The Grateful Journal Series
When I was a teenager, I tried to go to California three separate times. The first time I was thirteen years old. I had run away from home, and my friends and I stole a truck. Destination: San Francisco. We made it as far as Greenville, Texas, where police and the owners of a gas station from where we stole gas chased us. I remember I was lying in the bed of the truck as we tried to make our escape in a high-speed chase. I held on for dear life as our teenage driver fishtailed, spun, and did everything that should’ve sent me flying from the truck altogether.
God was looking out for me that day; that was for sure.
I know, O Lord, that the way of man is not in himself,
that it is not in man who walks to direct his steps.
Jeremiah 10:23
The farthest I made it to California was a juvenile detention center in Greenville, Texas. Just a few months later, one of California’s most devastating earthquakes hit the San Francisco Bay Area, and I wonder to this day what might’ve happened if I had made it that far.
The second time I tried was three years later, in 1992. A friend and I were drunk and decided to hitchhike to Los Angeles. We made it as far as Mississippi on a tractor-trailer with a truck driver whose handle was “Southern Comfort.” We later learned that this man intended to take us to the Mexico border and sell us in the sex slave trade. Miraculously (and I mean that in the literal sense), we were saved from that unspeakable fate by another truck driver named “Pack Rat,” from whom, after hearing a voice in my head telling me to trust him, we accepted a ride back home to Arkansas.
Not long after this event, the Los Angeles Riots made history.
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