Hitchhiking with tornados

This is a story of my youth, with strongly spiritual overtones and just a bit of humor. I posted it to my LiveJournal account to preserve it and make it available for reference and memory jogging. In rereading it well after I posted about it on the TANSTAAFL thread, it is clear that my clear memory of the story is not so clear. When I wrote the following, I was sure it was accurate, and I’m gonna stick with that story. ;)

At the end of my freshman year in college, I allowed myself to be recruited by the Western Publishing Co., very well known for its publishing of Bibles and related books, but less well known for its high quality (at least at the time, this was 1975) educational and reference books. It was this latter line that I was hired to sell, and door-to-door at that.

[Inevitable Editorial Comment #1: as you will see, it was not the usual brushes or vacuum cleaners sort of thing.]

We carpooled to a motel just outside Memphis soon after the end of the academic year. During the next 36 hours, we received a crash course in the Western philosophy of successful selling, a hurried but quality introduction to our products, and a very incomplete period of bonding with each other because we didn’t yet know what our “territory” assignments would be, just that we would be based in Oklahoma City.

The selling part was easy. It had two goals: give a good impression every time, to facilitate word-of-mouth; to cover as many homes as is humanly possible on foot in Oklahoma in the summer. It was a decidedly “soft” sell, with the strongly emphasized instruction that upon hearing anything that remotely resembled “I’m not interested”, we were to politely offer apologies for bothering them and be on our way to the next door in the same breath. This may seem counter-intuitive, but I not only agreed with the approach I thrived under it; for the first two weeks, I was on my way to a top-10 selling total.

The living part of it was not so easy. We were put up in the cheapest possible arrangement, which for me was an efficiency apt shared with two other men. We didn’t have to pay for it (there was an educational element to the experience, and while I never confirmed it I think the company got to write off the expense), but we got what we paid for: a place to shower, sleep, and be sheltered from the weather.

Our assignment was the town of Chickasha (chick-ah-shay), just about 45 miles southwest of Oklahoma City, and the location of the administrative offices for the NA reservation located near there. I got the town proper, being the only one of the three without a car, while the other two split the rest of the county in half.

[IEC #2: at this point I should inform the reader that I was just 19 at the time, and feeling very good about my newfound freedom to traipse about the continent, not knowing if I'd have any money to live on let alone take with me to the next semester.]

In the middle of the second week, I was tapped to be mentored, along with one of my roommates. We were to spend the day with two veterans in Altus, in the southwest corner of the state and home of a large Air Force base. Roomie (yes, I’ve forgotten his name long since) and I drove the 100 miles or so early that morning, and I spent a fairly typical selling day with a guy who was type-A and then some, literally running from door to door, leaping over low hedges and fences (but not before checking to make sure there were no dogs there).

We returned to his base, only to find that my roomie and only way back to Chickasha had a 103-degree fever, and wasn’t going anywhere for at least 36 hours. All I had with me was a towel and a toothbrush, not even a change of clothing, and at 4:00 in the afternoon I was faced with a dilemma: waste another day watching someone else make money, or find a way to get “home”. I was young and idealistic, and I headed for the road to hitch a ride.

I got a ride almost immediately as far as Lawton, the southern terminus of the north-south freeway that ran past Chickasha on the way to OKC. It’s now a part of I-44, which weirdly is an east-west (even numbers) route, but doesn’t actually run east-west until it gets north of OKC. (That’s for those of you following along on your road atlases.) But therein lay the problem: Lawton was almost exactly half-way, and sundown was fast approaching.

Anyone who has hitchhiked much knows that hitching at night is both more than a little dangerous, and not likely to succeed much.

[IEC #3: part of our training was an introduction to "Johnny Law", the local law enforcers we were likely to encounter. The stereotypical JL drives a midnight black Lincoln Town Car, unmarked, with more flashy gadgets than the bridge of the starship Enterprise, and at least two shotguns in racks where one usually finds the passenger seat. Our training was clear: under even the most unreasonable provocation, answer every question truthfully and politely, with no hint of cheek or sarcasm, and keep the regional manager's phone number at the hotel in OKC on our persons at all times.]

An old, unnumbered county road parallels the highway for most of its length, and after 30 minutes of no joy in Lawton I started walking. Distances between exits was not much, but that didn’t matter because I met my first JL almost immediately… and was disappointed to find that it was a young man (mid-20’s) with a friend along to keep him company. He was friendly, but he did search my towel roll, and then proceeded to give me a ride to the end of his patrol area, quite a distance towards my goal, to a village at the last intersection between the highway and the local road. He said my meager chances would be increased by the possibility of people traveling the local road, and I could run between the two. I thanked him sincerely, and when he disappeared around the bend I gave the highway one last fond look and started walking again.

The village consisted of about 20 houses set back a ways from the road, a gasoline/repair station, a “car wash” consisting of a corrugated iron walls and roof, a hose with a spray attachment, and a box to put money into… and a few roaches attracted to the residual moisture.

It was full dark at this point, going on towards 10:00 or so. I was hungry and thirsty, having totally spaced on any possibility of supplies before I found myself in the boondocks, and I approached the gas station with an increasing sense of hope: it had a soda vending machine right outside where I could get at it, and checking my pocket gladly revealed… about 30 cents, not quite enough for the 50-cent bottles. Damn. I hit the coin return handle in frustration, and the clink of coins greeted me, and my hands found in the coin return slot three whole quarters!!! I went from zero to two Cokes in 5 seconds, a new land speed record if I’m not mistaken.

I consumed the two bottles of Coke with a profound sense of satisfaction and peace, and happened to pay attention to the sky at that point. It was, for lack of a better word, apocalyptic: thickly overcast clouds, rolling from southwest to northeast (for those of you who don’t live in or know Tornado Alley: not a good sign). It was time to think about shelter and sleep until dawn, and the possibilities seemed very limited.

[IEC #4 and the last: just a month or two before, a triplet tornado rampaged through the Univ. of Oklahoma, pretty much razing about 1/4 of the entire campus. They were calling it the worst storm year so far, in recent memory.]

As I walked along the road from the gas station, a car pulled up from behind me, and there he was, the quintessential Johnny Law in all his glory, including a gut large enough for him to steer without using his hands. The passenger window rolled down with quiet automation, and the dulcet voice reached out to me:

“Whatcha doin’, boy?”

Careful to keep the towel roll in his sight, I leaned down and politely explained my plight, trying very hard to keep my teeth from chattering as I spoke, and trying even harder to use my normal mid-Atlantic accent — I am something of a lingual chameleon, able to sound like a native in a day or two, and having found this talent very useful in getting doors to open for me.

He looked me over for a few seconds. The flashy gadgets were bright enough that the dashboard lights were obscured. He cogitated, and would have spat twice if he were chewing tobacco, then said, “Get in, boy.”

I hastened to comply.

“I can’t have you hangin’ around here, boy,” he continued. “I wouldn’t want you botherin’ the ladies, should they look out their windahs while you walk by.” [IEC #4a: that's just about verbatim!!]

We drove in silence for a couple of minutes, the village about to disappear behind a curve in the road, when he hit his high beams and turned off into a void which became a dirt road. “I’m gonna do ya a favor, boy, and instead of runnin’ you in and wasting gas, I’m gonna let you sleep at this hear abandoned farm. You stay there until dawn, boy, and don’t even think of roamin’ back into town.”

“Okay, sir,” was all I trusted myself to say. He dropped me off in nearly total darkness (recall the overcast), and in a couple of seconds was gone back to the road. I looked around at the vague shapes of a long, low barn and a ramshackle house, and walked quickly back to the road. I waited there a couple more minutes to make sure JL wasn’t going to double back, and began walking again.

I began to notice flashes of reflected light on the cloud cover, and walked with my head turned back for a little while. I was rewarded with several excellent examples of lightning, and when I stopped and turned back to watch, I held up my extended arm with my thumb pointed upwards, and noted that the lightning was about the same thickness as my thumb at that distance from my eyes. My awe nearly overtook my trepidations, and I resumed walking in the hope that something would appear ahead to offer shelter.

Not long after, I came across an oil company office, a one room brick and concrete building with trucks and storage tanks behind it. It had two things to offer: an external light that would show that I wasn’t hiding or laying in wait (an important thing to have with Johnny Law around), and a three-foot overhang under which I might be protected from the worst of a hail storm or heavy rain. I glanced again to the southwest at a few more lightning strikes, noted one last time that the clouds were dragging the light show directly towards me, and drifted off.

It must have been around 4:00am when I awoke with a start, my neck and back stiff from the sort of seated position, my butt numb. I stood up to stretch, happening to face to the northeast, and was immediately rewarded with another lightning show. I held out my arm and thumb… yup, same lightning. I thought about distances, and guessed that the earlier storm was over Lawton, the current one was over Chickasha, and the whole shebang had passed right over me while I slept with nary a whimper.

The realization hit me like a revelation. I laughed, I cried, I shouted… and looked around sheepishly, expecting to see Johnny with a shotgun ready. But he wasn’t there, and I resumed my seat to doze and await the new dawn.

It was this experience which later inspired me to try an out-of-body technique I call dancing with the lightning. It’s a meditation that must (obviously) take place during a thunder storm, and it entails sending my inner awareness into the heart of the storm. It is exhilarating, energizing, but mostly it reminds me of that night in an unnamed town in Oklahoma, waiting for a tornado that simply didn’t notice my existence, finding that my place in the universe is so much more insignificant than I could imagine, and so much more important to experience from the inside out.