In California in the early spring
there are pale yellow mornings
when the mist burns slowly into day.
The air stings
like autumn, clarifies
like pain.

-Robert Haas

March 28th-29th
Saturday the 27th we slept outside a truck stop somewhere in El Monte, near the Pomona Freeway and I-605.

Early Sunday morning, the fourth day of our hitch-hike to the oilfields of New Mexico, we caught a ride going south on I-605. The driver was a young Mexican man named Antonio who was driving south in a small pickup full of fruit. He was very friendly, but didn’t speak more than a few words of English. He understood we were headed south as well. He let us off in Anaheim, where we parked ourselves near an on-ramp to I-5. We rode all the way to San Diego with a flashy Mexican-radio DJ who lived in California and worked in Tijuana. He took us to where I-805 meets the 8 going east.

Almost every driver who gave us a ride talked with us, asked about our destination and told us about themselves. Not the next one. He zipped to a sudden stop in his sports car, picked us up and sped down the highway. He was nervous, and didn’t talk to us or even look at us. I thought he must be running drugs or something like that. Then, only minutes later, just as abruptly as he had stopped for us, he pulled over and let us off. We we were a little to the east of San Diego, into some hills, apparently not near anything.

A white Toyota pickup pulled over with a man in his 50s and two younger men. I don’t believe in accidental meetings; I do believe in divine appointments. This is one of the reasons why.

The older man, clearly in charge, said they lived nearby. And as the day was growing long, he could offer a place to stay for the night. We hopped in the back of the pickup and rode a few miles further to the town of Descanso, two miles north of the freeway. To the rectory of a Catholic church.

The man was a priest, a well-known and well-loved one, as I came to learn. His name was Father Ben Carrier, pastor of Our Lady of Light Church, and helping the poor, including hapless drifters like us, was part of his way of life.

“After he became pastor of Our Lady of Light the rectory was never without strangers passing through or staying on for weeks or even months. They included drug users, ex-addicts, alcoholics, felons on parole or just nomads roaming the roads, homeless, purposeless, twentieth century gypsies. “Lost children,” he called them.

– Enid Lanyon*

He treated us with same kindness and respect he became legendary for among transients up and down the highways a hundred miles north and east – so he never made us feel like ‘lost children,’ even thought that’s just what we were.

Father Ben told us he had come to California in the late 1950s, with one-quarter of a lung and six months to live. Here we was, over twenty years later, full of life and receiving every day as gift. He suffered from TB and brochiectesis. Ben was a raconteur, and regaled us with stories. He made us dinner, and let us sleep on a couple of couches in the living room and shower in the morning.Then he made us breakfast.

Over breakfast he looked at me and said, “What did you say your last name is?”

“Dehner.”

“Do you know if you have a relative in San Diego?”

Suddenly I recalled Dad’s next oldest sibling, my Aunt Ada, a Carmelite nun.

“Yes, I have an aunt – ”

“Ada Dehner?”

“Yes! Sister Ada. But I’ve never met her. She’s been cloistered for forty years or something.”

“In the the Carmelite Monastery. Ada and I have been the dearest of friends for twenty years. I’m her spiritual adviser.”

“Wow. Tell me about her; we’ve never met.”

“Well, you’re going to meet her today. I’ll take you to there to meet her, if you like.”

Just a wild coincidence, right? But it was hard for me to see it that way. Something that day turned in my mind, especially when we entered the reception room and this beautiful sister, who I immediately recognized as a Dehner, appeared on the other side of the grille – something about how every time I turned around for the last year, I was bumping into God and his people, someone wanted to tell me about Jesus, or their religion, or their salvation. Or they didn’t mean to tell me anything at all – I just  knew what they were, or saw it. Back in Seattle, at work alone: Cliff the African-American kung-fu Christian; freshman Huskies center Barney Giles and KT the high school senior, friends and Christians; the Mormon couple and the Scientology Squad… And there had been the Christian peaceniks in Missoula… The Christians at the Poverello center, and the Children of God. I never even meant to go to San Diego, never even thought of my aunt the nun – until that moment. And now I have been picked up by my aunt’s best friend the priest and he’s bringing me to her monastery.

Ada was warm and radiant, and I instantly felt her love. She talked to me as if she already knew me, something so characteristic of my dad’s family. She told me childhood stories about my dad he had never told (she was ten years older), and about the grandparents I never knew. What an unexpected and profound gift. It just came out of nowhere. Or did it? It began to make me wonder.

That day Ben drove us east into the desert, and dropped us in El Centro, where we failed to get a ride, and ended up wandering around until late looking for a place to sleep.

March 30th – 31st

If you don’t die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.

-Anne Lamott

We thought we would take I-8 and connect with I-10 in central Arizona, which would take us as far as Las Cruces, NM. After that would be on state routes to Hobbs. But we ended up getting a ride in the back of a speeding little pickup with a cooler full of beer (“Help yourself!”) that headed north at Gila Bend to Phoenix. I don’t remember why, but in Phoenix we decided to walk to Arizona State University in Tempe.  It was about eight miles. It took us three hours. We must have figured we could find a place on campus to crash.

Near some dorms we encountered a group of students who invited us up to their room. They were fascinated by us: real live hitchhikers. By this time, hitchhiking as a youthful fad had already become a thing of the past. It was not as common to see kids our age doing it for fun or adventure. And it was harder to get a ride, because a lot of people were afraid to.

The students gave us some food, asked about our trip and told us we could sleep in a study lounge. In the morning a couple of them got us some food on their meal cards. We ate with them in the cafeteria. We thanked them and left, walking to I-10 to head south again.

From there we hitched to Tucson. We were dropped at an off-ramp at the outskirts, and as we approached a man at a service station to ask some directions, he yelled at us, jabbing his finger at the air.

“You just turn your asses right the hell around beat it back out of town. We don’t have any use for your types here!”

Without a word, we looked at each other and did just as we were told.

Before long we had a ride, and and made it as far as Benson. Suddenly it was harder to get a ride. We slept near the road that night. I was always thinking about rattlesnakes and scorpions, both of which I had encountered in central Oregon. To those I could now add my worry of waking up with hypothermia, though it wasn’t actually that cold at night. Finally we got a ride going east from Benson. When they dropped us off, one of my fears was realized: We were left on a remote stretch of the road in the desert. Instead of a hundred or more vehicles per hour, only a half-dozen or so passed by.

The temperature climbed toward 80 degrees. We sat on the edge of the highway, and the occupants of passing vehicles would honk, or roll down their window and yell, “Get a job!” One car slowed down, and then stopped. We hurriedly gathered up our books, packs, sleeping bags, and ran towards the car. And then it sped away, with hands and laughter flitting from the windows.

Time had begun to slow. Today and the days that followed grew long. Mark and I read and talked and slept. But we never brooked the subject of our last months in Seattle. I was reading a book I began there, a history of medieval Europe. It wasn’t exactly captivating, but I would have pored over insurance contracts at this point.

Waiting, waiting…for the next car.

A driver saw us from afar, far enough to decide to stop, not past us, but right where we sat. We jumped to our feet, but before we could approach, he bounced out and over to us. He greeted us cheerfully, and handed each of us a little book.

“Here’s something for you to read over while you’re waiting for a ride. God bless!” With that he returned to his car a drove away. Somewhat amazed and disappointed, we looked at our tiny books. The Gideons’ New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs.

The car disappeared down the highway.

“A ride would’ve been nice.”

“Yeah, we could’ve read in the car.”

Again, silence under the sun. Eventually we pried open our Gideons and read. I was looking for a verse, something I heard long ago, but couldn’t quite remember. I had tried to use it once in something I was writing, but I didn’t get it right. I didn’t know how to find it. Eventually I did, some months later.

This is what I was looking for, in Matthew 5:45. It didn’t say what I thought it said, but it was still good.

“…he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”

From Anotherbagmoretravel.wordpress.com

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*1995. Simply Benjamin. Nashville: Scythe Publications. P. 5