It turns out my guardian angel is a 40-year old French trucker named Eddie.
Out in rural Saskatchewan, the Trans-Canada Highway goes up to 110 km/h, and any rest stops are on service roads about two kilometres out of the way. What this means is that if your momentum isn’t up at this point, the prairies can hold you up significantly when hitching across the country.
I had been doing fine up until this point. I had seen Neil Young and Crazy Horse the week before I left home, so I was in the right frame of mind. In three days I had made it from Toronto to the middle of Saskatchewan, constantly moving during the days, camping out at night, and eating well. In Regina, however, I lost my rhythm. It was about forty degrees at noon on the outskirts. I had been dropped off in a field just east of the city the night before by a medicinal pot activist on a protest tour of the prairies. I had slept under the Northern Lights. I walked all afternoon, hoping to find a fruitful exit, carrying a guitar case that read, “Brake for Rock and Roll”. At about 4 p.m. I was burnt out and sick of wading through minefields of grasshoppers. I took an exit into town, and found a place to rest in a downtown park. Within half an hour I had met Sandy, an artist with a grant from the Saskatchewan Arts Council to set up a “mobile cassette lending library” project which she had conceived, twice a week in that same park. We talked about Beat Happening, The Royal Art Lodge, and the great skate rock bands of the eighties. I fell immediately in love with her and she asked if I wanted to go swimming with her and some friends at the public pool. I said yes and ended up staying with her for three days.
Eventually I had to get back on the highway, as I was hoping to make it to Bamfield, BC (the westernmost city in Canada) by the end of the week. We said our goodbyes, and I hit the road again, catching a ride with a farmer from Qu’Appelle who was headed to Moose Jaw. The ride was short, but it felt good to be moving again.
I walked from one end of Moose Jaw to the other, and continued out onto the highway. A grasshopper stuck to my guitar and rode with me for most of the afternoon. Initially, I took this as a good omen, but after five hours of walking, my spirits were low. I finally stopped for dinner at a rest station a little ways off the highway. After eating, I watched the entire dinner rush empty out of the parking lot without getting so much as a smile. I waited well into dusk, trying to keep my spirits up, but truthfully getting more and more depressed at having just left a wonderful woman and a good friend to be sitting alone on a service road in the rural heart of the prairies.
My confidence, and the momentum of those first few days, seemed completely busted. For the first time on this trip, I began to feel the fear. Panic was coming in, and I couldn’t figure out what in the hell I was doing in the middle of nowhere, with little money and no sign of a friendly driver.
My last resort was to plead with three truckers smoking in the lot, whose rigs hadn’t moved since I had arrived. Their initial response was standard: It’s an insurance risk, we could lose our union memberships, our jobs, etc. Fair enough. I walked back to my gear, disconsolate. But within minutes of watching the three men head back into the restaurant, the youngest of them came back out, walked over to me, and said discreetly, in a thick French accent, “I think I can give you a hand.”
My heart exploded out of my chest. Eddie explained that the other guys had agreed to turn their heads, so that he might give me a ride to the next reasonable town. My eyes were shining. I thanked him, and we set out. Eddie had moved from France to Montreal five years ago, and had begun driving trucks only recently. We talk about music, my jaw hits the floor when he tells me that he saw Patti Smith, The Clash, Talking Heads each a dozen times when he was a kid. An hour later, we hit Swift Current, and Eddie drives (out of his way) into town, honking at pedestrians to find out where we might find the Greyhound station. Ultimately, we find it, and I say thank you and promise to someday repay the favour a thousand times over. Eddie just smiles and shakes my hand, and tells me he’s going to wait there until I get my ticket. The only thing he said before driving away was, “nice talking to you.”
I eventually made it to BC, after resuming hitching in Alberta, where the speed limit is a little friendlier, but the highway patrol are not. That’s another story. Anyway, the only piece of advice I can really offer to prospective hitchhikers from the experiences I’ve had is, be aware of your momentum, try and learn something from every ride you get, and keep an eye out for angels on the highway.
