Stay Human

We know what our mothers would say about picking up hitchhikers, but we began the day by picking up an old man who needed a ride town. He was hunched under the weight of two large, white plastic bags and was steadying his pace with the worn, faded-pink handle of an old broom. How could we bypass this harmless viejito? Well, actually, we did at first, but we felt so muddled about it that we turned back for him.

Our initial hesitation to pick him up was colored not just by our parents’ everlasting warnings of strangers, but by news of a recent number of robberies across the lake in the last few weeks – the thieves often posed as hitchhikers (I can really hear our moms screaming now). Our neighborhood is small, and our road is traveled by few, so it’s easy to spot someone who doesn’t live or work around here, and we didn’t recognize this man. Erring on the side of caution, we initially continued to lumber down the road after he tried to flag a ride. It took a few minutes of hemming and hawing to accept that we were being overly cautious about picking up an 80-year-old man with a limp, so we turned around to give him a lift.

As we approached him, we realized that he was the same person we’d seen the night before sleeping in the grass on the side of the road just a few kilometers from our house – we had been a bit freaked out at the time, but identifying this old man as the vagrant cleared up any paranoid fantasies we had about a group of bandits casing our hillside. Nevertheless, we still felt cautious; but ultimately he seemed harmless. And indeed, he was. He set his load on the front-seat floor, ducked his black-hatted head as he climbed slowly into the car, and smiled a big, toothless smile. He couldn’t even close the car door behind him, so Chris had to shut it for him.

As soon as he was settled and we were on our way, Chris tried to start up a friendly, inquisitive conversation, but the man just started laughing and rambling away in semi-coherent Spanish. For the whole 15 minutes into town, we could neither understand much of what he was saying nor get a word in edgewise. Chris asked him a couple of simple questions that got no response – whether he was purposefully ignoring us or just oblivious, we couldn’t tell. Most likely the latter. But he was certainly happy and enjoying himself and telling some amazing tales. We all just sat in amazed silence while he animated his narrative with quick movements of his arthritic hands. Finally, a bit perplexed and intrigued, we dropped him off at the gas station in town and bid him adios. It was an interesting encounter – and I think in some way he helped to lighten our load as well.