Making room for strangers

by Theresa Kirchner (Germany)

Making a local connection USA

A truck veers off the road and stops ahead of us. As we approach, a tinted window is lowered in the back. We are trying to get to the Valley, I explain to the girl peering at us from inside the cabin. There is an exchange in Spanish with the driver, then the back door swings open. Relieved, we heave our packs onto the already loaded truck bed and move to the door where, one foot in the cabin, we come to a halt. There are three people sitting on the rear bench seat, and I am not sure which configuration the driver has in mind that would accommodate two more. On the far side, a sleeping boy is resting his head against the door. The girl scoops up a young child sitting beside her, puts it onto her lap and crowds towards the boy. It is a tight squeeze as I pile in next to her, and my partner crams in beside me and shuts the door. There has been so much snow the previous winter, such persistent snow, that this road was opened to traffic only a few days ago. It is the Fourth of July weekend. We have been trudging and tumbling through this thick, stubborn snowpack of the High Sierra mountains with heavy backpacks, wet boots and a voracious appetite, and had plunged down into the luscious green of Yosemite National Park the day before to stock up on food at a small store along this road. Unlike the road, however, the store is still closed. The nearest store is in Yosemite Valley; getting there takes about two hours by car and much longer on foot. Thus we were standing on the side of this road, clothes dirty, hair disheveled, extending our thumbs at the air-conditioned, spacious cars zooming by. They all had room, no one had stopped. Until now. As the truck picks up speed the mother in the passenger seat reaches back to offer us sugar cookies from a large box. The parents engage us in a conversation mediated by their daughter who expertly translates between their Spanish and our English. We are hiking to Canada, I answer. Enough time passes to mentally plot our current location against our destination before they ask about the start of our hike in - Mexico, my partner replies. ¿México? Her family is Mexican, the daughter explains, and her parents are keen to know where exactly in Mexico we started. My partner names the town, but it is small and they have never heard of it. It is just on the U.S. side of the border, he clarifies, and I think back to that first day, remember that construction of corrugated metal snaking through the rolling hills of chaparral, crowned with stacked rolls of barbed wire glistening in the sun, visible for hours as we walked north. ¿De México a Canadá? How long will that take, the daughter translates the next question. Probably 5 months, I reply. As she interprets for her father, I watch in the rear view mirror how another question is forming behind his furrowing eyebrows. ¿.....trabajo? I shake my head vehemently at this familiar word and reply in all the Spanish I can muster that no, we have no trabajo. There is amicable laughter from all sides, but mine comes with a twinge of shame in face of his incredulity towards the idea of taking five months off work. When we arrive at the large intersection that terminates our hitch, my partner and I emerge from the cab into the heat of the day and, once again, hoist our packs. Waving off the money we extend in exchange for the ride, the father offers us plump, shiny grapes from a cooler in the back and presses chilled cans of soda into our hands. As we stand by the side of the road with our sodas and watch the truck merge into traffic, I am left puzzling over the magnanimity of people who would pick up unkempt strangers off the side of the road and wedge them right in with their children in the backseat of their car.