WalMart to Shanghai

 About two weeks after I started driving for Uber, I got a call to pick someone up at a WalMart in Sherwood, a suburb on the far southwest side of town, around ten o'clock at night.

WalMart pickups are fairly common. Lots of people live in food deserts, places with no grocery stores, only overpriced corner stores, and many of them don't own a reliable car. So on their day off, they take the bus to a WalMart and fill a cart with groceries for a month, then call an Uber to take them home. It's normally a short trip, and plenty of Uber drivers will simply decline the passenger if they see it's a WalMart pickup, especially late on a weeknight, when the real money to be made is from drunk office workers downtown needing a ride home to the suburbs. That's where the tips are.

But I take these passengers, in part because I can imagine the gigantic hassle it would be to load six bags of groceries onto a bus, especially if you have to transfer, or wait at a bus stop. And they might have melting ice cream.

So I drive down to Sherwood, about ten minutes south on the freeway from where I was, thinking "this will be the last passenger of the night. After this, I'll shut down and go home. Twenty minutes, tops."

I arrive, and a young woman is there at the door with a cart full of stuff -- dry foods, a toaster oven, a coffee maker, a couple of large plastic bins. She gets in and says she's in the merchant marine, she's shipping out in two days, and has to run some errands tonight before having me drop her at the pier on the other side of the city.

This is a huge fare, and it will take an hour and a half to run to a UPS store where she can get her mail, drop something at her company's office, something else at a friend's, and then to a hotel where she runs in and gets luggage. We talk about her decision to join the merchant marine, and how she did it. She's originally from Florida, had been a legal secretary, decided she wanted something more lucrative and to see the world.

Finally, she says, "Let's go to the pier. There's an extra tip in it for you if you'll drive onto the ship."

So that's what we did. We got entry to the pier, and then drove a quarter mile out to the freighter. There's a loading ramp and I drive onto the boat. She directs me to take another ramp up to the deck of the ship, and suddenly I'm parked on the deck of a freighter, with a view of the St. John's bridge and the lights of the city behind me. I consider, for a moment, the possibility that she'll knock me out and I'll wake up two days later, hanging off the edge of the ship with a barnacle scraper, bound for Shanghai. That thought is not as awful as I might imagine, except for the dog. I immediately reject the idea of junking everything in my life and joining the merchant marine because I can't imagine the dog enjoying life on a freighter.

And then it occured to me that if the life I'm contemplating isn't fit for a dog. . . .

I help her unload. She tips me very, very well and says thank you.

I see myself off the ship, drive off the pier and then the fifteen miles home.

It's past midnight. My dog greets me and we sit on the back deck. Chile runs up and down the stairs, dropping a ball at the top so he can chase it as it bounces down the steps. I sip a glass of bourbon and think about the size of the world.