The kindness of strangers

”Whoever you are, I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers,” Blanche DuBois says as she gives herself over to authority in the final scene of the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire. I watched the 1951 screen adaptation with Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh yesterday. And my heart is still racing.

That famous little line I just quoted made me wonder when first I fully entrusted myself in the hands of strangers. I believe it was in my late teens when I was travelling through Turkey with a friend. We were hitching across the great Anatolian plains on a cold October day. The wind blew clouds of dust from the road to the fields, and the flat landscape was dotted with tiny villages and occasional mosques. Even the atmosphere had a certain colorless quality to it.

When the sun began to set we had been on the road for 10 or 12 hours. Traffic had been light to say the least, and most lifts had been hopelessly short. Something along the lines of sitting on the fenders of tractors going half a mile down the road to the next field. All in all, we hadn’t made more than twenty or thirty miles that day. Too far to turn back, too short to reach the Ihlara valley where we were headed.

That evening we dined with a Turkish family in a one-room house made of clay and straw. A mile or so outside the village an old truck had come to pick up the women after a hard day’s work in the potato fields. We held out our hands to indicate that we were lost, and they pointed us in the direction of the small houses. I remember walking down a narrow track with a big Anatolian shepherd dog watching our every move. Barking and showing off its impressive set of teeth to make sure we didn’t overstep the line to the field.

The village wasn’t even a village. It was just a hamlet, almost ridiculous on the vast plain. The people were poor potato farmers who didn’t know much else than the simple life they led. They had a couple of TVs, but they didn’t get out much. Besides the truck that transported the women to and from the fields, all they had was a less than reliable Trabant from the former DDR. Probably brought back by someone’s cousin or uncle who had gone to Germany to work. Later that night a couple of the men somehow managed to drive it all the way to the guesthouse at the entrance to the Ihlara valley.

Conversation was sparse. Fortunately we knew the names of a few Danish soccer players in Turkish clubs. We would mention them, and then our hosts would repeat the names with voices full of praise, over and over again. A detailed travel map of the Anatolian plains also proved a success. We would point out the route we had come, and they would read out the names of the towns and places we had passed. A joint venture, so to speak.

I was overwhelmed. Never before had it occured to me that you could just walk into a company of complete strangers, hold out your hand, and be treated with such hospitality. They took us in, they put us by their hearth, they gave us the best they had to offer, and then they even drove us through the dark, in their dying wreck of a car, to a destination we would never have been able to reach on our own.

Now, this may sound like the oft repeated romanticism of a first-time traveller. And I guess it is. But that doesn’t make it any less real. The experience was flesh and blood all the way through, and it changed something deep inside me. I learned to believe in the kindness of strangers, and I learned to believe that I would never ever be alone again no matter where I walked on this Earth.

I think everybody has had at least one such experience in their life. Some might have been let down, and some might not have understood. Some might even have forgotten. But the vast majority of men – even those who live Thoreauvian lives of quiet desperation – should be able extract one such experience from their memory, and know that they too once depended on the kindness of strangers.

Tomorrow I head for Copenhagen and a week off work. My plans reach no further than my girlfriend and a casual reunion with old high school friends. Apart from that I intend to just drift around town, or out of it, all as it happens. And should a stranger cross my path I’ll be sure to look her way, and shower some kindness on her. Even if she is a he. Blanche DuBois and the Anatolian plains taught me that.