10/30- Homecoming

Sometime mid-morning Don and I pulled into Binghamton and it was a real goodbye this time. I couldn't believe I'd just spent three days and four nights on a ride that proved to be incredible in many ways having ridden from the middle of Nebraska to four hours from my Dad's door in upstate New York. It was now Friday and his birthday was the next day, and I was within spitting distance. Once again, I had to look back over the course of events and realize all I needed to do was just trust that everything would work out and follow my gut, and it would.

Don bought me a coffee then slipped me $5 saying I'd have to eat again before I got home. I wished him well on his endeavors that he had coming up and we told each other we'd stay in touch via email. I then sat down with my coffee in front of the truck stop and he went off to drop off his load. I was there maybe half an hour, and hadn't even finished my coffee, before Dave came by.

Dave had just come for a coffee, I think, and when he passed me going back to his car and found out I was looking to get east, he said he'd give me a ride 50 miles when he got back from the junkyard. I offered to help there and he accepted. I hadn't been to a scrapyard in decades. Probably not since I was 8 or 9 was I going through old cars watching my Dad pick out parts for his beat up old green Toyota. It was nice spending a while pulling out starters and just wandering around with tools.

From there we went back past the truck stop and hit NY-17 East. Oneonta, the town I was born in, was right up the highway north of Binghamton, and I later found out that down 17 was the road my folks would take to get into the city. Dave, as it turned out, had been an avid hitcher and had all sorts of stories about sleeping under bridges, cutting open palm trees down in Florida for some sort of fruit inside, and general survival skills along that line. He was interesting to listen to, but definitely had a bitterness about people and life in general from those days.

Eventually he dropped me off at a rest stop in Roscoe wishing me luck since he spent much of the ride telling me people in New York don't pick up hitch hikers. Pennsylvania, yes, definitely, but upstate New York was a different lot. The skies were grey again, and it was another rest stop like the one in Auburn; just a bathroom pit stop. I sat out front and broke out the crackers and peanut butter I'd been hauling around since Missouri. As I got close to finishing those up about forty five minutes later I noticed a big pink rig hauling what I figured to be trash pull in.

I didn't take too much notice because it definitely looked like a company truck, no cabin in the back or anything so I didn't even try hitching it. When the guy came out he looked over at me and asked where I was going. I told him I was shooting for Kingston to get to Mass, and he waved me over. I've never caught a ride with a company truck before.

Harold drove me the rest of the way down 17 with few words. The few things he did have to say were a little shocking that he was telling some kid who just jumped in his truck. Apparently two years earlier he'd had an incredibly bad year. He had a stroke, found out his 11 year old was being molested, and his wife left him. The rest was silence.

He dropped me across the Hudson in Fishkill, NY at a gas station and told me to wait there, he was going to get more garbage to haul, and he'd be back to pick me up and bring me to Albany in about two hours. I took him for his word and didn't even try to hitch those two hours. I was still processing a lot of what Don had said and trying to interpret the past two weeks as to what, on a whole, was going on around me. Again, this is where people say I take this all too seriously, but for me it does seem to all make sense.

Two hours later Harold pulled right over and I jumped in. Soon I was up in Albany at a truckstop well off the main road. Wendie had flown in to Springfield a day or two earlier and I had been in touch with her through texting as Harold drove me to Albany. She offered to come pick me up there, since its an hour from home, so when I got in I just hung out there waiting on my ride.

Eventually I moved over to the bus station, since its an easier found landmark in town. Dad was coming with her and he knew precisely where it was. In the end, it all did work out. The three of us had a good family visit for the hour ride home, and I had made it in time for the birthday gathering.