d had some outdoor adventures of his own and it was nice to chat with someone who regarded this type of trip as cool rather than crazy.

As we traded stories, I learned a bit about the man behind the wheel. He lived in a house he designed and built himself, some 40 miles south of Bridgeport. He owned a high-end residential construction business operating primarily in the Mammoth Lakes area, but his passions extended far beyond homebuilding. He climbed mountains, volunteered in search and rescue, and supported an orphanage in Ecuador with both time and money. A devout Christian, he was open about his faith and its impact on his life. He was open about lots of things, actually: a prior marriage cut short by tragedy, the depression that followed, and even the concealed firearm that he carried with him at almost all times.

We shared our views on work and life. I was impressed with his energy, enterprise, and general outlook. We discussed the challenges and rewards of business ownership: being responsible for the bottom line, having the freedom and flexibility to do what one thinks is best, and knowing how to market a highly valuable skillset. I told him that he seemed to have life figured out; he told me that he wasn’t sure about that, but that he definitely had a lot to be thankful for and tried to do his part to make the world a better place.

He ended up driving me to Incline Village on the northeastern side of Lake Tahoe, going well out of his way to do so. In less than two hours, we’d gone the equivalent of a hard day’s ride. I unloaded my things, shook his hand, and waved goodbye as he continued on towards Reno.

I thought about the day before, when I sat alone in a hotel room and debated whether to hitchhike. I wavered not because of personal safety concerns, but because accepting a ride would mean that I hadn’t done the whole thing by myself—that I had help at some critical moment, that I might miss some moment of solitary enlightenment. I compared that line of thinking with how I felt in the afterglow of this truly serendipitous encounter. Chatting with Dean was better than any photograph I could have snapped or any moment of individual insight. I would rather have met him and heard his story, witnessed his simple gesture of unbargained kindness, than not and had some marginally stronger claim to achievement. The whole idea of “doing this by myself” was an illusion, anyway. The ride was a migration from one town of helping strangers to another, connected by a vast network of material and human infrastructure, all made possible by strangers.

One of the last things Dean told me was that he starts every day with a prayer, which goes something like this:

“Lord, let me use this day to make someone else’s day extraordinary.”

Mission accomplished, Dean. I hope our paths cross again sometime.

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