NOTES ON READING FROM THE AUTHOR:

I wrote the first draft of this just a couple of days after I had met James. I wasn’t planning to write a real “essay” right away, but I thought that since this was such a novel experience for me, I should write down the details before I forgot them. The piece pretty much came out whole, and it hasn’t changed much other than small edits to the prose and some changes to the beginning and end. 

If I could go back to before this was published, I’d probably try to pass this story off as fiction. But then again, admitting to everything I'm afraid to admit about myself is what I do best.

AUTHOR’S SUGGESTED MUSICAL PAIRING:

LEAVENWORTH

ON A SUNDAY MORNING last summer, as I was walking home from a coffee shop, a man with a deeply tanned face and a canvas backpack asked me for directions to Route 2, and I ended up driving him across the state of Washington.

As I looked up directions to Route 2 on Google Maps, he looked me over and asked, “Do you live outside?”

I was wearing jeans that were ripped on purpose but looked ripped on accident and a big sweatshirt covered in homemade buttons, carrying a woven bag big enough to hold three days’ worth of clothes. I said, “No, I don’t,” trying to sound casual. I have a terrible sense of direction and am bad at reading maps, which embarrasses me, so I wasn’t confident in the directions I gave him, and he seemed skeptical but still went the way I pointed. 

My duplex was in the same direction, but I didn’t want to walk with him, especially if my directions were wrong, so I loitered a couple of minutes, looking at my phone. I ran into him again anyway a couple of blocks down. He was studying the intersecting streets, confused and frustrated. He told me he hated cities. They were sprawling, and it took forever just to get out of them. I pulled out my phone’s GPS again, but he still didn’t believe my directions, and I didn’t either really. I asked if he needed money, and he said, yeah, if I could. “I ran out of money a long time ago.” I gave him a twenty-dollar bill. He was trying to get to Leavenworth, about three hundred miles west of Spokane. He had a construction job waiting for him and three days to get there, but he didn’t think he would make it in time. If he got there, they’d pay him in cash. He didn’t want to give money to the government, since they’d never done anything for him. 

“I hate the government,” I said, which was true but vague. I felt like a white British lady clucking her tongue at the injustices of colonial rule in India. I didn’t want to say something leftish and empty, like how I thought it was shameful that there were people starving in the richest country in the world. I wanted him to know that I didn’t see his situation as his fault at all, but maybe that was denying him agency. Ultimately, his fate was his own. He wasn’t anyone’s to save. 

I told him I lived just a few blocks from there and that I could drive him to Route 2. We walked back to my duplex, and he told me he was getting too old for this, that he’d been traveling for twenty years. He was forty. He asked how old I was.

“Twenty-four.” 

“That’s all? You’ve got a long way to go.” I thought of life that way too—arduous, making the trek from birth to death. The endpoint didn’t scare me as much as everything in the middle. Though of course I had much less reason than he did to think that way. I’m very privileged. He must’ve been able to tell that just from the car I invited him into, which was newish and nice, though dented on one side due to my own carelessness. It was so much easier for me to get from one place to another, from one week to the next. He told me he had no one—no wife, no kids, no girlfriend. I asked if he was in touch with anyone in his family, and he said no. “I left home at thirteen. My mom was abusive. My dad was an alcoholic.” I suppose this was his side of the bargain when people picked him up, telling the story of his life. 

I told him I’d only lived in Spokane a year, that I was here for school.

“By school, you mean college?”

“Yeah.” 

“What are you going to do when you get out?”

“I’m not sure… I have a few ideas.” 

“I thought when you go to college you already know what you’re going to do.” 

I felt a bit defensive, the way I always do when people ask me this. “Well, I might go into teaching. I teach an English 101 class right now while I’m in graduate school. I want to be a writer. That’s my main goal.” He told me he’d considered writing a book about everything he’d experienced. I’d already decided I would drive him all the way to Leavenworth, but I waited to tell him until we were on the highway. It seemed like a strange thing to offer; I wasn’t sure how to explain my motives. If a friend asked me to drive them to a town three hours away, I’d probably say no. 

I got lost trying to find US-Route 2, even with Google Maps. He seemed a bit anxious, like I might drive him in the complete wrong direction and strand him somewhere. I wanted him to know that I really was going to help him; I wasn’t going to be a well-meaning person who ended up doing more harm than good. 

Once I found the highway, he asked how far I would take him, and I said I’d drive him all the way. “I don’t really have anything I need to do today, and why not?” 

He seemed taken aback and studied me. This awkward, scruffily dressed girl, a rather bad driver. “You don’t usually do things like this, do you?” 

“I’ve never done this before,” I said through an embarrassed laugh.

“Why me?” If I felt any sort of connection to him, now was the time to say so, but I didn’t. I said it had been a right place at the right time sort of thing. I had time to spare, and I didn’t mind driving, and I could tell that he was a nice guy who wouldn’t hurt me. 

I think I have a good instinct for people, that I can tell quickly whether or not someone would hurt me. It’s a skill I’ve used mostly in online dating. But it could well be that I’ve just been lucky and haven’t crossed paths with many dangerous people. 

I think he’d hoped I was drawn particularly to him, maybe even romantically. My impersonal answer might’ve been a disappointment. Everyone needs to be loved, and he wasn’t, and I didn’t want to give him love. He’d tried to cut the bullshit of small talk and find intimacy, but I’d brought us right back to small talk. I wouldn’t have known how to be my real self with him even if I’d wanted to. 

Part of me did want to. I wanted us to have a bonding experience that would change our lives forever. But I couldn’t be my real self with someone who made me feel guilty. My desire to be kind only solidified the wall between us. Giving him a ride on a summer day when I had a full tank of gas and no   obligations was easy enough, but I couldn’t be anything to him besides polite.

“I don’t think I asked your name,” I said.

“James.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Becky.” 

Already I was thinking about how I would tell the story. I figured I should write down the details as soon as I could, but that I probably wouldn’t be able to make something insightful out of it until I was old and wise. 

I knew that I shouldn’t brag about doing this, and that it would be hard to write about it without seeming like I was saying, “Look at what a good person I am.” Or it could take the angle, “Look at how I think I’m such a good person, but really I’m a shitty person.” Which wouldn’t be better necessarily  because I’d still be using someone else’s suffering to say something about myself. 

And I don’t think I am a shitty person, really. I am privileged and can be very selfish, but I have a conscience and follow it maybe seventy percent of the time. I have a sense of empathy. I’m a human being, a product of my          circumstances, not good or evil. 

We drove past the strip malls and mattress stores on the outskirts of Spokane. This was why he hated cities, he told me. They went on and on, and no one could tell he was hitchhiking while he was still in the city limits. I asked how far he would walk in a day, if no one picked him up. “Forty miles,” he said. “Twelve hours.” You could only hitchhike on the smaller highways; it was illegal on the interstate. We took Route 2 all the way, even though I-90 would’ve been faster. I liked driving through the little towns. I pointed out an old-fashioned drive-in restaurant.

He said, “Yeah, we’re going to see lots of strange stuff like that.”

When we passed a field full of cows who were all lying down, I made a lame joke: “Lazy cows…” 

“No, they’re not lazy. They’re bedding down. Everyone thinks cows are dumb, but they’re really not. They know somehow when it’s time to eat, when they should bed down. I don’t know how they know that.” 

I like animals too. I told him my friend had just been to Yellowstone and the park ranger had told him all about the complex family dynamics of wolves, although I couldn’t remember the details. 

“Yeah, wolves are interesting. Each family group has the alpha male and alpha female.” He told me he’d almost been attacked by three coyotes recently but had fended them off by holding up a blanket.

His body hurt. He’d broken his shoulder a few years ago falling off a thousand-foot cliff. He explained, “You lose all your energy living like this, and you never get it back.” There were lots of long silences; eventually he fell asleep.

I played my favorite CD, this crusty folk singer from Missoula, Montana whom I was obsessed with. I thought if this singer knew I’d played his CD while driving a traveler across the state of Washington, he might become attracted to me, but only if he found out about it indirectly, not if I bragged about it. 

I thought about how this experience would probably benefit me more than him in the long run; I would make it into an anecdote and then forget about it. I wondered how I could help him in a more long-term way. Maybe we could write a book together about his life. I remember at an activism conference learning the philosophy, “Nothing about us without us,” meaning if you’re doing activism with an oppressed group, like the homeless, the people who are most impacted should be at the forefront and have decision-making power. I don’t know if I’m ready for a project like that. It would probably fall apart. I’ve had so many ambitious ideas related to art and activism over the years, and I’ve never followed through on any of them. A few years ago, I was planning to organize a collaborative theater project with disabled people and the family and friends of disabled people. We were going to write the project together, and everyone would contribute, even people who were non-verbal. We would have dance and movement portions. We would sit in a circle and express our experiences. And somehow this would turn into a play we would perform. But then I just didn’t want to do it. It was too ambitious; I don’t like collaborating. I don’t like organizing groups of people. So I didn’t.

We stopped at a Safeway, and I bought him two pre-made salads and a box of Cheez-Its. He’d pointed to the sign for the salads, “2/$6.00,” and said he didn’t know what that meant. I don’t think he had trouble with basic math or anything. He had finished high school. But I suppose he had so few options when buying things that he didn’t have “sign fluency.” He probably very rarely had enough money to get two of anything. He asked a clerk where the Cheez-Its were. I was a bit embarrassed because he was brash and loud and appeared homeless, but then it always makes me nervous to ask salespeople where things are. I wondered what people thought of the two of us in the store together, whether they thought I was homeless too.

At the register, the cashier asked how we were today, and I said, “Doing well. How are you?” Polite, soft-spoken, practiced. 

And he said, “Oh, same as always. Not good. Just trying to get by,” loud again, and I was embarrassed. I hoped when I inserted my debit card into the chip reader the cashier could tell that I lived on the safe side of the margins.

In the parking lot, there was a car next to ours with a woman inside and two Chihuahuas with their heads peeking out the window of the backseat. “Can I pet your dogs?” he asked. He had to repeat the question before she said yes. I was already sitting in the car, sheepish. Maybe I’m only revealing my own insecurity here. I don’t like talking to strangers. Something I’ve noticed is that poor people seem to talk to strangers more often than comfortable, middle-class people do. I always feel anxious at bus stops that someone will try to befriend me because I will not want to be rude, but I will also not want to get into a long conversation. Obviously, as someone who’s been traveling for twenty years, he needs to talk to strangers—to get rides, to get money and directions. When he got back in the car, he said, “You don’t talk much, do you?”

“No, I’ve always been shy.” It’s true. In the car he ate both salads one after the other. I’d expected him to save one for later. But I didn’t know the last time he’d eaten, and also he didn’t have a fridge or anything and probably not much extra space in his backpack. And maybe it didn’t even occur to him to save a salad for later. I don’t know. I hadn’t had breakfast, but I was going to wait and look for a nice place to eat in Leavenworth. 

He told me Leavenworth was a nice town. I said, “I’ll have to explore while I’m there. It will be an adventure!” It was in the mountains, by a river. James said he always traveled to towns in the mountains, that he couldn’t live anywhere else. I told him I’d grown up in Butte, Montana, a town on the east ridge of the Rockies. As we got closer to Leavenworth, the landscape became rugged and beautiful, winding through the sides of mesas and golden rock formations, lakes. “You can see now why I love the mountains, huh?” I didn’t remind him that I was used to mountains, that we had mountains in common.

He asked if I regretted driving him all this way, and I said no, not at all. I didn’t, but I was getting tired. I didn’t want him to see my moody side, how I get irritable over trivial things, even though my life is so comfortable. Also, my driving gets worse when I’m tired; I stopped rather abruptly at a stoplight and apologized. I didn’t want him to think I was going to kill him with my bad driving. 

When we got to Leavenworth, we stopped at another Safeway, and I wondered why this Safeway had a mural on the exterior wall of two children wearing lederhosen, and why the sign was in a fake “ye olde” font. When we drove farther into town, I realized that the whole town was pretending to be a Bavarian ski village, and every business had those ye olde signs and fake German architecture. 

There was a Starbucks in the Safeway, which was one of the things that seemed weird to James but normal to me. I asked if he wanted to get some coffee, and he said, “Well this is a Starbucks. If you want coffee, this is the best place to get it!” I ordered a 12-ounce drip coffee, and he just said he would get a black coffee. So the barista served us two 12-ounce coffees, but he said, “Is this a medium? I swear I said medium.” The barista gave him a 16-ounce for no extra cost, and we exchanged a private smile as I thanked her, so she could see that I belonged to her world, not his. The world of people who know how to order at Starbucks. James put eight sugars in his coffee.

“They must think I’m a cowboy! You know coffee’s bad when you have to put eight sugars in it.” I smiled and nodded, drinking my coffee with no sugar. 

At this point I wanted to be by myself again, and I wasn’t sure where James wanted me to drop him off. I was giving polite hints rather than saying directly that I’d gotten him to Leavenworth and now I wanted to drop him off somewhere. I thought maybe he was intentionally ignoring my hints because he didn’t want to part ways, but when I asked more directly, he said it was fine to drop him off anywhere, it didn’t matter. He would need to set up camp in the mountains soon before it got cold. 

He said he didn’t like living this way, that he was really an inside person, even though he’d been living outside for twenty years. I wanted to ask what he would do if he could get out of this life, but I didn’t know how to word it tactfully. He’d told me on the drive that he’d thought about being a veterinarian once, but that took eight years. “I’m not going to spend eight years just to be a vet,” he said, as if he hadn’t just spent twenty years being a traveler.

He said I could come and rest with him by the river for a while before driving back, but I said no thanks. I’d thought on the drive about giving him my phone number in case he came through Spokane again, but when we got to Leavenworth I decided not to. I felt like I’d given enough, and I worried he might want me to be part of his life in a more long-term way. On the drive I’d considered taking him out to lunch, but when I got there I decided I wanted to eat alone. I wondered if it would hurt his stomach to eat a lot in one day when he wasn’t used to it.

I dropped him off in a parking lot. He said I’d done so much for him already, but could he ask one more favor? I said yes. He asked if I had any more cash. I said yes, that I’d already planned to give him some more money. I gave him the rest of the cash I had in my wallet—four dollars and a lot of change. He got out and gathered his stuff, put the box of Cheez-Its in his backpack. “I’m going to have to make these Cheez-Its last a long time,” he said quietly. 

I shook his hand and said, “Best of luck.” I meant this to be kind, but I think it sounded cold. He just frowned and said okay. 

When I drove away, for a minute he was walking in the same direction I was driving, but now he was just a homeless person in Leavenworth, and I was a tourist doing whatever I wanted. James had said that tourists don’t like travelers. “They have cars. They have money.” Leavenworth seemed to exist purely to serve tourists. The downtown was a big shopping center, all in fake German architecture, with lots of fun little shops. I bought a pair of nesting doll earrings from a shop called Made in Russia. I bought a rhubarb quiche from a café. I bought a salted caramel cupcake. I bought an art print from a local fair. There were several places offering wine tastings, and I went to one, spending ten dollars to drink small portions of five wines. 

I drove home, which was more tedious than the drive to Leavenworth had been. If I’d anticipated how unpleasant six hours of driving would be, I might have hesitated before offering. Sometimes I make impulsive decisions because I don’t anticipate the consequences until it’s too late to change my mind, but usually that’s good because overall I’m too passive and cautious. 

I went home and took a shower. The shower in my duplex feels delicious, like a massage. My duplex is almost embarrassingly nice, by grad school  standards. High ceilings, washer/dryer, granite countertops. I try to pretend that my life isn’t bankrolled by my parents, but it’s not hard to figure out that my $900 a month teaching stipend wouldn’t cover the rent on this place, school fees, bills, gas, and food. These expenses are partly covered by the few thousand dollars left in the trust fund my grandfather set up to pay for my college. I also have, in addition to my debit card, a credit card that my parents pay for, which I often use for groceries and gas. I keep it quiet that unlike most college-educated people my age, I don’t have any student loan debt. 

I thought about James setting up camp by the river and regretted not giving him my phone number. It probably wouldn’t have caused me too much trouble, and it would’ve been kind, I think. It occurred to me that if I’d wanted to, I could’ve put him up in a hotel. Although maybe that would’ve made it harder for him to go back to the river the next day. Actually, I think it probably would’ve been nice for him, just to have a night of comfort, shelter, safety. To restore a little bit of the energy he kept losing and never getting back. But here I was, trying to decide what was best for him, when the world he’d been living in for the past twenty years was incomprehensible to me. It would’ve been so much harder for me to adjust to a life of traveling, hitchhiking, living among wild animals, scrambling for food and odd jobs, than it would be for him to adjust to Starbucks coffee and 2/$6.00 salads. 

I haven’t picked up any hitchhikers since then. I dread passing them on the highway because I’ll have that feeling that I could help and I don’t want to. Not because I’m afraid of being raped and murdered. I don’t know why, but I’m hardly ever afraid of being raped and murdered. I just don’t want to clear off the passenger seat of my car and make small talk. I like being alone in my bubble and singing along to my CD’s. I’m nervous about the awkwardness of pulling over, what I would say. I’m sure I would pick up a hitchhiker wrong. So I don’t pick up hitchhikers because for a few moments I would feel uncomfortable and embarrassed, and this, to me, is worse than letting a stranger walk forty miles a day with a broken shoulder. If my life were not so comfortable, I would probably not try so hard to avoid moments of being slightly uncomfortable. 

It’s winter in Spokane now, and I often see people sleeping under bridges. I’m afraid of being put in situations where I’ll have the chance to be brave or kind, and I won’t be. I think people like me have numbed the empathy centers in our brains. To an extent it’s a coping mechanism, but I think it causes us more pain in the long run, the guilt and the cognitive dissonance. We could help, and we don’t, and every person we see suffering is as human as we are. In my defense, the human brain was never meant to worry about the wellbeing of seven billion people; we’re only wired to protect our tribe, our   village. But I don’t even have a village. I don’t do that much for the people in my life. I remember hearing that most of the homeless shelters in the country are run by churches, and I wonder why there aren’t more secular liberal homeless shelters, if we are the ones who believe that no one should be homeless in this country, that everyone should have free healthcare and education. I think a lot of us Left-types have a sense of moral superiority because we believe the right things and vote for the better candidates, but we don’t do anything. Some of the people who volunteer at those Christian homeless shelters must have voted for Trump, but they’re still helping people more than I ever do. I believe that in order to end oppression privileged people must give up their privilege, or oppressed people must take it from them. I think my privilege will have to be taken from me because I can’t even bring myself to take the bus most days. Sometimes I wonder if I’d go willingly to the guillotine. Less often I wonder where James is now.