The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America (13 page)

Throughout this journey, kind strangers tell me how brave I am to cross the country with no money. They can’t imagine doing what I’m doing. Truth is, I can’t imagine doing what they’re doing. Pete and Doris have been married 43 years. That takes a kind of commitment I’ve never been able to fathom, much less display. While I’ve roamed, searching for life, they’ve stayed put and built a life. As I pack to leave, I’m filled with envy and regret. It’s only a rhetorical question when I ask myself, who’s the braver?

CHAPTER 17

Keith and Judy invite me to spend the night down their way, and nine of us pile into their van.

Keith drives while Judy breast-feeds three-month-old Theresa. There are no seat belts or air bags, just a pair of well-worn Bibles on the dash. Fifteen-year-old Beth sits in the second seat, holding Levi, five, and Kevin, two. I sit in the third seat with Dalen, 13, and Joy, 11. Keith and Judy’s oldest, Steven, 17, stayed home.

The two goats ride behind me, bleating in my ear.

Keith pulls into the gas station where Jennifer dropped me off two days ago. He takes orders for ice cream. Everyone wants a drumstick.

“Mike?” he says.

“None for me, thanks.”

“You sure? It’s on the house.”

I love ice cream, and I haven’t had any in three weeks. I want to say yes, but can’t.

“Yeah, I’m stuffed from dinner still.”

Keith pays for the gas and returns from the minimart with a cardboard box heaped with drumsticks. He passes them out.

“Dad, there’s one extra,” Levi says, noting the lone drumstick resting in the box on the floorboard.

“Yeah, I miscounted,” Keith says. “Sure you don’t want one, Mike?”

“Well, as long as you’ve got one extra,” I say.

Keith passes back the drumstick with a smile.

We drive into the black night. None of the kids fights or argues, and after a while even the goats settle down. Just one big, happy farm family.

Keith turns off the interstate and heads south on a two-lane highway. After an hour we make a series of turns down gravel roads, passing fields of corn and wheat barely visible in the dark.

“The thing that keeps people out here in these rural areas of America is their love of independence,” Keith says. “But it’s a big gamble. The farmer and the ranchers are dependent on economics decided by multitudes of middlemen. If people out here were looking for a steady paycheck, they’d have moved to the city a long time ago.”

Keith turns down a bumpy road and pulls in front of a ramshackle building listing among some trees.

“This isn’t a show house like Larry and Linda’s,” Judy says. “It’s more of a heap hole.”

“No, it looks great,” I say.

An angry hired hand trashed the house, and the owner now rents it to Keith’s family for $100 per month. An unpainted wall leads up the staircase. The dining room table is laden with junk. Unfolded laundry is piled on two sofas in the living room.

It’s 10 o’clock on a Sunday night, but there are still chores to be done. I wander out with Dalen to the dilapidated red barn. A rooster lords over a couple dozen hens laying eggs. Kittens scamper in the rafters. Rabbits rattle their cages. Ducks and geese mosey about the hay-strewn floor. Dalen sits on an upturned plastic bucket, milking the goats. A kitten sticks its head in the tin pail and gets squirted in the face.

Outside in the corral, Keith pours grain into troughs for his three horses. He feeds and waters his 12 border collies. Keith wears the belt buckle he won at the county fair when he and one of the dogs combined as cow herding champs. He walks off into the pasture to collect the cows to milk.

“Boss! Boss!” he yells.

I stand by the windmill that drives the well pump and gaze up into the sky. The Milky Way stretches out across the night like an endless spool of cotton.

Keith and I take off our shoes and leave them on the sun porch. The soles are caked with green manure.

“That’s our smog,” Keith says. “But our smog is biodegradable.”

One of the sofas has been cleared for me and some bedding left out. I fall asleep, feeling content and grateful.

It’s still pitch dark when I hear a racket the next morning in the kitchen. It must be Judy, up to fix her brood breakfast. But when I walk in, I find Beth tending four skillets, two for eggs and two for pancakes. Her younger sister Joy is setting a table the size of a barn door. Keith, Steven and Dalen are already out milking the cows. Judy is getting the little ones up. I marvel at the family’s teamwork.

We all hold hands as Keith offers the blessing. There’s bacon to go with the eggs, homemade chokecherry syrup for the pancakes, fruit cocktail and whipped cream. I wash it all down with fresh cow’s milk poured from a gallon-sized glass jar.

Keith and his two oldest sons are scheduled to shear sheep at a nearby ranch. Keith invites me to come along. The younger kids stay behind with Judy for home schooling.

Keith, Steven, Dalen and I cram into the cab of a beat-up pickup and bounce along a gravel road. Two collies ride in back. Ours is the only vehicle in sight.

“This is rush hour in South Dakota,” Keith says.

Suddenly, I hear a thwack! I look out to see a meadowlark wrapped around the side-view mirror, its neck broken.

“That’s our state bird,” Keith says.

“No, Dad, that’s Nebraska’s,” Steven says.

“Oh, you’re right. The pheasant is our state bird.”

The rancher Keith has contracted with greets us in overalls. He has 1,200 lambs to shear. Unlike ewes, which get clipped again and again, lambs are sheared only once, when they’re six months old. They live another 60 days before they’re butchered, their hides becoming winter coats and car seat covers.

Six shearers set up in the barn. Motors dangling by chains from the rafters drive clippers as sharp as razors. Each man keeps track of the lambs he shears with a number counter hanging by his workstation. Keith is good for 150 head per day. Steven can shear 100. This is Dalen’s first time with a pair of clippers in his hand, and no one knows what to expect of him.

The pay is $1.40 per lamb. Good shearers like Keith can earn more than $200 per day. It’s a lot of money in these parts, but the work is far from steady. It’s rarely more than a few days in a row, and never in the same place.

Keith’s collies herd the lambs single file from a pen into a chute. The shearers pull the lambs out by their legs through doorways in the chute. Dalen accidentally lets two out and gets bowled over by the frightened animals.

“Dalen, I know you’re good, but one at a time, son,” Keith says.

Keith is a pro. He squeezes a lamb’s leg between his knees and pulls the animal’s face to his chest. He works fast, making long, smooth cuts from crown to tail, careful not to nick the lamb’s private parts. The wool falls away and the animal looks like a peeled orange. The whole process takes about two minutes.

The shearer at the end doesn’t fare as well. He cuts his left thumb with the clippers and bleeds badly. He puts on a glove, but the blood soon soaks through the leather. The man keeps working, however, as there is no telling when the next day’s wages will come.

As wool gathers on the plywood floor, a man sweeps it into a pile with a push broom. He feeds the wool into a hydraulic press, which forces it into a burlap sack seven feet long. Each lamb donates four to five pounds of wool.

Steven holds his own. But by midmorning, Dalen is still struggling with his first lamb. He can’t hold it still. His strokes are short and choppy, and the animal bleeds from numerous nicks. Truly a sacrificial lamb.

But with Keith’s coaching, Dalen catches on.

“Stretch that leg out,” Keith says. “Keep it flat. Nice long strokes. That’s it.”

By noon, I’ve seen a way of life passed on, from father to son, here in the heartland.

Judy and the little ones show up to drive me out to the highway. She drops me at a wide spot in the road called Wewela. She hands me a plastic bag with sandwiches—two chicken and two honey.

“Eat the chicken sandwiches first, so they don’t go bad,” she says.

She gives me two stamped postcards. She wants me to use one to let her know how my trip turned out. I’m supposed to send the other one tomorrow, telling her who picked me up and where I stayed.

“I’ll be worried ’til I hear from you,” Judy says before driving off.

Wewela consists of one building, the post office, and it’s closed. I sit on the steps and eat one of the chicken sandwiches. I draw a sign for Ainsworth, a town 30 miles south in Nebraska that intersects with a highway that will take me east.

I stand on the side of the road. The only sound I hear is a jillion invisible grasshoppers. A half hour passes before I see a car. It’s going in the wrong direction. I get the feeling I may be mailing that first card to Judy from the post office here in Wewela.

I figure it’s time to get reacquainted with my pack. I hoist it onto my back and walk down the centerline of the blacktop. After a mile, I climb a short rise and cross into Nebraska.

My seventh state. I hope it’s a lucky one.

CHAPTER 18

I hear a car coming behind me, so I turn and hold out my sign. The four-door sedan pulls to the shoulder, but when I reach the window, I figure I must be seeing a mirage: two sweet little old ladies, dressed in their Sunday best.

“I know you’re not supposed to pick up hitchhikers, but it’s so far between towns out here, you feel bad passing a person,” the driver says.

I don’t know whether to kiss the old biddies or scold them for stopping. Don’t they watch the 11 o’clock news?

I’ve been amazed on this trip by the stubborn capacity of Americans to help a stranger, even when it seems to run contrary to their own best interests. I think of all the families who take me in. I arrive with nothing but my pack, while they expose their homes, their possessions, their children. As scared as I am to trust them, they must be doubly afraid to trust me. Then again, what might truly frighten them is the idea of not trusting anybody. It’s like this woman has just told me, she’d rather risk her life than feel bad about passing a stranger on the side of the road. As I slide into the backseat, I realize she would have stopped for the guy with the gas can I left stranded last year in the Nevada desert.

Vi and Helen are sisters. They grew up in Wewela, but now live farther north in Winner. Vi is driving Helen to an appointment with an eye doctor down in Ainsworth, Nebraska. They don’t have an eye doctor in their part of South Dakota.

We pass through Springview, Nebraska, a tiny town with a cemetery shaded by ash trees.

“That’s where our folks are buried,” Helen says.

“They paid for a section with six plots,” Vi says. “But they were told one of ’em was already filled, someone from the eighteen hundreds. There’s no record or marker or anything.”

“Dad always said he wanted to be buried there,” Helen says.

They drop me at the junction of Highway 20. As I pull my pack from the car, I look at Vi. We say the same thing at the same time.

“Be careful.”

It takes most of the afternoon to move 60 miles east. There’s plenty of traffic, but rides are harder to come by in Nebraska. Still, everybody waves, real friendly. It must be a compromise. They know they’re not stopping for you, yet they can’t just ignore you like drivers do in California. That would be rude.

Today’s kind stranger turns out to be the town of O’Neill, Nebraska. It has a free campground. There’s no shower, but there’s a sink I can stick my head under in the morning. The parking lot is full of big rigs with combines on their trailers. They belong to workers from Oklahoma who migrate north to harvest the corn. I pitch my tent and go for a walk.

The town is named for General John O’Neill, a native of Ireland who served in the American Civil War. He later encouraged Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine to settle in this fertile region. Owing to its founder’s heritage, O’Neill is called the Shamrock City. Green four-leaf clovers dot the sidewalks. Businesses with names like Shamrock Realty, Dougherty’s Pub and Luck o’ the Irish Drugs line the main drag.

Despite its charming nickname, something is slightly menacing about O’Neill. An abundance of homeowners feel the need to post “No Trespassing” signs in their yards. Youths cruise the streets in flatulent muscle cars. One kid revs his engine at a stoplight and stalls.

I hear the squawk of a public address system in the distance.

“Second and eight,” the announcer says.

I follow the cheers, past the town water tower, to the high school. The junior varsity football team is playing Ainsworth. It’s a Monday night and the stands are packed. The grass is thick and the fall air cool. Men wearing baseball caps with ads for farm equipment mill about the concession stand. Everyone looks serious, except for the children playing tag beneath the bleachers. The game is a rout by halftime, O’Neill leading 20-0, and I leave.

Signs posted on the school fence note that the area is a “Drug Free Zone,” and penalties are doubled for those found guilty. It’s dark, and I pass fresh-faced teenagers heading for the gate. I have a sudden fear of being falsely accused of something terrible. Then I get this crazy notion that a bad cop is going to plant drugs on me. I walk back to town in the middle of the street so everyone can see me.

I find a place called Tom’s Tavern and take a seat at the end of the bar. Three TVs are tuned to
Monday Night Football
. A couple and their young children shoot pool behind me. When the bartender sets a napkin in front of me, I ask her if I can just watch the game. No problem, she says.

The two men closest to me play liar’s dice, slamming the leather cups down hard on the bar. One drinks beer, the other whisky.

“Alice, can I get that last one I asked for?” Whisky says to the bartender. She brings him another drink. He drains it and calls down to the bartender, “Alice, can I get that last one I asked for?”

A hard-looking woman named Vicki sits down next to Beer and Whisky. Beer tries to get her to roll dice, but she says she’s not a gambler. Whisky gets up to relieve himself.

“Is it true he’s the best lover in town?” Beer says to Vicki.