The run-around

After Sunday’s 5k jog around the south side of Omer City, around noontime, my body was desperate to shed accumulated heat. The Rifle River Public Access provided opportunity to fully submerge.

People preparing for or packing up after a float downriver were bustling around both sides of my vehicle as I returned. Using a towel, I changed into a pair of bottoms with pockets, dropped my key into one of them and locked the car doors, readying to head back down to the river for an extended cool-down.

As the door swung shut and the alarm system chimed its activated status, I patted my front pocket and felt instant regret. There on the driver’s seat of the vehicle lay the key. Its friends, wallet and phone, sat in the passenger seat.

As I voiced my dismay, the lot around me quickly cleared out and within minutes of the tragic blunder, I was quite alone, with nothing to do but start walking with extended thumb in the direction of the spare key, in West Branch.

An Omer resident picked me up not far from U.S. 23 and Michigan Avenue and let me out halfway down Sterling Road, at Grove Road, where he proceeded south as I continued west.

At this point I’d made it halfway to Sterling in 15 minutes and held out some hope of making a 1 p.m. appointment north of Alger. This hope evaporated during a six-mile walk from Grove Road to M-76 two miles north of Sterling, where the next willing passer-by stopped.

This ride took me as far as the 202 exit—ten more miles to go. A West Branch area resident returning from a day out in Standish took me to Hamburger Hill, where I took possession of the spare key to my car. I walked the couple miles from there to the house we rent off 4th Street and sent a quick message to the person I’d stood up.

Just before 4 p.m. I set off south on an old bicycle. I patted the key in my pocket against my thigh intermittently for the next three hours.

A man enjoying a happy hour cocktail at a restaurant just north of the county line told me he used to hitch-hike regularly from Saginaw to Standish when he was younger, commuting home from work.

Anecdotally, we agreed that hitch-hiking is less common nowadays. I speculated that cellular phones have drastically reduced the number of ride-seekers and perhaps the number of people habituated to proffering rides as well.

“It’s a dangerous world out there, too,” he added.

I asked if he thought it was more dangerous now than when he was hitch-hiking regularly.

“Actually, I think it’s safer now,” he said.

Safety and connectedness: the two fundamental paradoxes of our time.

Devices and software applications that connect us remotely to family, friends and—through the internet—the entire world, simultaneously disconnect us from direct connections we used to rely on. 

This appears truly zero-sum from any glance around a densely populated public space, where inevitably one finds many people with eyes fixed on screens more so than the people that surround them.

Statistics suggest we are safer and better connected all the time.

Can you feel it?