The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America

by McIntyre, Mike

I take that as a “no” and thank Randy for the burger and the ride. I get out of the truck and almost step in a cardboard box sitting in the dirt.

  How quickly perceptions can change. Three days ago, I would have said the box at my feet contained spoiled produce. Now, all I see is food. Sure, that rotten tomato and shriveled celery aren’t fit for pigs. But the head of cauliflower looks like it might be edible—after some salvage work.

  I carry the cauliflower to a gas station and hose off an army of ants. The black fungus won’t wash away, though, so I crack open the head and eat it inside out. All in all, a tasty snack.

  Things are looking up.

  I ask a local merchant if there’s a safe place I can roll out my sleeping bag tonight. He tells me the nearby Humboldt Redwood State Park has 155,000 acres. “It’s probably illegal, though,” he adds.

  “Yeah, but is it safe? I mean, are there wild animals out there?”

  “We have some bears, and there are some mountain lions.”

  Enough said.

  I walk down the main drag. A woman with hairy legs appears from behind my pack and says, “Hi, do you need any help finding anything?”

  I ask if she knows a spot to camp.

  She says, “The best thing is to make friends with somebody.”

  I’m about to say, “Do you want to be my friend?” but she skips ahead. “I’m in a hurry now,” she calls back. “I’ve got to coach a soccer game, but I’ll look for you later.” I know that’s the last I’ll see of her.

  It hasn’t rained since spring, but the sky doesn’t look like it’s forgotten how. I spot an outdoor restaurant with covered picnic tables and figure I can sit out there tonight after it closes. At least I’d stay dry. I walk on, hoping for something better.

  I hit the edge of town and turn back. A man stops me. He’s in his fifties, wearing jeans and a baseball cap that reads, “Beef.”

  “You look like you need some directions.”

  “No, not really. I’m just kind of wandering.”

  “How far you wandering?”

  “All the way to the Atlantic Ocean,” I say. “Without a penny.”

  A smile fills his face. “Say no more. Follow me.”

  Next thing I know, I’m standing in the studio of the local radio station, KMUD. The man, Roger, is a rancher who hosts a talk show twice a month called “Life in the Country.” He’s in a bind. One of tonight’s guests has canceled. Could I pinch hit? I tell Roger I’m always happy to do my part for public radio.

  “I’m gonna have you on the air with a local firefighter who’s just back from fighting two fires in the Tahoe National Forest,” he says. “We’ll have sort of an over-the-back-fence talk.”

  I’m still reeling from the sudden turn of events when I see what appears to be a man dressed as a woman stroll across the parking lot and enter the studio. His long blond hair is held in place by a white bow, and he’s wearing a pink tank top and red lipstick. Beard stubble pokes through caked makeup. What really gives him away are his arms. They’re the size of howitzers. I’m six-foot-four, and we stand eye to eye. He grips my hand and pumps it hard. He says his name is Diana. He’s tonight’s other guest.

  “Roger, I’d like to keep the conversation more on firefighting,” Diana says, “rather than the cowboy logger turned cowgirl logger.”

  “Okey-dokey.”

  In the few minutes before we go on the air, I learn that Diana used to be called Dennis, and he’s not what he seems. He really is a she. The sex change—”gender reassignment,” in the parlance of transsexuals—was done years ago. All that remains is some electrolysis. Diana tells me that’s the worst part, but I can’t imagine anything more painful than losing the family jewels.

  The three of us squeeze into the tiny sound booth. As Roger greets his listeners, I steal glances at Diana. I’ve never met a transsexual, not that I know of, anyway. Fatigue and hunger combine with the surrealism of the moment to leave me giddy. I fear I may laugh like a hyena. I consider gagging myself with a handful of foam from the soundproof wall. But Roger asks the first question, and I settle down. Though penniless, I am, after all, a professional.

  Roger proves an able interviewer. He pulls my whole story from me, and then some. Callers ask about my travels to 35 countries, most of them as a journalist. I tell them how I went skiing in Bosnia during the war. How I witnessed the return of the condor to the Colombian Andes. How I found Romanian orphans living in the sewers of Bucharest. I hear myself talking and think, How could you quit such a fascinating job? But one thing I’ve always found frustrating about being a reporter: You’re never able to fully enter the world of your subjects. When your notepad fills up, they go back to their lives, and you return to your hotel to order room service and watch TV. On this trek, there won’t be an expense account standing between me and a fuller version of the truth.

  By the end of the show, KMUD listeners have concluded that my trip is nothing short of a pilgrimage, a spiritual journey. I’m heartened by their enthusiasm, as I sometimes think of this adventure in similar terms. Then again, it’s an easy audience. This is Humboldt County, where welfare recipients are called gurus. I’ll have to wait to see how my enlightened poverty trip plays in Peoria.

  Diana hasn’t said boo. With Roger’s encouragement, I’ve hogged the whole hour. It’s too bad. There’s a lot I’d like to have learned about her.

  So it’s a pleasant surprise when Garberville’s only transsexual firefighter leans over and says, “Mike, if you don’t have any other plans, I’d like to take you to dinner.”

  We go to an Italian-Mexican restaurant where a football game plays on a giant video screen. Roger and the producer, Mitch, join us at the table. There’s also Linda, from nearby Redway, and her eight-year-old daughter, Iona. Linda heard me on the radio and rushed to town to buy me dinner. Now that Diana’s springing, Linda insists I spend the night at her house. I happily accept, with one regret: I’ll never know how Diana intended our evening to end.

  I’m glad to see I still know how to read a menu. I order lasagna, garlic bread and the salad bar. That ache camped out in my head the last three days will soon be folding its tent.

  In her previous life as a man, Diana was known as a fearless firefighter and one of the region’s top loggers. As a woman, not much has changed.

  “I dropped a tree the other day that was seven-foot-four at the butt,” she says. “I’m still a redneck, I’m just a little different now.”

  Diana’s taco salad arrives, and she takes a bite, smearing her red lipstick. “I’ve always been maternal. My crew called me Mom even before I was a woman.”

  Linda asks Diana how her family reacted to her sex change.

  “My dad said it’d be easier if I was dead,” Diana says softly. Her relatives have raised cattle in the area for several generations. “With ranchers, you always want to breed up. You want your next calf to be better than the last. He looked at me and figured that I was a throwback.”

  The table falls silent.

  “People come up to me now and say, ‘Hey, I like to wear dresses sometimes.’ And I say, ‘Eww, how weird.’ They think I’m gay. I’m not. I’ve known I was this way since I was four. The thing is, when you go through your inner change, I can’t see it. When I go through my change, it’s there for everybody to see.”

  Diana spent last winter in the San Francisco area, in group counseling with other recent transsexuals. She worked a construction job to pay the bills. One day, she was remodeling the kitchen of a wealthy family’s house. The couple saw how well she got along with their kids and invited her to move in as the nanny. She became the auntie for the whole upper-crust block, a real-life Mrs. Doubtfire, and no one was ever the wiser, not even her employers. On nights off, she went out with her six-foot-eight boyfriend.

  “I could wear heels everywhere,” she says.

  We all erupt with laughter.

  The check arrives, and Diana snaps it up with her sausage fingers. I’ve planned this journey in m
y mind for a year, but I never came close to imagining who would be buying me my first dinner.

  I look at Diana and think, Kindness is strange, but never long a stranger.

  CHAPTER 5

  I load my pack into Linda’s minivan, and we head for her house. She stops at the supermarket in Redway and asks if I want anything. I’m too shy to say, so she fills a plastic bag with trail mix. Perfect. At the checkout, we see Diana come in and grab a cart. She waves. The whole scene now seems normal.

  Linda is 42 and twice divorced. Besides Iona, she has two other daughters: Fauna, 10, and Sequoia, 16. Iona and Fauna split time between Linda and their father, who lives in the same neighborhood. They attend one of Humboldt’s many self-styled alternative schools. Sequoia, who studies dance, lives with Linda’s first husband, in Santa Cruz. Linda and her second ex founded two hugely successful mail-order record companies, specializing in children’s and world music. A Hollywood entertainment conglomerate recently bought them out. Linda is a rich hippie.

  She grew up poor in San Francisco, the only child of an Irish merchant seaman and a Swedish maid. Her mother was an alcoholic who died in an insane asylum. When Linda last saw her, she was strapped in a straitjacket, her head shaved for electroshock therapy. She swore at Linda in Swedish, blaming her daughter for her wretched life.

  Ashamed of her background, Linda compensated by entering the glamorous world of high fashion. She became the buyer for an upscale San Francisco department store. A blond woman with stunning Scandinavian features, she was squired about town by wealthy men. When that lifestyle rang hollow, Linda dropped out to study herbal medicine. She arrived in Redway in the 1970s, part of the second back-to-earth wave of hippies to invade Humboldt County. She delved into yoga, astrology, Eastern religions, quantum physics and Indian mysticism. She set about repairing her soul.

  Linda owns one of the area’s original hippie mansions, a two-story octagonal structure built with scraps of redwood left behind by logging companies. A skylight in the shape of a pyramid crowns the roof. Wooden decks circle the house. The trees are so close you can reach out and touch them. It is a most unconventional home. Forty African drums fill a corner of the living room. There is no TV, no curtains in the windows, and the girls call their mother Linda.

  After the girls have gone to bed, I sit with Linda on a wicker sofa, gazing out the picture window into the dark forest. The house is still. Linda says she’s inspired by my journey. After a decade as a cynical journalist, I’ve developed a pretty accurate bullshit meter. Nothing registers on it now. Linda seems to possess an inner calm, an unshakable sense of her place in the universe. I feel like a sham in comparison. I want what she has. I confess to her that I’m not brave and wise. I’m a frightened boy in the body of a man. I’m afraid of the dark, the wind in the trees, the animals in the forest.

  Linda smiles kindly. “When I first came here, I lived in a cabin I found out I shared with raccoons and skunks and bats. They’d all nestled away in there. I snipped pot for a living, ten dollars an hour. I did it at night by lantern. The bats swooped all around me, and I worried. But I learned that they weren’t going to hurt me. They’d fly past and swirl around in these same patterns. After a while, I saw that they recognized me. They knew who I was.

  “An Indian taught me something I’ll never forget. He said, ‘We don’t have a word for loneliness in my language.’ I said, ‘Why, because you’re always surrounded by uncles and aunts and grandparents?’ He said, ‘No. It’s because we think of nature as our kin, so we are never alone.’

  “I thought, ‘How great. When you realize that the bears and the bats and the trees are all your relatives, you can never be lonely.’ “

  Linda looks at me and says in a solemn tone, “Reverence. You can’t repair your soul until you have reverence. Don’t be afraid of the dark, Mike. Don’t be afraid of nature.”

  We talk late into the night, and then Linda shows me to the guest room. A bed! With flannel sheets, no less. I drift toward sleep, feeling safe and warm and profoundly grateful. Diana bought me dinner, but Linda gave me food for thought. And sometimes that’s the best meal of all.

  In the morning I shave and shower, washing my hair with Linda’s Irish moss shampoo. The shower is made of stone and stands in a corner of the greenhouse, butting up against a wall of glass. I bathe, naked to the world, or at least to my cousins, the redwoods.

  Linda fixes French toast, with honey in the batter, as I eat sliced cantaloupe and sip grapefruit juice. Fauna and Iona turn cartwheels across the hardwood floor. I’ve never been a comfortable guest, even in good friends’ houses. But I feel totally at ease in this stranger’s home. My stomach churns, but not from hunger. I must soon leave, and I know the uncertainty of the road is about to resume.

  Linda hands me the bag of trail mix, along with a Mutsu apple and two lemon zucchinis from her organic garden. The load adds a good seven pounds to my pack, but it’s weight I’ll gladly carry.

  She and the girls drive me back down to the highway in Garberville. I thank Linda and tell her that if the rest of my trip goes a tenth as well as it has here, it will be a great journey.

  “Well, if you settle for ten percent, that’s what you’ll get,” she says. “On your journey, don’t compromise your vision. You’re on a vision quest. You’re an archetype. You represent Middle America, who just got fed up and wants to discover the real America. Maybe America is now spelled with a small a, and you’re out trying to find the capital-A America.”

  Linda leans over and hugs me, and gives my cheek a kiss. I say goodbye to the girls and step out of the van. I’m standing in the same spot where I found the cauliflower yesterday.

  “Remember,” Linda says through the open window, “don’t compromise your vision.”

  CHAPTER 6

  I compromise my vision in Arcata, California.

  A guy with a goatee offers me shelter and I quickly accept. His name’s Stitch, and he’s come to this coastal college town to play a gig with a band called Freeland. He says I can crash with him at the apartment of a friend of a friend of the lead guitarist’s. I stand through four hours of jazz-blues-funk, applauding wildly at Stitch’s ponderous bass solos. After the last set, he lingers with a pair of Freeland groupies. I hover at the edge. Stitch doesn’t know me now, and who can blame him?

  I wander off to sleep in the city park, just inside the tree line, too scared to go any further into the woods. The sweeping headlights of passing cars keep me up most of the night. Serves me right.

  At dawn, I walk out to Highway 299. I’m finally aimed east.

  A man of about 50, with baggy ethnic pants and a drum the shape of a TV picture tube, walks up and introduces himself as Brother Tom. He hitchhiked his way through the sixties and seventies, but now restores houses and cares for his two teenaged daughters. He’s returning to his roots this weekend, thumbing to a music festival in the mountains. As car after car ignore my sign and his thumb, Brother Tom lays out the Zen of hitchhiking.

  “See all those cars passing you? Don’t worry about them. They’re not your ride. Your ride’s comin’.”

  My ride turns out to be a small camper truck. The driver hops out to open the back, and Brother Tom gives her a hug. “Mike, I want you to meet my beautiful sister Mo.” She’s 20, in cutoffs, with long brown hair and ample breasts barely contained by her bikini top, and from the way Brother Tom holds her, I’d say they weren’t siblings.

  Mo is an engineering student at the college in Arcata, but this semester she’s working and living on an organic farm up the road. She should be in the fields this morning, but Brother Tom talks her into catching the concert with him. We stop by the farm, so Mo can get her sleeping bag. She asks if the rules of my journey permit me to accept food. No, I tell her, I’m a breatharian. She sees I’m kidding and fills a paper sack with organic tomatoes, zucchini and melons.

  I lie in the back of the truck and talk to Mo and Brother Tom through the sliding window. Mo says as long as she’s s
kipping work, she’d like to climb Mt. Shasta. But that’s more than 14,000 feet of mountain, and Brother Tom’s wearing slippers. A bit farther on, Mo decides what she really wants to do is go see a friend up in Ashland, Oregon. Brother Tom takes a pass; he can’t miss the all-percussion group that kicks off at midnight. I wish Mo would ask me.

  She looks at me in the rearview mirror. “You’re welcome to come with me,” she says, smiling.

  “That’d be great, if you don’t think I’d drag you down.”

  Brother Tom says, “Mike, you’re not dragging anything. Maybe you were, but you’re in an up-tempo mode now.” He bangs on his drum and adds, “This is a most harmonious harmony we’re having here.”

  “I’d love the company,” Mo says. “Then tomorrow you can look at your map and see which way you’ll go across Oregon.”

  We drop Brother Tom in Weaverville, and drive north on Highway 3. The road winds for two hours through the sawtooth peaks of the Trinity Alps and deposits us in Yreka, just south of the Oregon border. Mo shares her tofu and pita bread with me. I’ve never had tofu, and doubt I ever will again, but right now it tastes swell.

  Rain greets us at the state line. This would unnerve me if I didn’t have a place lined up for the night. But I’m staying with Mo and her friend, so it can rain cats and dogs and elephants, for all I care. How wonderful to come penniless into a strange town on a stormy night and be free of anxiety. Mo’s friend is a cook. Maybe we’ll drop by his restaurant for a meal on the house. Maybe there will be a few beers in the deal.

  Mo’s voice pulls me from my reverie.

  “I’ll probably have to wing it like you tonight,” she says. “I’ll want to visit with Matt, but he’s got a small place, and I know his girlfriend won’t want me to stay over.”

  My heart races. This can’t be happening. Not two nights in a row. But it is. Mo’s parking in downtown Ashland. She’s opening the back to her camper. I’m grabbing my pack and my bag of vegetables. It’s pouring. The butterflies in my stomach feel like pigeons.