Monday was a spectacular day. Some of my favorite days on the road seem to be the ones when I’m actually on the road. These times are always full of constant activity where each minute is almost inevitably one of uncertainty and, therefore, excitement. A great deal of these feelings indubitably come from seeing new and unfamiliar places but most can be found exclusively through the joys of hitchhiking.
I began this particular travel day by saying goodbye to the inhabitants of my Wwoofing homestay in Rangiora. Paul and Raylene were great hosts for the week that I was there on their hipericum flower farm. It was also great to meet the other Wwoofers. Miho from Japan had been there for almost two months, Jess, a fun Jersey Girl who has been one of the few people I can actually find to play card games and Connect Four with me, and lastly Wayne and Vivi; a nice Irish couple that arrived, sadly, only the night before I left).
Raylene dropped me off just after 10am on the motorway surrounding Christchurch in a spot I wasn’t quite sure about since it was so close to the city. My best rides usually come when I’m clearly outside of town with a look of desperation about me. These drivers seem to realize they are my only chance of getting anywhere, which is just the look I try and convey. The Pity Factor is my bread and butter.
After almost two hours (and a nice enough minced meat and cheese pie from the corner shop) I finally managed to be someone’s passenger. The woman who responded to my sign of “EVERY Km HELPS!” (“Km” is the abbreviated form of kilometer for my American or otherwise non-metric readers) took me, fittingly, less than 10 km down the road. Interestingly enough this proved to be more than enough time to fill me in on the sordid details of her impending and apparently soon to be quite messy divorce from her “filthy, cheating bastard” of a husband. She was, in fact, on her way to her $200/hour divorce attorney’s office when she took a momentary break from her festering rage to stop and pick me up.
This woman (let’s call her “Marcia” since I never did learn her actual name) was from the German part of Switzerland but was half Italian. This is the half that, judging from several interesting experiences with a few fiery women in Italy and, hence, one I don’t feel wrong in presuming, attributed largely to the brewing fury that I was witnessing after knowing Marcia for less than ten minutes. She took great pleasure in assuring me her husband was quite wealthy as a result of their thriving tourism biz and would pay dearly.
Suddenly Marcia quite noticeably switched gears. She stopped raving about the hatred directed at her soon to be ex-husband and took on a tone of less rage yet still full of unrequited intensity. Just days earlier, Marcia explained, she uncharacteristically stopped to pick up an injured cat from the roadside (which she took to the vet) and “now a strange man.” By the way she let this exclamation hang in the air I had a hard time discerning if it was stated matter-of-factly or if in her newly thrust upon freedom she was entertaining the thought of doing something with this “strange man” that you only read about in the Penthouse Forum. She had, after all, commented on the string of connecting events by querying “first a cat, then a strange man – what next?”
I’m not going to say that this statement absolutely implied anything at all more than just thinking out loud on her part. Likewise I’m not saying I would have done anything Forum-worthy with this strange woman either but I was definitely interested, in much more of a who-is-this-crazy-woman-and-what-is-going-to-come-out-her-mouth-next, what exactly she would say next. But judging by the gap in her otherwise never ending narrative it appeared to be my turn to speak. In my obviously bounded short-term wit I only managed the feeble reply of "yeah, you never know what could happen."
I never would find out what would be next. The 10km was up and it was time for me to look for another ride. I could only imagine what else I would have learned about this firey woman hell-bent on revenge if the drive with her had lasted longer than 10 interesting minutes.
Posted March 17, 2005 02:43 AM @ (GMT - 6)
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Hey Jim! Just wanted to tell you that I miss you. Glad your having so much fun. Wish I were out traveling with you. Hope to see you soon. Love you.
-your sis