Hitching

    I can remember vividly every experience I've had hitchhiking because it only happened once.  I was with my husband so it was more like a blind double date.  In the passionate poverty days of our early marriage, we bought  an ancient, but reconditioned washer and dryer.  We were ecstatic.  We invited our poor, washerless friends over for dinner and laundry.  Unfortunately the washer malfunctioned. Fortunately, the place we bought it from would fix it.  Unfortunately, that place was in Missoula.  One of our other acquisitions that second year of our moneyless marriage was an ancient, unreconditioned pickup.  Reed and I were born in 1956, the Chevy was born in 1954.  I didn't distrust it merely because of its age, I was taught to respect my elders, but because you could see the pavement through the floorboards, it wandered all over the road if you managed to exceed 55 m.p.h. and it listed to starboard.  But it was a pickup and could hold the washer so we headed from Helena to Missoula.
     About 45 miles from Helena the truck started to die.  We pulled into a rest area so we could either give it cpr or pronounce it dead.  Actually it was the coil that was dead and apparently vehicles need them so we headed to the highway so we could hitchhike to a town and buy another one.  We were picked up by a couple in a car that I, with no mechanical ability, could diagnose as having no muffler.  The young woman up front turned around looked at my blond, bearded husband, then turned to me and shouted "YOU don't look like a hitchhiker."  Apparently I had "virgin hitchhiker" written all over me.
     It all turned out well.  We got the part, hitched a ride back to our truck with a Wyoming cowboy who had a Stetson rack built into the head liner of his pickup cab.  You've got to trust a guy like that.  The pickup ran, the washer got fixed, happy ending.  Similarly, we haven't picked up many hitchhikers but we have picked up a couple, memorable stranded motorists. 
     Returning from a trip to Billings a couple years ago I was reading the paper and Reed was looking at the road, which was fortunate because he was driving. The highway was slick with snow. Reed noticed tracks heading into the median, then noticed an SUV lying on its side. We turned around at the nearest "Authorized Use Only" access and stopped at the side of the road.  Reed climbed up onto the passenger side of the upturned car and saw a young woman sitting on the inside door.  He asked if she wanted to get out.  She did.  Being uninjured she climbed out, jumped to the ground and sat in our car to get warm.  Her jacket and belongings were still in her vertical vehicle so I gave her my coat. The accident had already been called in by other passers by so we waited together for the highway patrol.  When we learned Sarah was a student at the U of M in Missoula, we offered to take her there after her car was taken care of.  Missoula wasn't on our way home, but neither was it too much out of our way. There were many accidents that morning and we waited for the tow truck for over an hour when the patrolman finally sent us to a truck stop in town.  I talked to Sarah's tearful mother on the phone and promised to do for her what I would want someone else to do for my daughter in a similar situation.
     In the end Sarah decided to wait for the couple she had been visiting in Wyoming to pick her up and make repair arrangements for her car.  We left Sarah in the care of  the Town Pump cashier and a nice young man we met at the truck stop.  She e-mailed us after she got back to Missoula to arrange to return my coat but we never saw or heard from her.  It didn't bother me that I didn't get my jacket back because I had given it to her, she could do with it whatever she pleased.
     Our other road refugee was Sean.  We were on a little used shortcut near Helena, returning from a trip to Boise when we saw a van with the hood open at the side of the road. The driver was standing next to it, forlornly holding a pair of jumper cables.  We turned our Chevy around and Reed jumped his battery.  The van started but we noticed in our rearview mirror that it was going very slowly and finally died.  We jumped the van again and this time followed him to make sure it kept running.  We repeated the process a couple miles further down the road.  But the three strikes rule must have applied because it finally died and could not be restarted; we offered him a ride.  Sean was working in Helena but lived in Bigfork and had bought the van for his daughter.  Reed and Sean pushed the dead van further off the side of the road.  Sean grabbed his backpack and the gun he had bought for his son and locked the van. 
     Even in Montana it's a little odd to let a hitchhiker bring a rifle with him, but it was still in the box and he laid it on top of a rifle Reed had just bought in Boise. If he wanted to rob us he was the world's most inefficient thief, not many people give you three opportunities to get it right.  He dropped the rifle at a friend's unlocked, unoccupied home and we dropped him off at a casino to wait for a ride.  He thanked us.  We wouldn't have left anyone on that deserted stretch of road.
     I have a unique perspective on situations like this, helping stranded motorists or homeless boys: I would rather take a loss once in a while than live my whole life as if I already had.  Despite opening our vehicle and home to strangers, we have never been robbed or harmed.  It is hard to balance being good stewards of the blessings God has given us, with the tendency to guard them so closely that they are unavailable to bless others, to walk the line between safety and selfishness. For now, I choose to be willing to take a risk to make a difference.