With my mood high, thumbing is a pleasure. My smile is big and maybe that is why many people stop, maybe it’s just Italy or maybe this lovely weather. Finally, in a charming minivan that has seen life, Mauritzio stops for me. He opens the back door and helps me pile my backpack onto all the stuff, then clears some more stuff from the passenger seat for me.
We speed through the small and flat roads, not the highway. The houses are colorful and there are palm trees(!) casually swaying in the breeze. Through the window on my side, I can see the Alpes as blue giants far, far away. They are beautiful, and I feel how all the way to the marrow of my bones, I respect them, fear their cold and rain and heavy clouds. I am happy they are far away. Down here, it is a different world.
Mauritzio talks and gestures with his hands in a stereotypically Italian fashion that makes me laugh. He speaks English well enough, even though he says that he struggles. He tells me he is on his way to a party. I like his chaotically kind energy.
“Do you live alone?” I ask him.
“What… Ah! No! No no no! I have…” Here he thinks for a moment, then his fingers shoot up to show me:
“Six cats! And Eight chickens!”
The GPS stresses him and we miss an exit again. I feel bad for him being late to the party, yet grateful and happy to be in the car with him.
“The universe wants us to travel together a little while longer,” he says, and at exactly that point I decide to gift him one of my charms when we part.
In the end, he drops me off at a gas station and the charm I gift him is my necklace with a rock and a seashell I gathered and made in Mozambique. I want him to stay well, forever.
Without much hesitation, I eye the cars lined up at the station. The first one, a yellow minibus with a Ukranian plate catches my eye and I walk over. Sure enough, the driver is Ukranian, I jump into Russian and he helps me as “one of his own.”
His name is Nikolay and he tells me how he worked as a bus driver between Ukraine and Italy, and how he left Ukraine just a day before the Russian invasion and didn’t go back. Later, his family followed.
“I would have asked you where you were going, if you hadn’t approached me,” he tells me.
He lets me off at a gas station about 50 km from Venice. He tells me there are many truckers that stop there, of whom many are from Romania, Moldavia, and so on.
“Many of our own.”
It is dark, and I decide that this is it for the day; it is hard to hitch after dark. Instead, I scavange google maps and am surprised for an abandoned building to be marked out on the map, not far from me. The forecast promises rain during the night but I am happy as I set out. If I eat and then sleep for twelve, fourteen hours, under a roof and in a tolerable temperature, everything will be very, very good.
…
Hulkuv loom 