No Moleste Por Favor

Days Walking - 55

I’m feeling a bit better today. Almost no coughing now. Adrian’s feeling quite a bit worse. I told him that when his yellow spew phase comes along, he’s can’t allow the group to break for his benefit. I swallowed gallons of that sh*t while hiking and he better too, or I’ll tell everyone that he’s ticklish. I’ll do it!

Kwame vanished in the night.
Caeled - who’s sheltering with him right now - came looking for Kwame at about 5AM and woke us all up. There are only so many shelters, so it didn’t take long to search the campsite.

The last person to see Kwame was Caeled at about midnight. Now, we have pretty stringent safety rules about talking a walk alone into the freakin wilderness at night - Don’t do it!

…And if you just gotta step out alone for a brief moment (must be nice to be male) make sure someone knows that you’re going. There aren’t any people-swallowing crevasses lurking around, but there is still plenty of danger.

So at 5:03AM, we’re looking for Kwame. We started at the shelter, all creaky, tired, and grumpy. No note, no tracks leading away from camp, no half-eaten corpse. We were at a loss. The sun doesn’t come up until like 6:15. Short of yelling and yelling his name, not much we could do until sunrise without a couple of bloodhounds.

The sun came up eventually. Still no visible tracks. The wind was blowing pretty good, so unless he flew away, the tracks got blown over/covered.

When something shady goes down in civilization, the police canvas the area and question everyone in an x block radius. Since there’s no one out here (excuse me Mr. Bear, have you seen our friend and how did he taste? Bit salty? Sorry to hear that.) So we headed to the Dalton Highway and hoped not to find a squished corpse.

No squished corpse…
There was a truck pulled off into the snowy shoulder of the road, a big yellow Freightliner. So what else to do? We knocked. I was expecting a haggard, unshaven trucker with a shotgun and an attitude.

It was a woman, and she came to the party without her shotgun. She had long brown hair, was holding a cup of coffee, and was wearing a long-sleeved blue flannel shirt.

She greeted us with a cheery “Good Morning!”

(I hate morning people).

You could feel the heat pouring out of the cab when she opened the door, oh my lordie, what it must be like to have a heater. You tend to forget pretty quickly what it’s like to be comfy and warm.

When you’re freezing your ass off day and night, the idea that somewhere people are sweaty-snoozing in the nude with a fan blowing on them seems like science fiction.

She turned her head - “Kwame, your friends are out here and they look worried.” and then she turned back to us. “I’m Lucy. Do you like pancakes?”

Gabe, the knocker, looked back at the rest of us in surprise. “Uhm, yeah.” So we all enjoyed Aunt Jemima Mini-Microwaveable Pancakes (heated in a skillet on a hotplate) and coffee and hot apple cider. Caeled, reveling in our excess, inquired after hot cocoa, but no such luck.

Lucy was very cool and let us all pile into her cab. It was amazingly toasty warm and spacious - we actually fit, if barely.

It was very difficult to be pissed at Kwame in the face of a yummy hot breakfast and a warm environment in which to eat it. He was dressed when we arrived thank god. His first words were “Hey guys.”

We threw Kwame lots of “What the F*ck!” glares, but no one was willing to jeopardize a hot breakfast by making a scene.

Lucy freights cargo between Fairbanks and Deadhorse, and a good portion of it is laundry, work clothes for the oil teams and jumpsuits and the like. There are a few thousand workers, working all sorts of shifts, so you can imagine that the dirty clothes build up fast.

Laundry. I can’t imagine how much gas her truck burns, but it has to be a lot. You can’t tell me that it wouldn’t be more efficient to build a laundry room in Deadhorse. We had a laundry room at the hotel. Why not one for the workers? Just odd.

When we told Lucy good-bye, we finally had the chance to give Kwame the tongue-lashing he deserved for making us all worry like that. I mean damn, for a good hour we all thought he might be dead.

He apologized over and over. He’s got food prep and pee bottle duty for the next two weeks as penance. I tried to hit him with some cranking time, but no go.

While we were all pissed at Kwame for scaring us like that, there was a certain amount of reluctant respect for the man’s charms.

It seems this is how it went down: It was like 1AM, and Kwame is lying there awake (he has insomnia - have I mentioned that before? The whole thing with his sister has not helped).

And out of the great white nothing, Kwame hears music - a Bach sonata. Is it in his head? He would ask Caeled, but he’s asleep. The sound persists. It’s Bach, and it’s coming from outside.

Kwame stepped out of the shelter and listened. Definitely real. So he followed the sound to the road and found Lucy’s truck.

“What did you do?” Adrian asked the question I was thinking - “You can’t just walk up and knock at like 1AM.”

It turns out that Kwame stood at a respectable distance in front of the truck and threw a couple of snowballs at the windshield. Lucy hit him with the headlights, and then they ended up striking up a conversation about Classical music.

He is so lucky - Instead of Lucy, it could have been Frank, the angry hiker molester with a taste for human flesh. No Moleste, Por Favor.

Now, Kwame swears that he and Lucy didn’t do anything more than stay up all night talking and listening to music, then passed out about 4AM. The other guys are all chuckling and suggestive, ‘heh heh heh’ but it’s probably true. Lucy didn’t kiss him good-bye or anything.

I don’t know how Kwame does it. I have reasonable social skills, but I’m really held back by my desire to not pester other people. This is probably born of my intense dislike of people pestering me. Don’t knock on my door, don’t try to sell me chocolate as I’m coming out of K-Mart, don’t talk to me. Don’t pester me, I won’t pester you and it’s all good. I may have spoken to Lucy if it was daytime, and she was outside working on her truck or something.

But to throw snowballs, possibly waking someone up and then strike up a conversation in the dead of night, Never! Never short of an emergency. I dunno. I don’t think I could ever be so bold.

Does Kwame have a mastery of social charisma - Or a total lack of common sense? Something of both, perhaps.

Litany Webb, signing off.

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