It’s just past dawn, almost 6 am. He looks over at me to see if I’m awake. I am barely, but enough to see him attempt a trace of tired smile. To say we’re both exhausted is an understatement. It’s been three months since we ran away from home together. Both of us wanted to stay in West Virginia but after the incident with the baseball bat and the car fire, we knew we had to go.

We spent the last month harvesting cranberries in Wisconsin and two months in Michigan harvesting apples and working on an organic pig and chicken operation working sun-up to sun-down until our backs ached and arms cramped. The fatigue may never leave us.

Winter is almost here. We’ve been hitch-hiking for four days now, racing ahead of blizzards. Last night, we befriended a lady truck driver that hooked us up with a free motel room here in rural Minnesota on the border of the Dakotas. Sleeping in a bed again was fantastic, even though it was freezing and there were mice in the walls. Before this, we slept in a shelter, on a heating vent in a park, and in a manager’s office trailer at a construction site.

The nice woman we met is going to pick is up in about an hour. There’s jobs waiting for us in the next state over – me, hard labor for a fracking company, and him as a parking attendant at a ski resort. We’re excited. It’s going to pay well. In the spring, if we have enough money, he’s talking about getting his EMT or white water rafting training certificate… me… I don’t know. I don’t even have a GED.
I also don’t know if we’re going to survive a winter in North Dakota. I don’t know if we’re going to make it to Oregon. I know, I know, everyone runs to Oregon. He’s been obsessed with making it there ever since he learned about the Oregon Trail in middle school. Westward, he says, is where home is. One foot at a time, or in our case, one mile at time.

I comb my hair as I watch him brush his teeth. There isn’t much to eat around here. I make some coffee. I discover apples, mini cereal boxes, and milk cartons in the lobby. We feast in our motel room while watching cartoons like little kids. We might be constantly near broke and desperate and crazy, but as long as we’re with each other we would be happy digging ditches. I look at him with a spoon in my mouth. He smiles fully this time. “We have a good fifteen minutes until she picks us up”, he says, “And one last condom.” I blush. “15 minutes? Is that enough time?” He says it is. It is.

____________
[ed note – the man in this photograph is Bartek Borowiec, a Polish fashion model famous for his stunning red hair and natural androgynous beauty. Most of his photographs are artsy and saturated as a quick search shows, but once I saw this picture, the story wrote itself.]