The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America Read Free Page B

dude.
    A woman and two men chat on the sidewalk. The woman glances over the shoulder of one of the guys and flashes me a smile. She looks like a girl I went to high school with 20 years ago. She sat behind me in biology class, blowing lightly on my neck and whispering, “I love you.” Or perhaps it was the overhead fan, and her muttering, “I loathe school.”
    I turn the corner and imagine her chasing after me, gushing, “Is that really you?” I tell her it is, and everything else. She must get back to work, but I absolutely can’t leave town until we’ve caught up. She hands me her house key and jots down her address. “The refrigerator’s full,” she says. “Help yourself to anything.”
    Clearly, I’ve lost it.
    I wander the streets and end up in the city park. Three bums occupy the bench near the drinking fountain. They swig from a jug of red wine as an Elvis Presley tape plays on their boombox.
    “Dave! Dave! Dave!” one of them bellows. “I’m fucking drunk, Dave!”
    The one on the end leans over and vomits to “Don’t Be Cruel.”
    I scan the park and zoom in on three women eating sack lunches. I stake out a spot between them and the garbage can. On closer look, I see that one of them eats from plastic tableware. That means leftovers, not trash. Another one is fat. She didn’t get that way counting calories. Sure enough, she gobbles every bite, and then devours a candy bar. The third one, though, looks promising. She’s skinny. There’s half a sandwich still in her hand, and she’s definitely slowing down. From this angle, it appears to be avocado and Jack, with sprouts, on a fresh croissant. It’s got my name on it, I know it. It won’t be in the can long enough to be called garbage. But wait! She’s getting a second wind. She polishes off the whole thing. As a final insult, she licks her fingers.
    Before I left San Francisco, my good friend Bruce gave me nine energy bars for the trip. I put them in the bottom of my pack, next to my winter gloves. My goal was for all nine snacks to arrive with me at Cape Fear. That would mean an abundance of kind strangers. But here it is only day two, and I’m ripping open the wrapper of a wild berry energy bar. It tastes like sawdust. It tastes great. I swallow the last bite and slump against my pack in defeat.
    I sense that my luck isn’t about to change here, so I head for the highway, running the gauntlet of fast food restaurants. A shabby fellow overtakes me on the sidewalk and ducks into the shrubs bordering a shopping mall parking lot. He reaches down and comes up with something yellow in each hand. My eyes bulge. I know what they are, but I can’t quite believe it.
    “What are those?”
    “Pears!” the man says.
    “They okay to eat?” I ask excitedly, wading into the bushes.
    “They’re good! This is the Pear Tree Shopping Center.” He points to a sign overhead. And so it is.
    The ground is covered with ripe pears. I rinse one off with my water bottle and bite into the fruit. Sweet, sticky juice dribbles down my chin. Incredible! I finish off the pear and eat another, and another. I store a few more ripe ones in my pack for later, plus a firm one that should be ready to eat in a couple days.
    A balding schoolteacher drives me to Lake Mendocino, nine miles north of Ukiah. Bob hitched around the country in the sixties, so this ride is a trip down memory lane for him.
    “I admire you for what you’re doing,” he says. “Americans are too comfortable. We forget. It’s humbling to know that all you have is in that backpack.”
    I wait for Bob to invite me to stay at his place tonight, but he doesn’t. Instead, he hands me a small bag of sunflower seeds that’s already been opened. “There’s your dinner,” he says, chuckling. When I hop down from the pickup, I behold the seeds and wonder: Is the bag half empty, or half full?
    The visitor center in Ukiah told me there was free camping at the lake. But when I reach the registration