be happy to reimburse you for the fuel cost, if you like.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Nah.” It was a quintessential New Yorker sound of dismissal. “I guess I thought maybe you’d just play nice, you know?”
I laughed. “I think we have differing ideas of what it means to play nice, in that case.” We pulled up to a stoplight, and I unbuckled. “I’ll get out here, thanks.” I reached into the back seat, hauled my backpack onto my lap over the center console, and pressed the unlock button on my door. Shoved the door open and stepped out, shouldering the backpack and carrying my purse in the other hand. I gave him a friendly smile, but not too friendly, and waved at him. “Bye, Donny, and thanks for the ride!”
He just gave me a frustrated sigh. “You can’t get out here. This ain’t a good spot, you know?”
I looked around—industrial outskirts, warehouses, manufacturing plants, a gas station. “I’ll be fine, but thanks for your concern. Have a nice day!”
I closed the door, put my other arm through the backpack strap, clipped my purse to the strap near my hip, and set off directly away from Don Zelinski’s Audi A8. A moment of silence, and then I heard his engine roar, and he squealed an illegal U-turn back toward the highway. I waited until he was on the highway entrance ramp and gone, and then pulled out my phone, figured out which compass direction I was facing and which way I needed to go. It looked like finding my way to I-80 would be my best bet. It was a bit of work with Apple Maps to get situated, pinching to zoom, shifting the focus this way and that, but finally I had a decent sense of where to go.
It was the very same entrance ramp Donny-boy had used. I cinched my straps tighter, pulled my Air Pods out and cued up the playlist I’d made, a six-hour mix of all my favorite music, which was eclectic, ranging from country and bluegrass to indie pop, singer-songwriter, and even a few hard rock and classic rock songs. First up was “Ain’t That Fine” by I’m With Her, which put pep in my step as I began the real work of walking to Alaska.
Up the ramp, well off to the side of the road, I followed it as it curved around and up to join the highway. Gravel liberally sprinkled the sparse crabgrass growing just off the shoulder, and the sun beat down hot. A pickup truck blasted past me, honking. I just waved and they were gone, and then I was on the freeway.
Which was much, much bigger on foot than it had seemed from the confines of a car. The white stripe on the side of the road, which from a car seemed only a few inches wide was, in fact, almost as wide as both my feet. The lanes themselves were enormous, and the highway as a whole seemed to be an entire world wide, rather than a narrow strip of pavement with a little bit of paint.
Also, it was loud. Very loud.
Cars, trucks, semis, car-haulers, panel vans, all roared past so fast they were barely even a blur, the combined noise of engines and movement a constant, almost deafening wall of sound. I had to turn my music up to hear it over the noise, and for the first several minutes I found myself startled every time a huge semi barreled past at seventy miles per hour, the wind battering me even when I walked as far from the edge of the highway as I could.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t regretting my decision. A few miles in, and I started to get used to the noise and the battering wind of passing trucks. But…it was a little scarier walking along a freeway than I’d expected.
Some part of me, the part spoiled by growing up white, well-to-do, and pretty, expected someone to stop and offer me a ride almost immediately.
I guess it was kind of hard to tell what I looked like from the driver’s seat of a car going eighty on a freeway. Whatever the reason, a few miles turned into a few hours, and a few hours turned into almost a whole day. My feet hurt like a bitch and I’d drunk almost all of my water, and I was hungry as hell.
I was in a section of freeway where it was miles and miles between