Hokkaido Highway Blues

Finally one hit me on the head and you could hear the distant gods of Fukui yell, ”Awwright! Ten points!”
    At first I was overjoyed. Rain! Surely I would now look so pitiable that people would stop out of sympathy. I changed my expression from nonviolent Mormon to puppy-eyed orphan and looked wistfully at each car that passed.
    Which leads to Ferguson’s First Law of Hitchhiking vis-à-vis the Japanese: A foreigner standing by the side of the road in the rain with his thumb thrust out does not look sad or forlorn; he looks deranged. Cars sped up when they saw me and drivers’ eyes watched me recede in their rearview mirrors just to make sure I hadn’t leapt onto the bumper. Then the clouds opened up, and the rains came down as in the days of Noah.
    Having given up on an early rescue, I struggled to get out my handy fold-a-pac plastic rain poncho—which was clearly intended as a novelty item, because it stopped approximately zero percent of the rain, while still managing to cling to my body like a wet sarong. The rain was coming down so hard and fast that it bounced up off the pavement in ricochets. The road was awash. I thrust my thumb at cars in a wild frenzy. No one stopped. I began cursing as they passed, alternating between my thumb and middle finger. Not a good hitchhiking strategy. “Gee. honey, let’s stop for that rain-soaked wildman who is giving us the finger. Why look, he’s wearing a novelty item over his head.” I was out there in the rain for three hours. Let’s pause a moment and reflect on this. Three hours. In the rain. And not a single Fukui person stopped. Get out the salt, boys! Burn the fields! Unleash the hounds! You remember Carthage? The sack of Fukui City would have made Carthage look like a romp in the park. Fukui delenda est! Though I doubt whether even Alexander’s troops could have ignited anything in this downpour. Still it was nice to imagine and it helped take my mind off the bone-chill of advancing hypothermia.
    Like so many things in life, it got worse. Rush hour began: bumper-to-bumper cars hydroplaning by, dousing me with great sheets of water as they sailed past. Trucks went by like snowplows, pushing the rain before them, and one driver laughed at me as he passed. His license plate: Fukui prefecture, naturally. The sun went down. Or rather, the rainstorm darkened. Headlights came on. Now I was a wildman ranting at traffic, illuminated by passing vehicles—like Frankenstein in a lightning flash. Nobody was going to stop for me and it was ten kilometers back into town.
    I dragged my backpack up onto my shoulders. It was soaked heavy with water, its space-age zephlon NASA waterproofing having proven ineffectual in the face of a Japanese rainstorm. I turned and was about to begin the long walk back into fun-loving Fukui City, when a low-slung sports car pulled over. The vehicle was practically afloat. It was so low, it resembled a red life raft.
    “Are you okay?” asked the driver. I squeezed in, dripping rain over everything. I was wedged into the passenger seat, my backpack across my lap.
    “What the hell’s wrong with you people?” I yelled. “Three hours I waited, three goddamn hours!” I put my glasses on and they immediately fogged over.
    “Where are you going?” he asked.
    “Well, I was going to Kanazawa, but that was three hours ago! Now I’ll be lucky to get to the next town.” I pulled a soggy map from my jacket pocket and peeled back the pages until I got to Fukui. “Just get me out of this goddamn prefecture. What’s the first town after the border. Let me see. Kaga City.”
    “I can take you to Kanazawa,” he said.
    “Good. Then take me.” I mopped my face with an already wet handkerchief and wiped the fog from my glasses. For the first time, I saw my driver. He was young, well-dressed, and very dry. ‘Are you from Fukui City?” I asked.
    “Yes?” he said, hoping that was the right answer. It wasn’t.
    “Well, what is it with you people? Doesn’t anybody care about anybody else anymore?” (You ever notice how personal affronts inevitably signal the downfall of civilization as we know it?) “Fukui City people,” I said, “are not kind.” This is a really mean thing to say in Japanese, trust me.
    We drove into the night. The car was deathly quiet, just the sound of the rain drumming across the car roof, like fingertips on Tupperware, and me hyperventilating. Slowly I calmed down enough to realize that perhaps it was not a good