Sarah Rooney Designs

“Thumbs”

The first time I ever hitch hiked, I didn’t have anywhere to go. 

I paced up and down the shoulder of highway 40, trying not to look too aimless, or too murderous, or too delicate, trying to tell my elbow to raise and my right thumb to stick sturdily into the air, looking like the thumb of a girl who hitches, and who has a knife in her pocket. I had something figured about how if I was going to do this whole life thing right, at some point I was going to be hitching. I didn’t want to need to get there and find my elbow locked. I never wanted to be a girl who couldn’t move when she needed to.

It was a new knife, a new weight in my breast pocket. I didn’t like that, that I’d never used it. I shifted my pony tail from one shoulder to the other and thought it must be painfully apparent to anyone who took a look at me that I’d been standing in line at Ace Hardware an hour ago, fidgeting in my place behind sullen men buying drill bits and chicken wire. 

The woman at the register had been friendly, in a way I had learned how to recognize here. She was old, and her eyes never met mine. She almost chuckled when I put the knife on the belt, it was more like a cough. The chip reader chirped, and I asked her if she knew where I might be able to buy a book around here. I’d only moved here two months ago, and only with two suitcases. I was regretting that in all the space used up by winter gear, I hadn’t had room for anything to read. She tossed her eyes high and to the left, thinking about it earnestly, “A book?”, before telling me to check out the Safeway, “I know they’ve got some magazines and things there.” 

It took three tries to get my thumb all the way up, five to get it to stay up for more than a few seconds. It was ninety seconds before a teal sedan rolled to a stop a dozen yards ahead of me. 

*    *    *

The second time I ever hitch hiked, I wasn’t alone.

I’d picked up a boy named Francesco to come along with me. It’s funny how now I don’t remember how I met him, only that I did, and that I liked to watch him hand roll those skinny little cigarettes. The ones we’d smoke with the food trucks behind my hostel, walking along the stretches of pavement beyond the bus lines, cradled in the sand circling the fading fire. 

*    *    *

To reach the valley of WinterPark, you drive up Berthoud Pass. You heard a lot about it, in the ski instructor locker room – “I’m getting down to Denver tonight before this storm hits” “Jim’s not coming in today, pass is closed”, at your second job – “No milk today, so no lattes, the delivery truck couldn’t make it up the pass”. 

When I arrived in Fraser for the first time, the postage stamp town where the Winter Park Ski and Ride School had given me a room of employee housing, I had driven up through the night. I credit this for some of my initial disorientation, I didn’t understand just how far up we all had climbed, and how deep we had snaked our way into the mountains. Maybe if I had grasped through my windshield the pitch of the drop inches from my tires, I wouldn’t have been so surprised on my first morning when the sun sliced into my new bedroom, white and piercing, slamming through the gaps in the thick black-out curtains that hung crooked from their rod. Instead I had swum up into a sky inky black, and under the cover of a moonless night failed to notice the sun had become close enough to touch. 

The valley was divorced by the Rockies from any reality I had ever known, the pass a tenuous tie to the strange conglomeration of tiny figurines littering the landscape. Earnest mountain people, ski bums, tourists who stayed in the brick paved little village of t-shirt stores and ski-rental shops and two hotels.

That’s where Goody’s Cafe was, where I got a second job hawking “Wholesome Mountain Food” crepes and burgers, to all united by the call to shred as they stalked stiff and sore off the gondola when the lifts closed at four. My manager James was an alcoholic from North Carolina. He called the mountain his chiropractor, and broke his collarbone at least twice a year. He wore wife beaters under a peacoat, he was a political science major in college (like me!), he was trying to grow a goatee, and one time when I was in his apartment watching the line cooks snort lines off his kitchen table he said the N-Word 67 times. I was stoned and I was counting. I really appreciated his hands off management style. 

My favorite shifts were the mornings. I’d wake up at 5, and by 5:30 crawl up the icy hill to the bus stop, where I’d stand under the night sky and watch my breath, waiting for the tell tale throttle of the morning commuter bus crunching around the corner. There I could find my place as another half dreaming lump slouched against her seat. Once I’d gotten fired from ski and ride school, I was working mornings five days a week. Most days there were only two or three other people sliding together on our lurching bench. Some days there was a couple there. A dark haired woman and a translucent man leaning into one another. I’d half dream that I was sat between them. 

There was a lot to like about the mornings. I liked that I was the first one in, and got to start the fresh coffee alone. I liked that I had plenty of time to experiment with our latte flavors, and plenty of time to drink way too much caffeine. I liked that the liftees would come in before their shifts started, and that I got to give them free coffee and day-old cinnamon buns. I liked that they told me about the conditions on their runs, and that when I got off at noon and found myself in their lift lines they’d give me a fist bump, or let me cut ahead. I liked that I got to touch everyone’s excitement as I helped fuel the morning rush for a day on the mountain. I liked the way the sunlight would stream through the cooks window around 8:30 and dance through the steam rising off the grill. 

I had come to think of the valley as something of a snow globe. It was the coldest place I’d ever lived, and the brightest. The air was crisp and the sky balanced on the tips of the peaks surrounding us. Standing in the parking lot of the grocery store would have you holding your breath at the majesty of the snow caps dusted in the pink of a setting sun. It was both a pocket of wilderness in the Rockies, and a company town. It was the wildest place I had ever been, and the place with the greatest sense of community. There was no one in Winter Park by accident, everyone here had run here. Most were sprinting open armed towards the independence of open mountain, more were running from their pasts on lower grounds. All our lives moved to the rhythm of the next storm. It was the most familiar I’d ever felt with the unknown. It was this sense of an altered reality that let the words of the people like the firefighters soak in properly.

*    *    *

 It was on the second day that I knew Francesco that we decided to go find a stretch of island to hang our hammocks for the next night. One where the surf would break just right. On the morning of the third day I was mulling over that decision, wondering if agreeing to sleep outdoors with a strange man on a strange island was more suicidal than free spirited.  I consulted my new bunkmate. Her name was Sarah. She had short blonde hair, and open blue eyes, and the voice of a boy but the laugh of a little girl. We had biked together to the farmers market on the other side of Honolulu on rentable bikes, half racing each other up the winding hills.    

We were sitting on a curb, devouring a cup of mango between us with toothpicks, waiting for our number to be called from the sandwich bodega.

“Do you think he’s expecting me to sleep with him, because we’re, you know, sleeping together?”

“Oh maybe. Are you guys sharing a hammock, or do you have your own?”  

*    *    *

One of the great things about my snow globe was the free bus service. They called it “The Lift ” and all the stops had retired ski lift chairs for benches. They brought the liftees and the housekeepers and the ski instructors to work, and the tourists and their skis and boards back to the condos they rented. It brought me to and from work everyday, and home from the bars. I think as fondly of the time I spent circling the valley on those buses as I do the time I spent perched on chairlifts gliding with the pine needles. I was happy to be hung in the space between runs and between days. 

Maybe sixty percent of the time I was on the bus I found some friend there to chat up, also trekking to the slopes. Maybe forty percent of the time I was on the bus I was stoned.

 I wasn’t stoned now. Sitting with my heels dug in the ground and my toes to the sky I was starting to regret that. I had walked about a mile through steep icy streets to get to a bus stop I’d never been to before. I was on my way to the fire station a town over to get a covid test. My new roommate had been randomly tested at her guest services job and come up positive. 

Even though it was two p.m. and I was nineteen, I walked into a bar down the street. I was wearing my ski instructor jacket, this big obnoxious blue and yellow thing with about two dozen pockets. No other instructor really wore it 24/7 the way I did, but it was way warmer than my own coat. I wasn’t sure if that made me seem younger or older, but I was hoping confidence would carry me to a warm bar stool and some conversation. The bartender was young underneath her crow’s feet. I handed her my ID, which I’d found abandoned in a house I moved into a year ago. It said I was twenty-five with blue eyes and about four inches taller than I really am. I could tell she was deciding to let it slide when she asked “So what can I get for you?” I ordered a rum and coke and then made it a double.

 There was an old ski bum at the end of the bar, two or three seats down from me. He and I got to chatting, about vietnam and the times he spent living in his van in the parking lot of some ski resort in Utah in his twenties. I told him how I moved across the country to be here because I couldn’t take another semester of online classes. How I had figured something about not wanting to be the type to get stuck. He said it was a good shake that I was making good use of this weird time, and I let him know that he’s lucky he’ll be dead soon. 

After another rum and coke (a single this time, tall) and a generous tip, it was time to catch my bus. Stepping out onto main street gave the effect of stepping into the sky. White sunlight glared off the low white roofs and white curbs of the snowy street, and bounced off the peaks on all sides as if off the tanning mirrors held to a vain starlet’s face. I climbed onto the bus and sat at a window seat in the back.

The driver dropped me off with no fire station in sight. I ambled, eventually climbing a gentle hill to find a line of people waiting on the sidewalk. Parents and children, other resort workers in their red liftee jackets. I saw a cook from my work go- up to the desk and tell the EMTs there that her name was Tracy. I only knew her by Amanda. When it was my turn I filled out my information, writing down a fake contact phone number before stepping aside to wait.

 Any buzz left from the rum fizzled away as the man sitting at the folding table slid the advisory sheet across the white plastic to me. 

I slumped dejected down into one of the folding chairs bordering the room. I felt fine. I was weighing the odds I could convince them to let me take another test to really be sure I had it. It was when I stood to slip back into the dwindling line that the EMT who tested me asked what the hell I was still doing here, not unkindly. 

“My bus doesn’t come til six”, another two hours. 

“Where are you headed?”

“Back to WinterPark”

“We’re wrapping up here soon, we can give you a ride”. He motioned between himself and the EMT standing at the table across from him, a red-head with a crooked nose. 

“I tested positive, you know. Like, I have covid.” 

“Pshah, we’ve got antibodies”

So half an hour later I found myself climbing into the passenger seat of their truck. It wasn’t a firetruck, but it was red. Riding with strangers did not feel particularly smart. But I reasoned that they were firefighters. The red head, his name was Sean, was driving. Without his mask on I could see his mouth hung sweetly in a smile too big for his face. I was mapping the constellations in the freckles on his neck while Dillon leaned forward over the center console from the backseat, his arm slung around the back of my headrest.  We were driving into a sky that was just starting to consider setting, and from the height of the Ford the windshield seemed to hold the world. Dillon was telling some story about the time new uniform issued suspenders left the whole crew’s pants sagging, Sean was chortling into the rearview and arguing over who it was that actually managed to get the dime into the Chief’s ass crack. The truck never veered as we zoomed along the winding highway. 

I was asking about what it was like to fight actual forest fires, and they were telling me about how they got out here. They told me they’ve been buddies since they were 17 living in Montana. They told me how ironic it was that they were firefighters, considering how much they hated the government. They commiserated with me about the hardships of a first season out here. They told me, too, about the year they spent hitchhiking across America. 

“It’s a sick way to travel, everyone should do it, people are kinder than we think.” I rolled my eyes, just a little bit. This was probably the fourth time in two months that I’d received similarly tone-deaf advice from some man to a teenaged girl about how solo traveling or living in your van was actually, like, totally way safer than people think.

 “Hah, that might be easy for you to say.”

 “I mean it, people hitchhike out here all the time. Chicks too,” Dillon added pointedly.

“Really?” I said, “I feel like I don’t ever see hitchhikers around here”

 “Right! That’s because they get picked up so fucking quick, you wouldn’t see em!”

“Of course,” Sean added “It’s best when you do it with someone else”

“For safety?”

“Sure, yeah, but for companionship mostly”

“The road is a lonely place,” Dillon conceded.

I was sad to see my apartment complex roll into view half an hour later. I thanked them again for the ride, and stalked up the icy concrete steps to my apartment to isolate, with a lot to think about. 

*    *    *

We spent two hours on the buses, changing lines three times. Francesco brought a book to read, joked that he wasn’t sure if I’d be boring. It stayed tucked in his bag at our feet as he told me about his home in Italy, as we talked about what traveling meant for our relationships with our parents, what it meant for what we wanted out of life. 

 When we climbed off at our last stop, giggling out our Mahalo’s to the driver, we were a forty minute walk from the nude beach we’d heard word of. Most places worth getting to aren’t on the bus lines. We set out walking with our bags slung over our shoulders, his surfboard tucked under his arm. He rolled cigarette after cigarette for us. Here and there we’d come upon a rusted out car, wheels gone, vine growing into the hood. Dusk was approaching. We needed to get there before dark or we might never get there. 

*    *    *

I spent ten days sipping raspberry tea and going on long walks in the woods behind my apartment. I’d spend three or four hours pacing under towering pine trees, climbing steep inclines and descending into valleys, rolling up the sleeves of my coat, trying to soak in some vitamin D. On one of my walks, I passed a house being built. Men were hammering away on the roof, and as I walked by a german shepherd took notice of me. It followed me for miles down the road. I wasn’t sure if she felt I had intruded on her territory, and I worked to keep my distance. I was happy for the company.

My apartment felt smaller each day. I scribbled incessantly in my sketchbook, I read the backs of my shampoo bottles and my soup cans. I cleaned my bathroom, sprayed my mirror with windex and watched it dry completely in a white film over my reflection. Really it wasn’t my bathroom, or my apartment. When I lost the ski-instructing gig, I’d lost my housing too. I had hidden my two suitcases when they came for the move out inspection, and had been squatting ever since. Under a ceiling inching closer to my nose each night, I dreamed up grand escapes. Sitting on the roof outside my bedroom window I watched the sky and imagined I could make out the dome of my snowglobe, wondered if my skull was hard enough to crack its frosted surface should I jump high enough, wondered if I’d land among the stars or just down to Denver. 

My first day out of quarantine, I’d thought about it enough. My snowglobe didn’t feel whimsical anymore, it felt suffocating. I was certain if I didn’t move my body my joints would atrophy stiff, cementing me into place here as another figurine in the landscape, bundled against the cold. I stuffed one of my dozen pockets with tip cash and some cliff bars, and then there was the matter of the knife. I’d ride down U.S. 40 to U.S. 60., stay in Denver for the night – be back in time for my first shift back at Goody’s in two days.

It was on the bus ride home from the hardware store that James texted me, asking me if I could please come in tomorrow morning. Charlotte had just tested positive.

 I didn’t have enough time to get to Denver and back anymore. 

I didn’t have the heart to let that stop me from exercising my muscles. 

I pulled the yellow overhead wire to signal the Lift to let me off at the next stop, the parking lot of the dive bar where I’d watched a bar fight between a line cook and one of my fellow baristas a few weekends ago. I found a nice wide section of shoulder. There I stuck out my first lone thumb.

I pulled open the passenger side door of the sedan. A preschool teacher with her hair piled into a bun sat in the driver’s seat. “Where ya headed?”

“West”, I said, sliding into the seat. The opposite direction of the pass that would snake me down to Denver. 

 An hour and a half and three rides later, I stepped out of a black SUV in front of the Granby Public Library. I wandered inside, eager for something to read besides the sodium content of Campbell’s soup.

Sitting at my gate, I tucked my bag between my legs. I didn’t have any suitcases this time, just the one backpack. Tank tops and swim suits took considerably less space than sweaters and snow pants. 

It had been a month since I’d let Ronnie give me a hickey on my right tit while Finding BigFoot played on his roommates T.V. The season was ending, and my neighbors were going to Puerto Rico. One of my roommates had already driven off to Utah in her boyfriend’s van. The other was moving to Korea to teach English. Ronnie was going to be a white water rafting guide for the season. 

It had been two weeks since Ronnie had driven me and my two suitcases to the greyhound station, and kissed me at my stop. The kiss came in quick, and caught me by surprise. I was a little bit proud of him. It had taken an hour for him to build up the courage the first time, and our teeth didn’t clack together even a little bit this time. He asked if we’d ever see each other again, and I said “Maybe in another life”. 

I sat down at the window, across the aisle from a man in an orange beanie. 

“That your boyfriend?”

I made a noise close to a guffaw. 

“Not anymore I guess,” The man laughed.

As the greyhound careened down the pass, I soaked in the views of a place I knew I’d likely never see again. I didn’t have a plan for the summer. I cracked open my beaten copy of “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life”, the one I’d checked out from the Granby Library and never gotten around to returning. I get car sick when I read on the road, but to distract from my escape from a world I hadn’t meant to find, I was willing to risk it. As we rumbled towards Denver and my flight home, I dove into the world of a surf bum’s memoir.

It had been a week since I sat in my childhood bedroom for the first time in months, all pink and purple, and reached out to search for any tethers. Finding none – no job, no boyfriend, a bank account padded by a few months of being home-free, I bought my ticket. Honolulu. One way.

*    *    

We came upon a busier road and, grinning toothily at each other, each threw a thumb into the air. We waved at and twirled for the cars, throwing shakas in acknowledgement to the ones that passed us. In ten minutes we were walking towards the brake lights of a white pickup truck, hand in hand.