Crossing the Rockies: Day Five (Part Two) & Day Six – Getting Back to the Truck (9/27-28/09)

I met a pretty girl this morning.  It was about 8:30, and I was camped a few miles south of Alpine, Wyoming, which was as far as I’d been able to hitchhike the day before.  Duke and I had just gotten up and were limping around in the cold.  Duke’s paw was sore again, and he didn’t look good.  My knees hurt.  I was considering my chances of hitching a ride south.  I flexed my hands, which were cold and stiff.  I looked around my campsite for wood to start a fire, but I hadn’t collected enough the night before.  This was a heavily used camping spot, right next to Grey’s River, and the forest floor was scoured.  Chances of a ride not too good either.  I had tried for a ride for two and a half hours late yesterday afternoon without success, and had no reason to think this morning would be any different.  I stuffed my hands in my pockets and listed to Grey’s River rumble past.

Yesterday, I climbed through McDougal Pass and walked down the western side.  The single-track path became a double-track four-wheeler trail, then a gravel road that a Volkswagen Beetle could have traveled.  Duke and I hiked happily down the gravel road until it turned to pavement, and then we were hiking past mowed lawns and houses.  Chained dogs barked at Duke as he pissed in their yards.  I wanted to pee in them too but my species has laws about that, so instead I waved airily at people sitting on their porches.

But after awhile, hiking though a neighborhood felt silly, so when I heard a motor behind me and saw a white pickup approaching, I stuck out my thumb.  The truck eased to a stop, and Duke and I caught a ride into Thayne, Wyoming, which sits along US 89.  We stopped at the gas station, and Duke and I got out.

“So where’re you going, man?” the driver asked, resting his forearms against the bedrail of his truck while his son pumped gas.

I told him I had just climbed over the Wyoming and Salt River Ranges and was hitching back to my truck.  I told him about the Walker Expedition, and my plans to follow Walker’s route all the way to the Pacific.

“That’s awesome,” he said.  He had a thin reddish beard and wore a big black tee shirt over padded dirt biking pants.  His son, who was about fourteen and wore his dark hair long, nodded at me in agreement.  His father had removed the cigarette from his lips since we were at the gas station.  “Man.  That’s a long way.”

He asked how I planned to get back to my truck, and I said I’d probably hitch north along US 89 to Alpine, then take Grey’s River Road southeast into the National Forest.  Grey’s River Road followed its namesake down the eastern edge of the Salt River Range, then intersected the road that I’d followed through McDougal Gap.  As I was walking along that road through the Wyoming Range, lots of folks had stopped and offered rides.  I hadn’t even been asking.  I figured with my thumb out I’d get rides, no problem.

“Yeah, you should be fine,” he said.  “People around here are pretty cool.”

I thanked him for the ride and started walking north through Thayne.  I figured I’d walk to the edge of town then stick out my thumb, but before I’d gone five hundred yards a guy pulled over for me.  He had a truck top over the bed of his pickup and an inflatable raft on a trailer.  Duke got in the bed and I climbed into the cab.

The driver’s name was Jim, and he was a river runner.  He was from Utah, but he floated down rivers all around the west, fishing.  Everywhere he went he brought fresh fruit and vegetables from his garden to give to the Forest Service folks.  It made them go easier on the regulations.  The barter system, he told me, works well out here.  He told me he was a generous guy.  He told me about a couple campgrounds in the area that I should visit, and told me to tell the campground operators “Jim gave me a ride.”  If I said that, he advised, they might let me stay for free.

I told him I was heading up to Alpine, then heading down Grey’s River Road.  “Oh, I wasn’t going as far as Alpine.  But I’ll take you there.  I don’t mind going ten miles out of my way.  Ten minutes further is no problem.  Or twenty minutes, because I’ve got to go there and back.  But I’ll do that.  I’ll take you to Alpine.”

“Thanks,” I said.

We stopped at a gas station in Alpine, and he gave me two tomatoes and two peaches.  I told him thanks, and told him he was a generous guy.  “That’s how I was raised,” he said.  He pointed to Grey’s River Road, which I had already seen because it was a hundred yards away on the other side of the fuel pumps.  “That’s Grey’s River Road,” he said.  “I’ve gotten you to it.  You’ll have no trouble getting a ride quick on that road.”

I thanked him again and unloaded Duke from the truck.  Jim bent over Duke and started baby-talking to him, telling him what a pretty dog he was.  This is a pet peeve of mine.  Duke is a grown dog.  He’s smart – smarter than some people – and a whole lot less self-righteous than most.  I knew I shouldn’t, but I kind of hoped Duke would bite Jim on his self-congratulatory nose.  Instead I had to be satisfied when Duke refused to eat the bone that Jim gave him.  “Duke, you ingrate,” I said, although I was pleased.  Jim pushed the bone at me.  “Maybe he’ll eat it later,” he said.  I took the bone and thanked Jim for the ride.

After Jim left, I sat for a minute with my back against the gas station wall looking at some maps.  A lady with kind brown eyes reminded me that “dog” was “god” spelled backwards.  I smiled yes.  I checked the map and checked my watch.  About thirty miles to the road that would lead me back to the truck, and about 5:00.  I shouldered my pack.  Confident in the kindness of strangers, started for Grey’s River Road.  With a little luck, I’d catch a burger and a  at the Green River Bar not long after nightfall.

But luck left me the way the homecoming queen leaves the nerd who asked her to prom.  She had been so sweet to begin with . . . but as I walked south on Grey’s River Road, up hills, down hills, through the smoke from a controlled burn the Forest Service had started, grinding over the gravel, my knees aching, Duke’s paw hurting, I recognized her treachery.  Cars and trucks rumbled past, offering nothing to Duke and me except a coat of dust.  I tried using a thumb, using a wave, turning to face approaching cars, keeping my face forward.  Lady Luck wouldn’t dance.  So at 7:30, I gave up.  I made camp by Grey’s River, and gathered what firewood I could find from the picked-over forest floor.  I knew it would be cold the next morning so close to the river.  And it was.

I was fighting that cold about 8:30 the next morning when a Forest Service truck pulled off the road a few hundred yards from my campsite.  It was a big crew-cab model, probably in the area monitoring the controlled burn from yesterday, so the chances that it would go south were slim.  I started to turn toward my camp stove when a figure got out of one the rear doors and took a couple steps toward me.  They’re going to kick me out of here, I figured.  I wondered where they would try to send me.  I watched the bulkily-clad figure approach.  I had no car and a seventy-pound dog that couldn’t walk.  Short of throwing me in the river, there wasn’t much they could do.

Then the person lifted her head and there was a big white smile under long dark hair.  She started bounding toward me – it wasn’t a walk, it wasn’t a skip, it was something in between, and it was feminine.  Duke lifted his tail and hobbled a couple steps in her direction.  I walked toward her and grinned.  Shit, I remembered, I haven’t brushed my teeth yet.  And I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I’d had a bath.  But when a pretty lady comes your way, I had learned, you’d better be ready.

“Can I pet the dog?” she asked.  I don’t know whether Duke or I assented first, but it didn’t take us long.

Her name was Catherine.  She had brown eyes, a dark complexion and high cheekbones.  Her dark hair framed her face, and I liked the way her eyes moved as she talked.  She smiled a lot.  Her clothes were all business: laceup leather boots, green Forest Service pants, a black hooded sweatshirt.  She told me that she was riding along with some other crew members monitoring the embers of the controlled burn.

I told her where Duke and I had been.  “McDougal,” she said.  She stretched out the “oo” like western people do.  “McDougal’s one of the prettiest places in these mountains.  It’s beauuuutiful up there.”

I told her it was pretty to my eyes, with the wide sheer-cliffed ridge looking out over dark evergreen forest, green and yellow aspens, and other foliage turned bright red.  The red was mountain maple, she said.  I told her about the Walker Expedition and where Duke and I were headed.  When I told her we’d be crossing the Sierras in November, she raised her eyebrows.  “I don’t think I’d do it in November,” she said.

Before I could ask where she was from, or whether she always worked around here, or where she was going next, the truck’s engine revved.  She looked toward it.  “It might be time to go,” she said.  The truck rolled forward several feet and stopped.  “Yep, time to go,” she said.  We shook hands goodbye.  Hers were rough working hands to which Rhett Butler would have objected but that Jeb Butler considered just fine.  Then she bound out of my morning, and presumably out of my life.  I watched her go.  The truck headed north.

I heard myself whistling as I turned back toward the stove and boiled water for tea.  A pretty face can sure change a morning.  I reconsidered my chances for catching a lift.  I remembered the guy in dirt bike pants, and Jim, and how quickly they stopped to let me in their pickups.  Maybe my luck would revert to its old form.  I wished Catherine had been heading south, but it was good to see her anyway.  There are some lifts only a woman can provide.

Trying to hitch a ride.

Duke and I eventually made it back to the truck at about 3:00 on the day that I met Catherine, having caught a couple rides from folks who have to remain anonymous because they weren't supposed to help hitchhikers.  "If it weren't for your dog, I wouldn't have picked you up," one of them said.

This guy needs a bath.