Driving west on Interstate 90 coming into Missoula, Montana, I pull off at exit 105. The man at the bottom of the ramp stands ten feet off the side of the road, heron-still, quartered to the wind. At chest level he holds a large cardboard sign, its message neatly printed in thick black magic marker: "Traveling. Out of Money. Please Help. Thanks." 

I slow to a stop behind three cars and a pickup, all of us waiting to make a left-hand turn across traffic.

Arriving just months ago from a rural part of British Columbia, Canada, I'm still unused to seeing the homeless, and each time I do a burdock of uneasiness attaches itself to me. It's like I've pulled on a scratchy sweater. The man with the sign is oblivious to this of course and continues to look back up the highway. It’s as if he left something there, or I have, which I don't doubt is true. With broad shoulders and chiseled features, his expression is granite. He could be a monument to failed expectation. 
 

The man keeps his eyes on the horizon and his thoughts to himself. He looks to be about my age, maybe a little older, and I think he has the steady gaze of a carpenter, possibly because that's what I've been doing on and off for ten years, nip and tuck years. I've seen this look in every woodworker I've ever met, people who gauge character with the same squint they gauge level and plumb. I've always prided myself on being level and plumb with my generosity to others, but this man places that notion in a whole different light altogether.
 
I know from experience that the arc of hope doesn’t ends, but I'd wager this man is careful how he sights across it. It's safer to study the gray clouds, his face tells me, their heavy bottoms and torn edges more in keeping with the future he's likely to encounter. For reasons I can't explain, I get the impression he’s new at this, that it's not the trade he signed up for. As I steal glances from behind my Ray-Bans, he rocks from one leather boot to the other, a dance that betrays how long he's been there. He wears a pair of clean jeans and a faded flannel-lined jacket, and his hands and head are bear, fingers and ears pink with cold. What expressions of hope or despair he may have he hides behind a full beard. 
           
I fiddle with the radio while I wait to move ahead. When the man's glance sweeps my way, I adjust the rear view mirror that doesn't need adjusting.  
 
What would it take, I ask myself, to loosen me from this lock-washer of guilt? Better question: What would it take to release him from the vise-grip of poverty?
 
The man remains motionless looking back up the highway. He’s like a guardian into the city, a tableau of hunger we must pass before entering the good life. As two more vehicles arrive behind me, he doesn't look at them, but angles his sign, letting the blunt message speak for itself.

Now a man on a bicycle is passing, and the man with sign turns to watch. We all watch in fact, the people in the cars ahead of me and the two behind, thankful for this small reprieve. In half a dozen silences, we gawk at the day-glowed, sunglassed, spandexed mirage peddling left to right across our vision, the incongruity of the image just another to add to the list. The man on the bicycle doesn't look to either side, but peddles with his head down, rapidly, like a superhero fallen from the pages of a comic and striped of his powers. I have time to think these thoughts because no one has moved. Then the man with the sign starts toward the second car in front of me. A window is being rolled down.
 
I'm far enough back I can't see the exchange clearly, but I feel the awkwardness of each of the drivers in line. Their discomfort clouds the air around their vehicles as sure as exhaust, and I feel my own uneasiness close to the surface. My conscience has risen from whatever slumbers it enjoys, fingering the wallet in my back pocket, pointing at my full belly behind my belt. It knows about the dinner party I will go to this evening, and about my mother, 2000 miles away who loves me, who would do anything and everything within her power to help me if I were in trouble. Trouble like him.
 
Less than a week ago, I was standing beside a payphone outside a shopping center. Four-wheel drive station wagons and SUV's pulled in and out of the yellow-lined spaces, the people inside them in pairs, or pairs of pairs, happy-go-lucky on a Saturday night. I could see the couples passing groceries and gossip into the back seat. To my left an electric door opened to suck in two teenagers holding hands, while the door next to it spit out an overweight couple pushing a shopping cart loaded with MSG, the front left wheel of the cart gone haywire, rattling, "Whoa, whoa, whoa." Then Jack was coming up to me, weaving like a wide receiver who had forgotten his pattern. I watched him sway violently to one side, correct, and aim again.
 
"Hey brother," red eyes, boozy breathe, "you got any spare change.  This bitch slipped me Ecstasy three days ago and..."
 
Hands move out from his sides, palms up, hands like carved oak, fingers like massed roots. Moses, I think, this is how Moses parted the Red Sea, not really expecting anything to happen. But before I know it, my hands are reaching into both front pockets, acting on their own, coming out with two small fistfuls of coins, too many nickels I know, too many pennies, still, emptying them into his. 
           
"Here, take it all." 
 
And Jack closing his hands around them, not looking, no, never looking, because he is an old pro, a very old pro, and because he has his dignity you know, got to have that, if you lose that, well.... But I'm walking away, quite unsure about my own dignity (you know), but needing something to lean on, anything, even a false sense of it.
 
With the truck idling and the sun already down, I'm back at the intersection, sunglasses on. It’s only now I take them off, realizing once again I'm hiding, using the dark lenses as a screen. The transaction I was watching is over, a crumpled bill thrust forward and the arm retracted, taken in with a quick jerk that allayed its fear, its shame. The man with the sign plays his role perfectly, accepting the money gracefully with a simple thank you, then walking back to his post. Now he picks up his sign and once more stares ahead. For all the emotion he shows, the sign might as well read, "Free Parking This Way" with an arrow that points to his heart.
 
The light is green, somewhere the light is turning green, and there's a gap in the traffic which the first car scoots across, then the second, the third, the pickup in front of me pulling out so that the oncoming Nissan has to put on its brakes. 
 
I pull up opposite the man.
 
There's the idea that time doesn't exist, that it's a construction of the human mind. Anyone who believes this can get in their car and go out to exit 105. Time is about as real as it gets out there, and if my experience is anywhere in the ballpark of true, it's counted in heartbeats. Given the fact that we are here, on earth—stranded or vacationing, you pick—the space between one heartbeat and the next is pretty close to forever. It's where infinity hangs out when it's not slung overhead and showboating among stars. I know this because everything I'm about to tell you happens within that period of time, between two heartbeats, their systole and diastole; mine, and his. 
 
All I did was turn my head, and if I could have that moment back I never would have. Out of the corner of his eye the movement of my head looking left and down the boulevard for traffic caught the man's attention and he started toward me. I can only imagine the leap in his heart, the tug that started his right foot forward. He stepped out almost instinctively, too quickly I can see now, spiked with excitement. Then with that foot halfway toward coming down, he realized his mistake and ground that step to a halt that nearly caused him to stumble. He was leaning forward at the same instant, like anyone would who just thought they'd spied a friend, (and if you've never seen hope flash in a man or woman's eyes, you don't know what salvation looks like. And if you've never seen that same hope yanked out from under them, you can count yourself lucky).   I was just turning my head to check traffic like I said, and before I could turn it back our humanity collided. We didn't lock eyes, but it was close, and in a look that was not a shade less than grief, his eyes slid over mine and mine over his and you'd have thought two glaciers were passing one next to the other the size and silence of our shame that great. And for reasons I don't know he didn't pin me with his eyes, didn't let them settle and bore. Instead he looked just over my left shoulder, maybe where my guardian angel lives, I don't know, but he looked just a little bit passed me and a little beyond and damn me all to hell if it wasn't because he was being kind. I don't know where people like him come from. I don't know where they go except to some lonely bed or smelly mattress where the only blanket they have is their own hand-spun square of despair. But here he was sparing me. He looked at me and I looked at him and if there was unction I didn't see it. Because you wouldn't think a man could squeeze his lips any tighter, into any straighter of a line than he did.

But I'm here to tell you that's what I saw. I was less than ten feet away separated by a quarter inch of glass and I don't know what fraction luck. We were at a crossroads and I saw him draw his lips tight, skate his eyes passed mine and then drop his chin in a nod. And without thinking I dropped mine likewise, just like that, just like we might have arranged it ahead of time. And if you'd have been there you'd have thought we were compadres on our way to killing. You'd have thought we were brothers looking at each other across the top of a horse. You'd have thought we knew something about the other. And you might have even come to the conclusion that there’s fairness in the world, or justice, or call it what you will, and not this awful soup kitchen of confusion and guilt.

You can tell me I'm wrong, but in that inch of nod, a simple motion between here and god knows where, on the side of a highway that is every highway, a nod from a man that is every man, or could be, he forgave me. For no reason I can think of he let me go. He didn't say a word but he pardoned me like no Pope ever could. And he put his whole life into that nod with the belief that I'd do the same if in his shoes. Imagine that. And damn if this man didn't have a name, a name like every single last one of us, a name as high sounding as mine, Charles, like a prince—some prince.

And here I am spilling my guts as if I had any. Because you know I drove away, said a little Hail Mary and Praise Be and maybe even gave a silent yip of a Hallelujah when the traffic opened again and I could enter the flow. First gear never felt so good. Second gear was like being let off death row. But it wasn't him I wanted to get away from, it was me, from the sweater of my conscience, from the crazy thoughts hammering themselves into my brain. Because I had my hand on the door handle. Because I wanted to get out and invite him home for dinner, tell him to hop in. Tell him I'd cook him a steak and wouldn't let him get up for seconds but would bring the plate over to him myself. I wanted to buy him a gallon bottle of wine and we could sit in rockers all the good night long and tell the biggest lies you've ever heard and lace them with the truth. I wanted to save that man like you'd save a baby from drowning. I didn't see him shed a tear, but my guess is he was full of them. Self-pity, self-hatred, I don't care, they sting. But I knew I wasn't going to do anything of the sort, I knew that I was going to pull away and the sooner I did the sooner my conscience could settle back inside me and go to sleep, do whatever it does when it's not poking me in the chest. 

And so I pulled away just a little quicker than I'd have liked, spun the tires in the loose gravel and that must have hurt more than any blank stare. And I drove like someone late for an appointment, but where or what that appointment might be I don't know and am afraid to ask. So I drove leaning forward over the steering wheel as if that could hurry me along, driving faster than usual and concentrating so hard on the stoplights ahead of me I wouldn't be surprised if they were changing to green on account of my will. And at the bottom of the hill I turned right—not a metaphor—and from there I passed down the double-lane vein of Broadway and into the city's heart. “Thump, thump,” the city was booming all around me, “thump, thump.” But I knew full well it wasn't the city, knew it was something inside me, something harder to get at, knew with the shoulder-gripping coldness that comes with certainty, that despite the bright lights and brick buildings around me, I was driving farther into the woods.