Over the four days on the trail we spotted at least a dozen bear, both brown and black, and the hillsides were marshmallowed with Dall sheep and mountain goats. As the packs got lighter as we ate our vittles and drank our booze, we began the descent down the Primrose Trail, thankfully through a part of the Chugach that had yet to be debarked by the beetles. The Chugach is a temperate rain forest, and the silence of all but our footfalls stepping over fallen nurse trees from which the next generation was growing made me feel that this was the closest I’d ever come to hiking through heaven.

In the early afternoon of our fourth day we stepped, a bit hesitantly, off the trail and walked the half mile down to the highway where we leaned our packs against a tree and hung out our thumbs for the 20 miles back to Seward and a hot shower. We hadn’t been standing there for more than 10 minutes when an old Chevy Malibu pulled over about 30 feet in front of us. On the lip of the trunk was a bumper sticker that said, “I Kissed Santa in North Pole Alaska!” and below that was a license plate with a wheelchair icon in between the tag numbers on either side.

Patricia and I exchanged looks, shrugged our shoulders, grabbed our bags and jogged up to the car. The driver handed me the keys and told me to toss our gear in the trunk. Bending over I noticed that in the front passenger’s seat was her wheelchair.

We climbed in the back seat and the driver, Rose, offered us some crumb cake she’d made for her boys. She must have been in her 60s and was not the type of person one would expect to pick up a couple of filthy hikers fresh from the trail. She said she was driving over from Homer to visit family, and she told us about her grandkids, awkwardly pulling out her wallet and handing it back to us so we could look at the pictures. Then, just as we were pulling up to the hostel, Patricia leaned forward and gestured at the wheelchair, and asked Rose why she picked us up. It was a fair question. Here was a woman who was utterly defenseless. She was old, sick and crippled. She’d just handed us her wallet. And she said with a resonant depth of compassion, “Oh, honey, I know what it feels like to be stranded.”

It was pure empathy, and I’m not sure we deserved it, but it was offered with such kindness and gentility that it, like so many other events of that summer, put whatever limited challenges and passing vulnerabilities I’ve experienced in this life into fresh perspective, one in which I was reminded that having an open heart that loves and trusts is a choice, and by making it you can bring another few lumens of hope to your brothers and sisters stuck on the side of the road.

We got our stuff out of the trunk, and I bent over the driver’s side window to thank Rose again. She patted my hand and wished us luck. Right then I promised myself that someday I would write a story about her to let some other folks share in the beauty of that gift, given to a couple of travelers somewhere within a long day’s hitchhike of the North Pole.

Merry Christmas.

In this story, Patricia’s name has been changed to protect her identity and to prevent her husband from tracking me down and kicking my ass.

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