Free The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America by Mike McIntyre Page B

inside is filled with dirt from Tim’s days at the Nevada mine, and my head and feet touch the corners when I lie down—but it’s home.
    I tear off a hunk of Edie’s homemade bread and break out the bag of trail mix Linda bought me back in northern California. I lie on my back and gaze at the stars through the mesh top of the tent. When I roll over to go to sleep, a coyote in the desert bids me good night.

    In the morning, I shampoo my hair and shave in the sink of the bathroom in the courthouse. When I’m home, I shave only three times a week, due to a combination of sensitive skin and general laziness. But on this trip, I try to shave daily, so as to put my best face forward to would-be benefactors. My strategy works this day. The fellow who stops for me says he never gives strangers rides, but I look different.
    “I think people still respond to decency,” he says. “I think that’s what you struck in me.”
    Don, a local hay grower, is driving 50 miles east to Mountain Home to get a tire fixed. That will put me at Interstate 84, but I see on my map there’s a two-laner that heads out from there across the gut of Idaho.
    Don asks where I’m from, and lets me know how poorly folks from my home state are regarded in these parts. A Californian is lower than a snake’s belly. The very term “Californian” is synonymous with that local swear word “environmentalist.” There is mounting resentment against Californians who cash out and invade the intermountain states, bringing with them such twisted liberal notions as conservation and imposing them on the natives. Most recently, irrigation in the area was suspended—threatening to bankrupt many a farmer—while environmentalists fought for the rights of a new species of snail discovered in a reservoir.
    “It’s gettin’ to be where a guy who wants to live off the land and raise a family can’t do it anymore,” Don says.
    As if on cue, we pass a spray-painted plea on the blacktop: “Don’t Californicate Idaho!”
    Don doesn’t hold my birthplace against me. He even offers me the can of soda resting on the seat.
    “But what are you going to drink?” I say.
    “Oh, I’ll be by a Pepsi machine before you will,” he laughs.
    He stops at a truck stop in Mountain Home to let me out. Before he drives off, he says, “You know, these days people all think we’re masters of our own destiny. I couldn’t go out and do what you’re doing if I thought like that. I hope you know you couldn’t do what you’re doing unless there’s someone looking over you.”
    I wish I shared Don’s blind faith. Life would be simpler. But in a way he’s right. While I worry about dying—and even conjure grisly scenarios involving my demise on the Road to Cape Fear—I simultaneously believe that on this journey I’m immune to death. Perhaps it’s no more than a mental trick that allows me to hop into cars with total strangers. Or maybe it’s proof positive that I’m not an atheist.
    The next car that comes along picks me up. Casey, a recent college graduate, buys me a hot dog at a convenience store, but he isn’t much for conversation. It’s a silent 200-mile shot across the state to Idaho Falls. We blow by the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Arco, the first nuclear-powered city in the U.S. About all Casey has to say is that the Mormon Church is a cult. Like Utah, southern Idaho has a heavy Mormon population. Casey says you’re either with them or against them. So when we reach Idaho Falls, I’m surprised when he drops me in the parking lot of the Mormon temple.
    Everyone in my girlfriend Anne’s immediate family is a practicing Mormon, except for Anne. As long as I’m here, I figure I’ll have my picture snapped in front of the temple and give it to Anne’s mom when I get home. A couple of women volunteers from the visitors center see me standing in front of the temple with a camera, and they come outside. They’re both wearing dresses that almost