My First Trip South….Almost
For a year or so I had no permanent address and had been crashing on people’s couches. I had often been staying with an older couple and did some house sitting for them. I was fourteen at this point.
The woman I stayed with wasn’t happy at all. Being married with two children, she felt trapped. One day out of the blue she asked me if I wanted to hitchhike to Florida, I was on board for just about anything at that point. Bathing suit packed, we headed out and neither of us with a clue of how to get there.
We got a drive just outside the city at first and then a truck driver picked us up. We told him we were headed to Florida and he told us that he was going to Ontario. He said he had a buddy that we could catch a ride with the rest of the way.
Since we lived in New Brunswick, we should have crossed into the United States in Houlton, Maine. I guess geography wasn’t our strong suit.
I was exhausted and almost immediately crawled into the guys bunk, there were only two seats anyway so this worked out. It was late at night at this point and we were somewhere in Quebec. A long dark stretch of road ahead of us, no street lights, it was dark for miles.
I was still in the bunk when the truck pulled to the side of the road, he asked me to move to the front so he could lay down. He said he thought he was having a heart attack. My friend got on the CB radio trying to get help, nobody could speak English and neither of us could speak french. Finally, someone we reached contacted 911. The EMT’s attended to the man and determined he was indeed having a heart attack. Soon, he was in the ambulance and on his way to the hospital. Shortly after, we grabbed our bags and got out of the truck. We stood on the side of the road as all the commotion subsided. Here we were in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, and I remember saying “well this was a great idea”.
Another transport truck had stopped on the other side of the highway, a man walked across the street and said “are you girls going up or going down?”. I looked at my friend and we both said at the same time “we are going home”. Here we are in our second transport truck in one day, I crawled into the back bunk again. This had been quite an eventful twelve hours.
Just as it became daylight, the truck now pulled over and my friend asked me to get out of the bunk this time. We were about thirty minutes from home. I crawled out of the bunk, rubbing my eyes and not really understanding what was going on. The truck driver jumped into the bunk and then closed the curtains. I soon realized what was really going on back there. I sat in the front listening to them and music for three hours. Eventually, I yelled that I was going to hitch hike the rest of the way myself. They crawled out from behind the curtain and we headed home.
I was so mad at this point. The truck driver drove us to the trailer park where my companion lived with her family and where I crashed on the couch. Back “home”, alas. What a crazy night!
My next trip to Florida was on a plane.