I had spent the day up in Omak, WA trying to install a new router at one of our offices. Omak is nowhere -- about an hours drive from the Canadian border in central Washington. Both the fiber company and the ISP had screwed up, and I ended up drinking my lunch at a bar. I was really pissed off because I knew there was no way they'd fix it any time soon, and I'd have to spend hours driving back up to that god-forsaken town sometime next week. On my way back, I started contemplating a career change, as one often does after a particularly frustrating day, when I saw a hitchhiker on the side of the highway.

I've picked up every hitchhiker I could since 2008, during the housing market crash. That was the year I saw a very clean looking man with a dog hitchhiking out of town. Being young and dumb, I picked him up. He was a construction worker, and told me the story of how he'd lost everything during the crash. He'd just sold his truck and was trying to make it to Spokane, where he'd heard there was still some commercial work going on. It took him two days to hitchhike from Seattle to Yakima; that's normally a two hour drive. That hit home. My entire extended family had lost their construction business during the crash. I've been picking people up ever since.

So I pulled over on the side of the highway just outside of Omak and offered a ride.

We start with some small talk. He's looking for work picking fruit and was striking out in Omak, so he figured he'd move along further south. I tell him I'm headed through Wenatchee, which about that time was ramping up for the cherry season. He'd never heard of Wenatchee, but it sounds agreeable to him. I thought that a little odd, but then he starts asking me what I was doing up in Omak.

I tell him about the router I was trying to install. He asks what brand it is (Cisco). He starts asking more questions about what was wrong. We're about 10 minutes in to troubleshooting the problem verbally when I realize he knows way more about networking than I do. Finally I point blank ask him why the hell he's picking fruit.

Turns out he had been working in LA as a Linux admin. He was also working on a side project, basically Pinterest for outfits, when his girlfriend took exception to the time he was spending on the project. He didn't go in to great detail, but it became pretty clear to me he had seriously, dramatically, burnt out, and the girlfriend was just a trigger.

He decided to forget everything and take a bus north to do some manual work for a while. He was still sending money back to her to make the car payments. This guy had abandoned everything, traveled to the middle of nowhere, slept in bushes, and done manual labor in the sun all because he was sick of life as he'd been living it.

I tried offering him a laptop. He wouldn't take it. He didn't want it. Said what he needed was a bicycle. As we crested a hill in to the Wenatchee valley, he became quite excited about the size of the town and the number of orchards he could see in the distance. I dropped him off soon after. I'm pretty sure I saw him riding a bicycle in downtown Wenatchee some time later.

This event still fucks with me years later. It could just as easily become my story, or your story. Mental health is fragile. Take burnout seriously.