Excerpt from my upcoming book:

Fields Awaiting

Earthly Stories with Heavenly Meanings

Excerpt from Chapter 8

   In the beginning, I had an endless stream of twenty minute to two-hour rides that eventually got me into Idaho, where I found a safe place to camp off the road each night before doing it all over again the next day.

In one Idaho town, a police officer stopped to let me know I was not allowed to hitch there, illegal he said, and so he drove me to the next town where supposedly it was acceptable. In this little barren town, some sheep farmers stopped and asked if I wanted to spend a few days making money herding and sheering the sheep nearby. They looked like real cowboys with their chaps, wide brimmed hats and vests, and I considered it. I expressed that my dog would be going crazy over herding those sheep, being an Australian shepherd and all, and what did they think about that?

   “Oh, we will just tie her up for those few days so she won’t get in the way,” one of the cowboys said at which I politely declined that opportunity. Savannah tied up for days? No way. I’d have to be desperate for money and experience to do that to her, and fortunately I was neither.

   I made it to Montana and there I called my cousin John who was living in Bozeman. I landed at his house and stayed a day there, grounding and eating good food while being in the comfort of family. When ready to move on, John took me as far south as he could, inside the parameters of the National Park of Yellowstone.

   That previous night I had a message come through in my dream: “Don’t take the white van. Wait for the yellow car.” I woke myself up saying it. I had many dreams in my life like that, still do, so I have learned to listen to them.

   To me, time is not always linear- it is possible to dance among the past, present and future simultaneously but it is not always easy to get there in the waking hours so my dreams took care of that. One that was very helpful in college was the dream that awoke me with the words, “Do not step on the snake.” Later that day, on my daily jog around the Battery in Charleston, the words came to me again and at that moment an enormous snake, it looked like a boa constrictor, crossed my path and I jumped over it and looked back in wonder as it slithered off into the shrubbery along the sidewalk.

   So with the yellow car dream in mind, I stood at the intersection of two roads humbly waiting for this car to come by- it was not the busiest season of the year. My last ride had taken me further into the park, a ranger on his way to work. After dropping me off, the ranger was soon back again and handed me a paper bag with a PB&J, an apple and underneath a napkin with a sweet note written on it, he had slipped a twenty-dollar bill. Angels like that made my journey infused with hope and faith.

   It was cold and began to snow and then a herd of buffalo came into view, getting closer and closer. Savannah was growling and acting like she was going to attack the herd at any moment. A white van appeared and offered us a lift, and I said, “No, thank you, but thanks for asking.” He mumbled curse words under his breath and raced away from the scene, I guess trying to burn rubber as a statement of disgust at being rejected.

I was staring at big bison now, across the road, and having to restrain Scout Savannah from going after them with all my might, while praying aloud, “Please, please….Help!” when a yellow Subaru hatchback approached. I did not hesitate to get in. The driver, named Stephen, had a dog that was also a shepherd and our dogs chummed it up while we drove right on through buffalo herds and falling snow in geyser country, chatting away like old friends.

   Stephen was the kindest and most intriguing of all the rides that carried me back South. He lived near Jackson Hole in a cabin open to the whipping winds of the grasslands' enormous spread, surrounded by sagebrush and glorious mountains. He made me a meal of elk and potatoes and gifted me earrings he had made from the elk’s antlers, with cedar nuts he had also harvested. I was, for the most part, a vegetarian, yet I was in the company of someone willing to feed me local foods from their own culture and was not about to complain.

   The rest of the rides were mostly uneventful though productive in getting me that much closer to where I wanted to go. I rode with women selling Avon, men going to soccer tournaments, parents with screaming kids, a couple with a flair for gambling, a man who was a traveling appliance salesman, a woman who was “just driving” to get away from a hard break-up with her boyfriend (that was a ride that went for hundreds of miles), teenagers on their way to an out-of-town party, and truckers.

   Truckers were the best rides in a way because I knew I could cover lots of terrain in one ride- a break from all this switching over from car to car, heaving my pack into each vehicle and getting situated with Savannah on my lap or at my feet.

In Nowheres, Nebraska, I sat on the road for the longest time waiting for a ride. A trucker who had transported a load of mattresses and box springs to Wyoming and was on his return to Kansas picked me up and carried me through a couple states.

   He was really loved the Southwest and had made the inside of his truck decked out in Southwestern décor. It was a real trip, let me tell you. Behind the front seat was a mini-bedroom with suns and kokopellies on blankets, zapotec wall hangings and pictures of cactuses and cowboys filling the space. It was his truck and he spent most of his time in there, he said, so he might as well make it nice. When he had reached his destination he got on his static CB radio and found another trucker heading in my direction that I could continue riding with.

   This driver did not own his truck permanently and could have cared less what the ambiance was inside. He had Mountain Dew soda cans piled so high on the passenger side I truly had my knees up to my chest in order to fit in the front seat. We had to listen to Heavy Metal music for hours, and hardly said a word to each other. Savannah sat in between us with her tongue hanging out the whole time like she was just tolerating this whole affair.

   The next trucker I rode with would be my last ride. From northern Mississippi, he drove me all the way to a little town outside of Atlanta, where my Aunt Sara was to meet me and haul me back to familiar territory. This man, Bob, was the epitome of the trucker image. He had wide, muscular arms and a sleeveless shirt slit down to his mid-chest with a picture on it of a half-naked woman straddling a Harley Davidson. He wore sunglasses that mirrored your own reflection back when he looked at you and had shoulder length, wavy black hair framing his bearded face.

   Bob asked me, "Just what do you think you are doing, a young woman, hitchhiking across the country like this?" Why, he told me, just last week he heard about a girl murdered from doing the same thing, getting in the car with a perfect stranger.

I looked at him and said, “Well, this was the way I could get to where I wanted to go, so I had to just trust completely in the safety of it. Besides, you would never do something like that to anybody.”

   Bob lowered his shades and turned to me with a glare, “You never know.” Just like that.

   I went through a few thoughts of how to react, and said, “Do you have a daughter?”

   He answered yes, and I asked if he had a picture of her. He had one quite handy and I looked at the photo and told him that I was sure he was the kind of person who would not harm anyone in a way that he would not want his own daughter harmed. And I was sure. The whole time I had been hitchhiking I would ask my inner guidance whether this was a safe ride to take or not. A few times the answer was no and so I would decline those rides and always a good one was to follow. Fear was absent. Discernment and faith were the dominant vibrations I was holding. I figured anybody could be scared. Why not be brave in this instance?

   Bob did not speak for some time and then he told me he was trying to scare me so I wouldn’t hitchhike any more, because he could not stand the thought of his own daughter doing something like that. We had real open and satisfying conversation after that, Bob and I, and in Dalton, Georgia, he delivered me to the truck stop where, to my aunt’s dismay, I got out of this burly man’s gray eighteen-wheeler and into her clean, air-conditioned white Toyota Camry.