I’m not condoning hitchhiking, but in the retelling of this tale it certainly gave me some pause for reflection…
I have hitchhiked more than a few times in my life, and for various reasons. I have always been grateful for the rides I received, and they have always been interesting experiences. But I do have a confession to make. I have not been very good at reciprocating. It’s only been the rare occasion that I picked anybody up. And truth be told, in this little story I am not even the driver but a passenger; so while it is about picking up a hitchhiker, it’s technically not me doing the actual picking up.
Hozomeen, Hozomeen, the most mournful mountain I ever seen, and the most beautiful as soon as I got to know it and saw the Northern Lights behind it reflecting all the ice of the North Pole from the other side of the world.
-Jack Kerouac, the Dharma Bums
We were driving south down the long and dusty Silver-Skagit road en route to climb that very Mt Hozomeen when we came across a couple of people hitchhiking out in the middle of nowhere. Whoa… that’s always a serious red flag in my book. ‘They’, being a man and a woman. They looked harmless enough. Dressed sort of like members of our tribe. So we pulled over and squeezed them into the back of the already full land cruiser. It turned out that they were doing a through hike and that their vehicle was parked at the other end of a trail, so that’s why they were out there.
We got to talking as we bounced along and it turns out this guy was just like us and mad about climbing. Another thing we had in common was that he and I each turned out to have a reasonable amount of free time on our hands. He was self-employed and could mostly arrange his own hours to suit. I on the other hand was on the Unemployment Insurance Commission’s Climbing Team, and could also quite handily arrange my own hours. As long as the weekly ‘no, no, no, yes, yes, no’ card was filled out then I was golden for a full year.
So before we dropped them off, this cat takes my telephone number and says he’ll call me to go climbing sometime. Yeah, okay. If I had a buck for every time some Jamoke was gonna call me, I wouldn’t have had to be on the pogey. Well… the very next week, I get this telephone call. “Who?” “What?” “Umm, oh yeah… I sort of remember” “Do I want to go climbing?”
How about that! This guy actually came through. How totally crazy is that? He seemed sincere and harmless enough, and I did need a partner for climbing during the week when most of my other friends and partners were chained to either a work desk or to a school desk. So I took a chance and took him up on his offer and we met up the very next day at his house out in the valley to go climbing. Who would have thunk it… that by picking up a random hitchhiker is how I came to meet the Desert Mountaineer? We spent the next two solid years climbing our brains out and forged a climbing partnership and friendship that have both continued for close to four decades.
offwidth and DM on a perfect day high in the Canadian Rockies
Ah yes, I remember that day very well. It led to many a good and memorable climb from that point onward. Good times.
I did not know that’s how you guys met. What an incredible story.