LJ Idol 10: Week 10: Take A Hike!
She Takes To the Road
She zips up the bag and slings it over her shoulder wishing she had some whiskey to wash down the regret. She grabs her felt hat and resists looking over her shoulder as she heads out the door; tying her bandanna around her wrist and tightening the knot with her teeth.
She walks along the side of the road judging the cars that come around the bend; turning to walk
backwards and holding her thumb up in the air when she feels the right vibe.
She keeps moving. Trying to put as much distance between herself and that mess she left behind.
She looks up and sees a hawk circling overhead. She raises her arms and closes her eyes. Imagines for just a minute that she could lift off the ground and fly away.
She takes a deep breath and gives in totally to the fantasy for a moment, tilting her arms as if she where a small child pretending to be an airplane.
She hears another car coming and turns to look. It’s a white minivan. Soccer moms don’t tend to pick up hitchhikers but the woman slows as she approaches.
“Give you a ride someplace?”
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She makes up a story about who she is and how she came to be walking along the side of the road with her whole life in a backpack.
She’s 25 (give or take six years but somehow being under thirty makes her seem more trustworthy and like less of a fuck up). She just graduated college. She just came to the area to visit family.
She smiles. She laughs at jokes; watches the scenery. Calculates the miles in her head against the cash in her pocket.
She hops out at a strip mall. She waves until the car turns onto the highway. Then she crosses the street and goes into the greyhound station.
Thankfully there isn’t a security guard checking tickets at the door so she finds a bench to sit on and leans her head back cradling her back pack on her lap.
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They pull off into a coastal rest area with fire pits and campsites. She says her goodbyes to her traveling companions and she hops out to pitch her tent. Her new neighbors offer her scrambled eggs and rice wrapped in tortillas.
She’s only a few hundred miles from the punk house.
In the early hours of dawn she peeks out of the tent flap to watch a few of the caravans drive on down the highway.
She stays wrapped up her blanket listening to the waves in the distance until the fog burns off and then crawls out of her tent. She breaks down her camp and hikes up to the highway on-ramp. She makes a sign to prop against her bag and then changes it after an hour.
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She sends postcards to the addresses scribbled on the inside cover of her notebook. Dropping them in postboxes like sowing seeds she will never get to see flower. Her boots kicking up dust. Clinging to her like memories, stamping her feet on the dry earth trying to shake it off, trying to forget.
Getting lost in the dirt roads off I-5 into Bakersfield.
It feels like a hedge maze and they consider they made a wrong turn but the GPS is telling them to turn left and she thinks about the satellites circling the planet plotting a trajectory of the car inching along the the bumpy terrain.
It’s the mountains in the distance that she longs for, getting high enough to look down; beyond and further than she’s ever been. Fading into the horizon. Betting the world against her courage.