Location: New Zealand, Kaikoura
Vehicle: Mercedes Double Trailer truck
Driver: Ex-Professional Car Jacker
Slurping the last chocolate milk from a pack of six, my stone cold 8% phone read 8:02pm. A slow and demoralizing two hours had drifted by since I was last dropped off outside the Kaikoura grocery store. The longest I had ever waited. A brisky, ominous mist quickly replaced the gentle warmth of the autumn sun that once illuminated my fruitful thumb. I was now hitching blind, something unprecedented in my hitching career. Rudely, an insidious detraction of blood from my peripheries, exhibited by a tingly sensation in my fingers and toes, signaled my core body temperature into 4th gear. “Come on chocolate milk, kick in,” I thought to myself. If chocolate milk was ever designed for one thing, the fueling of the executive brain function as it searches for life-demanding decisions, must be at the top of its list. The temptation to wear my 4/3 millimeter wetsuit under my cream chinos and slightly torn puffer vest was becoming more and more prominent.
A sense of lifelessness lingered amongst the Tuesday night mist. House lights were out, gardens were neat and tidy. Not a whisper was made in my radius. From my literal knowledge of these settings, I felt as if I was Truman from the Truman Show, nobody really existed, everything is staged, and I will never escape from this vicinity.
Street lights engulfed in fog, shone a disturbingly dim shadow from above. However, despite my body drawing the line in comfort, my spirit was high and free. I pulled out my lagged phone, rubbed it furiously between my hands, played some heavy electronic music from a friend, and bobbed to the beat for both sanity and thermoregulation.
“You look cold, where are you heading?” spoke a Maori man and his son who had just pulled out of the grocery store car park.
“Blenheim” I said with desperation.
“Oh, we live 200m up the road, just wanted to say hi and goodluck, keep up the good vibe!”. A smile four millimeters in height was all I could muster for this prankster. For once in my life, a practical joke could not satisfy a smile on my dial. I must be at the end of my wire.
Swallowing the reality of defeat is a two-fold process. The initial seed of doubt is overshadowed by the slightly comical, blind courage within a hitcherhikers spirit and synonymous with the common saying, “Things always work out, the universe will align for me”. As reality seeps into the hitcher's psyche that a simple ‘thumb-to-ride’ operation is obsolete, the force field of hope disintegrates quickly.
I felt I had been folded twice in defeat. I grabbed my bag off the curb, and walked toward nearby hostels. Heart, broken.
“Closed”.
$60 for a room”.
littered my vision, making me sick to my stomach. “I’d rather sleep in a skip than pay money for a ghostly hostel”. I thought to myself.
I walked past a BP petrol station and double-took. I had an idea. A really good idea. This lightbulb moment, like Einstein and his theory of relativity, hit me harder than the array of consumer-grabbing colours BP swamped my retina's with.
“Truck drivers”. I thought to myself in admiral disbelief.
“I should ask a truck driver”.
Standing across the street, bag held down by my side, shoulders slung over my center of gravity and eyes bulging towards the station, you’d have thought I had come out of a 50 year comer.
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Before long, a truck driver driving a rather modern looking Mercedes double trailer bounced out of his cabin, and darted straight toward the pastry warmer inside the shop. This truck driver didn't fit your stereotypical phenotype of a New Zealand truck driver. He was tall, lean and had a swagger-like locomotion. The sort of bloke who looked like he knew where he was walking.
As he stumbled out minutes later and embarked across the street, the surrounding noise was deafening. Cars steamed past, neighbouring trucks starting up their engines, I had to get closer towards his truck if I was to catch his ears and ask for a ride.
Like an eskimo in an igloo, I shuffled toward his truck, feeling more and more uncomfortable.
“These things are huge” I thought to myself, as the grill of the truck was now 5 meters in front of me.
“Hey, mate”. I spoke with poor assertion.
“HEY, MATE”, I said with an acceptable assertion.
Stunned, but willing to offer his body language and precious truck driver concentration, he glared with no response.
“Are you heading north?” I asked.
He paused, still maintaining stern eye contact, obviously processing my physical stature. It felt like a wild west standoff, except he held two cocked pistols and I held out my hands.
“Yeah mate, jump in”.
I bolted around to the passenger door and looked up. Way up. “How on earth am I, a certified tiny person, meant to get up there?” I thought to myself. Pulling the door handle back with the tips of my cold nipped fingers, I clambered up the enormously distanced stairs.
That feeling of falling inside your stomach, or commonly termed the “butterfly’s”, entered my tummy without invitation, followed by a sudden dawning to the emergency department of my brain that rock climbing really isn’t my cup of tea. I took my last step in awe of my old flatmate, an intrepid ice climber, who found fullness in the emptiness of the mountains. I marinated in his unbounded interpretation of the “comfort zone” - he found peace in the vertical nature of life, moreover the horizontal, perhaps more attuned to his ancestral “tree-to-tree” way of locomotion.
“The name’s Anthony”. He said with a slight slur. The abundance of crumbs around his beard and disturbingly warm handshake concluded our greeting.
As you’d expect, the calibre of my maturity became instantly fixated on the extreme bounciness of the seats. Like a kid visiting Dad’s office for the first time, I furiously bounced around in his chair and questioned him to death.
“What’s it like to sleep in here?”
“Pretty good pay?”
“You must see some crazy things on the road”
“How many pastries do ya eat in a day?”
“What's your longest day driving?”
“Wow these seats are bouncy!”
Anthony and I were very open in our discussion. We hit it off instantly. Being a young, open-minded lad from Woodend (Canterbury), we had a general mutuality of energy that set a tone of comfort for questioning anything about one another. Things began to shift after I asked him one particular question:
“What did you do before you were a truck driver?”
“I used to steal cars for a living. Professional hijacker if you will”.
My position of honest interrogation became filtered through a tone of remorse as we dug up his past life, his voice changed, an indication that his heart was peeping through the curtains, ready to do the talking.
“10 years in prison and the birth of my first daughter was enough to leave life in the fast lane”.
As he injected events across his timeline of life, emotions of sadness and empathy flooded back, forth and between my heart, like a fierce game of quidditch. Before long, waves of gratitude for the safe and happy life I had compared to this man cushioned my heart.
A sapposed two-hour trip flashed by, the "Blenheim" sign reflected back off the trucks headlights, flooding back memories of family holiday trips and unsuccessful surf missions to the infamous Ward beach with friends. Memory and time are such funny phenomena, When you want it to speed up, it slows down, and when you want it to just stand still, it runs away from you - the nature of being human really is the ultimate paradox.
"Where's best I drop you mate", says Anthony, as his rather obnoxious digital clock beeps 10:00pm.
"Anywhere that's easy, a friend is coming to get me". I spoke back with tones of tiredness dribbling out. A large yawn, a stretch and a last bounce in the truck seat prepared me for the cold wait on the Subway sidewalk.
"Mate, I can't thank you enough for the ride, you've saved my bacon! I wish you all the best with your daughter" I spoke confidently, gripping his hand firmly in a handshake any kiwi male would be proud of.
"Go well on your teaching journey”, he murmurs, before grabbing his megatron vaporizer and releasing an extraordinary puff of vapor out of his window, images of a raging bull hunting down a flag of red came to mind... .I need some sleep.
And for that, I'm forever grateful.