WTG Devin

People have asked me what kind of people picked us up while we were hitchhiking. The hot kind. And when I say hot, I mean Danny’s mom. But seriously, a great variety of people were kind enough to give us a ride. There was the rich businessman who was convinced that Estonian women were the most beautiful in the world (“Don’t get married before you go to Estonia”), the ex-biker who had been born in a meth lab and was headed to jail until he found Jesus, the ex-biker steel worker slash minister to the inmates of Pelican Bay Prison who had rescued a jumper on top of the Sacramento Bridge Tower while inebriated, the older lady with beautiful crystal blue eyes and the most well-informed nine year old son I’ve ever met (“That store was established in 1928 after a fire, and traded hands five years ago. You guys going to Leggett? The best pizza place in the world is in Leggett.” Points to random surfer on the side of the road, “That’s Geoffrey. He’s out early”), the Mexican with an immense Latin lover’s curl and an amazing truck that was “just for him” who had driven straight from Sonoma to Guadalajara, the pot-head sound technicians coming back from a Hells Angels’ gathering in Norcal where one of their friends had gotten beaten up, the guy who had started a children’s home with his wife before she cheated on him with his best friend, the beautiful Billy with six-shooters strapped to her thighs, the German graduate physics student who couldn’t pronounce “Mendocino” to save his life but was applying for a fellowship at UC Berkeley, and last but assuredly not the least, Crazy McCrazerson.

Crazy McCrazerson picked us up deep in the Coast Range of California the day after out quicksand adventure. When I got in the car the first thing he said was, “You boys got money for gas?” I’m not sure he understood the whole hitchhiking deal. Danny got in the front seat, we informed him that we had $14 between us, which he was more than welcome to, then McC took off speeding in his enormous new truck. From the back seat I noticed that he 1) had no front teeth – upper or lower, and 2) he was wearing ALL DENIM (known in the industry as a Canadian tuxedo). There was a moment of calm. Then:

McC – You boys ever head of Lake Baikal?

-pause-

Me – You mean the lake in Russia?

McC – Yep. Got me some property up there.

Me – Do you speak Russian?

McC – Nope. Don’t need to. It’s a free country there now.

Danny – How’d you manage to get a place up there?

McC – Used to be a spy. Not a bad profession, if you don’t mind gettin’ all your teeth knocked out, gettin’ shot in the back, all the bones in your foot broken with a hammer, gettin’ your scrotum torn off by another man’s teeth. Ha! Heh, heh, not bad.

Danny – Whoa.

McC – Yep. Lake Baikal. Biggest lake in the world. Deepest, too. Call it the uncrossable lake. Know why?

Me – Why?

McC – ‘Cause it can’t be crossed. Can’t swim across it, can’t cross it in a boat, can’t put a bridge over it. Hell, it’s got it’s own micro-climate. Know why boats can’t cross it? Boat will be going across, and giant carbon dioxide bubbles seep up from the bottom, overturn the boat. Never heard from again.

-silence-

McC – Know what’s strange? Feels like we’re going uphill, right (we are clearly driving up an incline)? But we’re not. We’re going downhill. See that river down there (points to the Trinity River, which flows next to the road, and on a side note in the dry summer season is one of the most unique and striking rivers I have ever seen)? Water’s going the wrong way. It’s an optical illusion.

Danny – Whoa. That’s crazy.

McC – Yep. You boys don’t mind listening to some music, do you?

Me and Danny (enthusiastically) – No, not at all! Go ahead.

Cue way strange 80’s synth music set to rolling, golden, dry CA redwood forest and turquoise rapids. I could have felt how uncomfortable Danny was several football fields away.

Me – What band is this?

McC – This is Simon Friedman. 28 years old, from Seattle. He sat down one night and recorded this whole album. Course that was ten years ago.

McC asks me if there is an open water bottle in the back seat. I give it to him, and instead of taking a drink, he proceeds to remove the cap and SPRAY THE GAS PEDAL AND BREAKS with water. Of course, at this point he could have started gnawing his arm off with his remaining teeth and I wouldn’t have been surprised. Terrified, yes. Surprised, no. He also liked to put his cigarettes out underneath his seat.

As we went up the mountains McC would periodically pull over to “decompress” his ears. This led to lots of awkward conversations on the edges of cliffs. “Hey, come look at this view,” McC would say, standing on a ridge above a 400 ft. drop into a valley. Danny and I would look at each other, look at the cliff, and then reluctantly join McC.

McC – You boys scared? Am I scaring you? Heh. Me, I don’t care if I live or die. I’ve got degenerative bone cancer. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to die tomorrow. Hell, I’ve got 23 grandkids.

-silence-

Danny – You’ve got a really nice car.

McC – Yep, brand new. It’s a good thing, too. Get into an accident, won’t explode.

Danny – What do you mean?

McC – New cars, they’re built different. They don’t explode. Not anymore. They implode. More powerful than a nuclear explosion. Bet you didn’t know that you could turn a Pepsi can into a nuclear bomb, did you? Heh.

McC – You boys got Indian blood in you?

Danny – A little, yeah.

Me – A tiny bit.

McC – Yeah, you boys look a little Indian. Hell, how come you’re hitchhiking? How come you don’t get your check from the government?

Me – I don’t think I qualify.

McC – Sure you do.

Danny – How much do you get?

McC – Oh, not much. ‘Bout 100,000 a year. Enough to keep me in cars.

McC – You see this valley? It was made by a tsunami. Swept in and carved it out. The Indians, they won’t cross it. If you try, you’ll die. Die of thirst, or a bear or rock will get you. Hell, a falling pine cone can start an avalanche. Same thing happened back in ’67. Wave came over the hills, lifted up a Spanish galleon, dropped it right here in these mountains. All these mining companies around here? They ain’t mining. They’re looking for gold all right, just not in the ground. They’re looking for those galleons.

McC – You know redwoods are the hardest hardwood in North America? They’re the most radioactive, too. They suck heavy metals from the ground, that’s why they only grow in areas where there’s gold. That’s why I got me a house made of solid redwood. You know what happens when you stick your head in a knot of redwood?

Me – What?

McC – You can breath! There’s air in there. You know what happens when you throw grenades into a redwood house?

Danny (finally getting a little uppity) – What, the grenades break.

McC – Nope. Nothing. Redwood’s that strong.

Even though he said he was going all the way to Seattle (“Yep, I’m gonna be eatin’ salmon in the Space Needle come nightfall”), Danny and I got out at Redding because we needed some time to sweep together our shattered nerves and glue them back together. To see how well that turned out just read my previous post.

Of course, because this trip was 2 ½ hours long, I’m leaving out a lot of amazingly ridiculous monologuing from McC. Like how the water on the top of Mount Shasta is always boiling, always 76 degrees, and how he jumped in to prove he could swim it. Or how Danny and I could bike up Mount Everest because we were hiking in California. Or how his son uprooted a tree with his bare hands because they got into an argument, or how he likes to go boulder dancing. What’s that, I hear you ask? What’s boulder dancing? Why, it’s when you stand on a boulder at the top of a mountain, start a rockslide, and ride the boulder down the whole way because that’s how you live your life – on the edge.