Talking to Strangers

When you’re trying to cross the road and a homeless person is loitering at the crosswalk, what do you do? Do you speed up — going as fast as you can without breaking into an all-out sprint? Do you decide to skip a block to cross there and avoid having to talk to the undoubtedly chatty Cathy who might even be named Cathy? Be honest with yourself. What would you do?

I’ll start: I’m going up another block to the next crosswalk. That’s the extent of my neurosis. I would rather inconvenience myself by adding minutes to my trip, than talk to an unconventionally attired stranger on the side of the road. And, I would argue, with good reason. It’s a dangerous world out there. More than that, it’s a scared world out there motivated by fear and a primal instinct to make it, to stay alive. The America of today lost track of its neighborly sensibilities decades ago, and one glance at the social media cauldron is enough to scare the average man shitless. As has been recorded elsewhere, the glory days of hitchhiking passed us by long ago. The story my friend’s grandad told us about hitchhiking from Massachusetts to California during WWII will sadly not be repeated. It’s dead, and we killed it.

But why am I droning on about hitchhiking and talking to strangers on the sidewalk? The other day I was in Ann Arbor for an event downtown. I’d driven in that evening — dodging rainclouds — parked at a garage a block away from the venue, and walked over. On my walk back to my car, I got hung up at a crosswalk, and that’s where I saw her idling. We made the preliminary eye contact (my first mistake), and I went into evasive maneuvers angling my back away from her and crossing my arms to express disinterest. Despite my pivots and air of meanness, I must give her credit. She broke through, and we were engaged in conversation.

Let me back up before I retell the conversation itself. The event I’d gone to was for Meaghan Garvey’s inaugural book reading. Garvey, who writes for County Highway (‘America’s Only Magazine’), read and talked about her book, Midwestern Death Trip, beautifully. One of the reasons I and many others enjoy the stories in County Highway and Midwestern Death Trip is because of how steeped they are in the small places of the world. Those books belong to specific worlds with specific languages, identities, and norms. They are grounded in reality. Take this bit from the introduction to Garvey’s book:

You might describe Tom’s Burned Down as a vast open-air junkyard partially covered by a tent from Big Top Chautauqua. The mismatched chairs were excavated from the island dump, the marble bar reclaimed from Baufield’s Pureair Sanatorium. All other surfaces not embellished with birch branches were painted with one-liners ranging from alcoholic to anarchic, with quotes from Hunter S. Thompson (“I never advocated drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity, but they worked out well for me”) to Alexis de Tocqueville (“All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a Democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it”). Flying from a mast at the center of the compound rose a painting of a phoenix bursting from the flames.

A little later in that story, Garvey recounts a conversation between some local bar-goers about the song “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)”:

“I bet you guys don’t even know what this song’s about,” hiccupped the stoner.

“It’s about… Well. it’s about Brandy,” said the old fisherman beside him.

“No way, dude,” the stoner insisted. “It’s about way more than that.”

“Isn’t it always?” the fisherman replied.

It’s passages like this that grip you and pull you in. It’s so desperately enticing because it is so real. And it is so real because Garvey went to Tom’s Burned Down Bar, saw it, smelled it, touched it, and felt the life lingering like an expired drug in those ashes. It’s brilliant because, despite taking place within our minds, the story is fundamentally linked to flesh and dirt. I’m not exactly sure if this checks out metaphysically, but I even believe that that type of grounded writing shares a very real (albeit invisible) physical bond with its inspiration, like two meaty hands interlocked to close the deal.

It’s the face-to-face encounter that brings us to this book reading — literally. The desire to meet the woman whose name is on the cover of this book. In phenomenology (an unnecessarily fancy word for the study of how reality presents itself), Jean-Louis Chrètien wrote extensively about how face-to-face interaction enables all other human interactions, ranging from violence to forgiveness. It’s an encounter with something supernatural that occurs through human connection. What Garvey has done in her life — and through her book — is to experience that in some way and record it. In modern America, where phones and artificial intelligence and virtual reality have robbed us of reality, we are desperately in need of face-to-face encounters.

In response to a question about how Garvey is so comfortable playing the role of stranger, she said she’s grown into it. She reached down into her guts, grit, and whatever else is down there to go somewhere to talk to some strangers. She went outside of herself — something not many people are willing to do nowadays. It’s a skill that she’s learned. And, as she aptly pointed out, “good writing doesn’t come from sitting on the couch all day.”

Back at the street corner in Ann Arbor, I’m trying to blend into the lamp-post. But the chatty Cathy got me. The lady spoke and, piercing my scowl, told me her sob story; about how she’d been screwed out of her home and the justice system had done her wrong and now she was forced into selling penny papers to make ends meet. Who knows whether she was telling the truth or not? I’ll certainly never know, but I listened. She told me how she now sells this newspaper that reports from “on the ground.” She asked for two bucks, which I had and bought one. She seemed to think I’d like the stories.

Then, things got weird.

She told me her name was Amanda, and asked me mine. She asked me about the Chattooga River hat I was wearing, and I asked if she knew it. She did and asked me if I knew Whiteside Mountain. I did! Now we were cooking with gas! That’s a mountain I’ve hiked for my entire life. My parents have been going there for decades. What’re the odds? 100% apparently?

She asked if I lived in the area, and I told her I lived in a small town called Hillsdale west of Ann Arbor. She knew it because she knew Hillsdale College because she’d taken some of the online courses. She loves C. S. Lewis and started chatting with me about his Christianity and his use of the term Dao. I was speechless. Here’s this random stranger in Ann Arbor, Michigan who, despite her faded and ragged clothes, is explaining how Lewis’ use of the Dao might provide some insight into his personal faith. Then, she pulled out an article she’d written that she kept in a faded page protector and asked me to take a picture of it. I did, and later that evening I started reading it. The first paragraph reads,

“Years ago (in college) when I read of Thereau putting his whole body on the ground—immersed deeply in the grass and bathing in the sun and sky and earth—I never dreamed I would one day be living an adventure that would in an unusual way allow me to realize the gift that the Earth is to us, in much the same way. When I became “Homeless” however, after 18+ Years! Of a difficult residing situation, and 2 low-income rental situations that were beyond less than ideal, the beautiful, peaceful haven of the woods I now reside in—received me.”

This is a stranger with a story to tell who, to my surprise (I probably shouldn’t have been surprised), is engaging with Lewis and Thoreau in order to make sense of the world. We talked for only about ten minutes, but she smiled and fist-bumped me as we departed saying “God bless.” The moment, while small and perhaps unimportant, stayed with me and was a beautiful example of the great conversation with the stranger.

None of this occurred to me at that moment, but in reading Garvey’s book and listening to her talk about it, one thing becomes obvious: she loves these depressed, drug-addled, majestic Midwesterners. They are not subjects she’s examining with a flashlight and scalpel, but friends and, in a funny way, family to her. At least, she protects them in a way I’d want my family to protect me. That’s the beauty of Midwestern Death Trip. To enter into the world around you when it’s inconvenient or unexpected, which is to say when the world spins and we finally notice, is to discover something profoundly human. More than that, it’s an extension of love towards our fellow man, and when that love is selfless and unburdened, it begins to look like the Divine. Isn’t that the mission after all?

Image Credit: Edward Hopper, “People in the Sun” (1960)