Trieste Light Pole

                                                                                                                                             Sandy Dickson

Jolene, (who everyone called Jo) and I had been on most of our trek around the world by the time we got to Europe eight months after we started from Hawaii. We had been cautiously frugal, the theory that the more money we saved, the longer we could travel and the more places we could see. We not only loved the towns, but the people within them and savored meeting them as much as their surroundings. Any time we used public transportation, we decided we would split up and sit in separate seats, so as to have the chance to meet that many more people.  Good things could mushroom from meeting the people of a place. By now, this had proven true over and over again. Just the day before, we were hitchhiking in Germany and a man stopped to give us a ride. We sized him up, and besides being neat and clean, he seemed very nice, sincere and trustworthy. I admit now that I am older and hopefully wiser, that this sense of innocence and trusting doesn’t work well in some instances and proves to be very unfortunate and even deadly for some. It’s a good thing God was watching out for us, as we had always seemed to triumph despite our stupid decisions and blind trust.

     This German man was truly a nice person and spoke great English. It was a cold, rainy day sometime in June, and he offered to give us a ride somewhere in the direction we wanted to go, although now, the details escape me. We weren’t on a definite schedule and it was of little consequence when we got to our next destination. The order in which we arrived at these chosen places didn’t matter as much as any new adventure along the way. Our next destination was always only a matter of our own curiosity or a place that held some interest to us based on a travel book we carried, recommendations from others we had met or the fact that there was a youth hostel there. Youth hostels had proven the way to go in that they offer great prices and a host of other people traveling in the same shoestring manner for the same reasons. They were always a great place to meet lots of nice people, where good camaraderie and advice among the fellow travelers could always be found. We found these people offered great tips about places not to miss and it’s much better than sitting in a more expensive hotel room isolated from the world.  The drawback is that they have a curfew, and most of them lock up at night at 9:00, as well as lock people out during the day from about 10:00 to 4:00.

     This German man, however, offered to take us home to his wife to spend the night in their home. He said his wife spoke much better English than he did, though that seemed pretty impossible. He went to a restaurant pay phone to see if that would be okay with her, and returned to announce that she was anxious for our visit. So within the next half hour, we were greeting his wife and children in their home and being shown to wonderful comfortable beds, which were ours for the evening. That night they took us out for a meal and showed us a bit of their town.

     The next morning, the wife cooked what she deemed the typical American breakfast for us, which included bacon, eggs, toast and coffee. She was very proud of this as she ushered us to the breakfast table, announcing that she had done this just for us. We never ate like that, especially on a shoestring, and we appreciated her devoted effort.

     Her husband was leaving shortly for another town in Germany for a business meeting, but wanted to make sure he could deposit us at a place on a highway where we could get a good ride. We had told him our next destination was Trieste, Italy, which sits on the northwestern border dividing Italy and Yugoslavia.

     He didn’t just drop us off. He dropped us off and had us wait in the gas station where it was warm and away from the misty morning chill until he would tell us he found us a ride!  Outside, he was “interviewing” everyone who stopped at the station to find out where they were going and if it included going as far as Trieste, which was about a nine-hour drive. He was also doing quick character judgments on the type of people the travelers were, to figure out if they seemed trustworthy candidates to allow them to take us to our next destination. About half an hour later he excitedly came back in with the announcement that he had found us the perfect ride. There was a business traveler outside who was going to Trieste, and he was willing to give us a ride. He said he seemed like a nice guy, but he didn’t speak any English. He escorted us out to our ride and the guy was a nice-looking man appearing to be in his 30’s. Once in his car, with me in front and him finding that I could speak a little Spanish, I was the one who was to convey our thoughts and make small talk. (With my minimal Spanish, it really was quite ‘small’ too.)

     When we arrived in Trieste about 7:30 P.M., he insisted on taking us right to the youth hostel there, as we had the information in our Youth Hostel book. It was a very impressive ediface built on top of a cliff at a corner where two streets met, and right across from the Adriatic Sea. Once the top of the long stairway was reached, the traveler had to cross a substantial courtyard to reach the building. The streets at the bottom of the cliff had a sidewalk along each side, and on one side was a stairway with a large, very tall wrought iron gate across it between the steps and the sidewalk, which was kept locked tightly after curfew. This was the entrance to the hostel, which rested on the flat top of the cliff about the equivalence of two stories up. Our driver escorted us up the steps and to the hostel, for the purpose of helping us with our luggage and making sure there was “room at the inn.”  We got checked in and thanked him profusely. However, now he was suggesting the 3 of us go out and get a pizza. Jo declined, saying she just wanted to take a shower and wash her hair, but since I was the one most able to communicate with him, why didn’t I go along with him to find one to go, then bring it back and we could all have it together? This sounded feasible, so off the two of us went.

     When I climbed into his car, I pointed out that his gas gauge registered near empty and that perhaps he should consider stopping and getting some ‘petrol.’ No, he assured me, it would be fine. We drove from pizza place to place, but no one wanted to sell a pizza to go. When yet another suggestion about the declining gas was refuted, I didn’t say any more, but now it was about 20 minutes to 9:00 and the youth hostel locked the gate at 9:00. We seemed about 20 minutes away. With this hostel being on top of a cliff, I knew there was no hope that I could even coax anyone to open a window, which we heard is a common practice by other hostellers when a fellow traveler gets back past curfew. These windows were high atop the cliff and no one inside the hostel could ever even see anyone or anything below the cliff. So I called the hostel, told them we had finally found our pizza to go, though I may be a few minutes late, so, could they leave the gate open until I got there and also pass this message along to Jo? The lady assured me that she would do this for me.

     Now when we got back to the German’s car with our pizza, he didn’t have enough gas to get it started! I didn’t have time to waste. I had to get back immediately. I wondered if he had let that happen intentionally, knowing I would be stranded with him, but before he had a chance to try to convince me of anything, I thanked him and said I had to try to get back on my own, then took off on foot. I didn’t have much of an idea where it was, but I stuck my thumb out. A man stopped and took me almost there, stopping a block away where the road forked. He said he thought it was a better idea if we went dancing. I replied this was impossible, as I had to get to the hostel—they were waiting for me. And I pulled another hasty vanishing act, walking the block to the hostel. However, when I went up to the wrought iron gate, it was locked with no way to climb over the top of it. I walked around the side of the cliff to inspect feasibility, but the youth hostile was way too high up the cliff, impossible to reach short of the steps or helicopter. Also, t was a fairly isolated area with no businesses or phones anywhere around. I was most worried about Jo worrying about me, but there wasn’t any way to get word to her. All there was to offer a remote chance of entry was a light pole about 5 feet from the wall alongside the cliff. If I could get up to the top of it, perhaps I could transfer from it to the waist-high wall around the hostel’s patio. There was only one other soul around, and he was an armed guard across the street at the small and deserted-looking military base on the Adriatic. I said, “Do you think I could climb to the top of this light pole to get over the wall?” He said, “I don’t think so. I’ve never seen anyone try that before.”

    Well, I bet he hadn’t!  I evaluated it again. I had to try. With my left hand and foot on the light pole, and my right hand and foot against the wall, I started climbing. I surprised myself and made it all the way up to be equal to the top of the wall in relatively short time. Now I had a problem. I couldn’t let go of the pole long enough to grab the wall and the distance was too far between them to do so without falling. So now, here I am at the top of a light pole in Trieste at perhaps close to 10:00 at night, and this whole situation struck me incredibly funny. I started laughing. I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do now, or which tree I might find to sleep under, but this was quite humorous. As I laughed because of it, I laughed even harder because I was laughing over this whole pickle I had gotten myself into. Even my laughter was funnier to me. 

     Now I saw three people come strolling down the sidewalk toward me at a leisurely pace, and it became funnier still. I’m sure the last thing they thought they’d ever encounter was seeing some maniac at the top of a light pole. I hoped they wouldn’t see me, but surely they had, and if not, at least, heard me. Sure enough, as they approached closer, they stopped and looked up at me. I was still laughing and gripping the pole.

     “Are you okay?” one of the two men asked as the lady stood there gazing up with the other two. I’m sure this question was offered with a bit if trepidation, as they weren’t sure who or how sane a person they were dealing with.

     “Yes, I’m fine. I’m locked out of the youth hostel,” I announced, but shocked too, that this was spoken in English and without any accent foreign to me.

     “We thought that was the case. Can you get down?”

     “Yes, I can slide down the pole,” I said, even though I sort of hated to give up all that hard work now that I had made it all the way up there.

     The same man spoke up again. “You can stay with me and my wife. We have a beautiful place on the top of a building that overlooks all of Trieste. You can have a room of your own and I will behave myself entirely. This is my wife. She will attest to that.”

     The wife encouraged me to take them up on their offer and said they had just eaten at a place down the road and were walking to their car. They would take their friend to his house, and then bring me home with them. This sounded wonderful and since I didn’t have a better plan, I took them up on their offer. I was hardly in a position to refuse.

     Their dwelling was a spectacular penthouse. They were two Americans who had met in Viet Nam during that war, she as a news correspondent and he was some sort of dignitary to the American government. I never really knew what he did as they didn’t offer that information and I felt they would have if they had wanted me to know. But they were warm and delightful. They told me of their personal encounter with Chairman Chaing Kai Shek when they had been guests in his home. They even had a picture on their wall which had been painted and given to them as a gift by Mrs. Chaing Kai Shek. I was also told by my hostess that her husband had been in the position to personally advise the President of the United States and had just spoken to him the previous week on the phone. They lived in Italy because they loved it there. Their home was spacious and sprawling, and they had a large, generous patio that indeed, did overlook a huge expanse of Trieste. Lights twinkled everywhere and it was a spectacular sight.

     The next morning, I called Jo, as it had been too late to call the night before. I told her I had mostly been worried about her worrying about me. She said she wasn’t a bit worried about me--that she knew I would be fine because I always seem to find a way to make things work and make everything all right. She just somehow knew I would have found a good situation. But she couldn’t have known how good. The lady of the house invited me to lunch and for her personal tour of Trieste. We went down a wonderful tree-lined, cobbled stoned walking street with little stores and sidewalk cafes on both sides, and stopped at one of them where we took a small table outside and watched the people go by. The lady even offered to let us bring our dirty clothes to her house so that we could use her washer, as she said she knows how it is when one travels, but we never did that. We didn’t want to put her out any more than I already had. I was just happy enough to have had this adventure, and one more opportunity to see and experience the good in mankind.