Meeting Jesus on the Highway
It was late in the morning on Feb. 1, 2013, when Caleb Lawrence McGillivary met Jesus Christ on a highway outside Bakersfield.
McGillivary had been on the road a good while by then, having left his home in Alberta as a teenager to find his own way in the world. He'd gone back at times, back to his family, back to school or work, but that kind of routine never suited him for long, and by the early months of 2013, he was drifting once again. Not homeless, he would tell people. Home free.
He'd hitchhiked through provinces and states, walked over mountains and across borders. He moved as the mood took him, sleeping under bridges and in vans and on boats and couches, working when he had to, finding friends and parties and beaches to surf along the way.
He called himself Kai, unless the authorities were asking, in which case he was Edward Carl Nicodemus or whatever other series of monikers might come to mind. He was 24 years old. The road had turned him lean and luminous, burnished golden by dirt and sun.
He spent the last night of March sleeping alongside Route 99 in California, the road heading north toward Fresno. He was standing beside the highway when a black Oldsmobile rolled to a stop, and the driver beckoned him inside.
On that morning, Jett Simmons McBride was on his way to thwart a terrorist attack he believed, from conspiracy theories he read on the Internet and his own calculation of numbers and signs, was about to occur at the Super Bowl. He was 54, well over six feet tall and almost 300 pounds, with a thin bow of a mouth and pillowy bags under his eyes. He'd barely slept or eaten for weeks, and had recently come to the conclusion he was Jesus Christ.
McBride had thrown away his cellphone and left his dog, Zoe, on the side of the road so neither could be used to trace him. When his phone was found and returned, he smashed it and threw it away again. He was doing his best to ignore the white trucks he knew were members of the Illuminati following him.
Then he saw the hitchhiker.
Everything was fine between them on the way to Fresno. They talked about God and Walmart and numerology, and when they got to the city, McBride gave McGillivary $40 to buy pot. The car was overheating, so they smoked a joint while McGillivary poured water into the radiator until it was ready to go again.
Even after everything that happened in the minutes that followed, McBride would still say Kai was the coolest son-of-a-bitch he ever met. If things had gone differently, he said he could have imagined adopting him like a son.