This story is not about hard times. It is about a man named Enoch.

As soon as the crops were harvested in the fall Enoch would take off out down a dusty road, depending on his thumb and two legs to take him to anywhere there was a chance of finding work for the winter months. Sometimes it was Pardee, Virginia, to load coal for a dollar a day for a week or two, then on to the Cotton Mills in South Carolina, to stand by as a loom fixer if and when there was a breakdown, and occasionally he found work as an automobile mechanic in a garage closer to home. If he came home in the spring with enough money to pay the taxes on the farm he had done well.

Many years later, at age sixty-seven, Enoch retired from a good job at Mason-Dixon's truck repair shop. He had a good retirement income plus his Social Security, and thus could afford to keep a new car; but the old man never forgot how good it felt to climb into a warm automobile when he was tired, cold, wet, and hungry. He was grateful for the kind people that had given him rides, also money for a hot meal now and then, and helped him along his way in the desperate times during the Great Depression years, when he was a young man trying to provide for his family.

He still owned the hillside farm in the country and one of his nephews farmed some of the bottom land for a share of the crops. He frequently drove the sixty miles round trip from his home in Kingsport to the farm to repair fences, cut bushes, squirrel hunt, or just to visit with old friends and relatives. Despite the warnings of family members about the dangers of picking up strangers, he could never pass up a hitch-hiker.

One day Enoch picked up a scraggly looking young man on his way to the farm to do some work. About a mile on down the highway the man took out his pocket knife, opened it up and started cleaning his finger nails.

"Old man, ain't you a-scared to pick up strangers along this lonely stretch of highway?"

"Oh, I reckon not young feller," Enoch replied, as he reached under the seat and came up with a huge machete like knife he had crafted from a steel saw blade for the purpose of whacking down bushes and clearing the under brush, "I only pick up gentlemen, but if I should mistakenly pick up some misguided, rowdy creep, that was stupid enough to try something with me, he most likely would go home minus two hands and a good Barlow knife." Suddenly the hitch-hiker became very nervous. "Mister, I appreciate the ride" he stammered. "but if it ain't too much trouble, please stop and let me out right about here, this is as far as I am going today."

Enoch continued to pick up hitch-hikers as long as he was able to drive a car.

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