Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [123]
Mooch made a good point, and sometimes the worst thing about being part of a group is having to accept sound advice. The three of us crossed the river in the canoe, and it was actually kind of fun. We may not have been walking, but at least we got to paddle.
Safe, dry, and on the opposite shore, the three of us decided that we would try to catch a quick hitch into Caratunk for an ice cream break before returning to the trail for an afternoon of hiking.
I assumed the position by the side of the road with my right arm out, my thumb in the air, and the boys several feet behind me. As we hoped, the first car to drive by slowed down and pulled over. But as the middle-aged man passed us, I caught a glimpse of far more than I expected to see.
“He’s naked!” I whispered to the boys.
“That’s ridiculous,” said Mooch. “I bet he’s just not wearing a shirt.”
“I promise you, there is more missing than his shirt,” I said.
Still unconvinced, Mooch walked up to the car window. He was there for less than a second before he had to look away.
“Um, no thanks, we changed our minds,” said Mooch.
“Are you sure about that?” asked the driver.
“Yep, pretty sure,” said Mooch.
The driver laughed and drove off. The boys couldn’t believe what had just happened.
“I mean, really? Did a naked guy really just pull over and offer us a ride?” Mooch asked in disbelief.
“I never thought I’d see anything like that on the trail,” said Nightwalker.
“Get used to it,” I said, smiling. “You’re hiking with me now, remember?”
The next day we had to try to hitch again. It was our last hitch of the entire trail, and it was our hardest.
It rained hard all day. It was cold and my gear was no longer waterproof, so I was chilled and soaked to the bone. I also had two hard falls that morning. Both times, I remember looking down at my feet speeding over the slick wet rocks, and then the next thing I remember I was looking up at the sky, trying to figure out how I had gotten there.
I beat Mooch and Nightwalker to the road, because it was cold and, no matter how tired I am, I always hike fast when it’s cold. When I arrived at the road, not only was I shivering and wet, but I was covered in mud. I even tried to get a ride before the boys arrived because I knew that if they looked anything like me then no one would stop to pick up the three of us as a group. I stood alone in the downpour getting splashed by cars as they sped through the runoff for twenty minutes without success. Then the boys came out of the woods, and as I expected, they were dripping wet, slathered in clay, and sprinkled with pine needles.
We stood there for another forty minutes, and still no one stopped. Aside from evacuating Nightwalker, the longest I’d ever had to wait for a hitch was ten minutes. But on this, the last hitch, when I barely had the strength to stand by the road and stick out my thumb, I was stuck in a cold downpour for an hour. I started hoping that the naked man from the day before would drive by again. If the boys had agreed to go with me, I would have been more than willing to get in his car.
I was consumed with fatigue and irritability. I began cursing the vehicles that passed us. Not all of them, because there’s no way that I would have picked us up either, but I did yell at the pickup trucks that passed with empty truck beds.
When a car finally pulled over, my bitterness melted, and I was filled with gratitude. In the end, it was not a truck with an empty bed that pulled over to help us; it was a family of four in a clean, crowded SUV. The mother and father were sitting in the front and two young children were strapped into car seats in the back, and between the seats were layers of boxes and household goods that they were delivering to friends.
The car was filled to capacity without our presence, but the young couple insisted that we could not stay on the side of the