Further Adventures in Hitch-Hiking

(A continuation of previous adventures, obviously).

I'm not entirely prepared to rule out the possibility that he was some sort of Field of Dreams-esque traveling ghost from the 1920s.

He was a fiddler, you see.  A fiddler.  That's what he seriously called himself.  Had his violin with him, and there were patches on the case and everything.  He wore actual overalls.  Had a big black bushy beard and a cap.  I picked him up somewhere east of Boise, and he said he was hitching over to Nampa in order to hop on a freight train (yes, a freight train, like some tramping hobo with a knapsack tied to a stick over his shoulder) to West Virginia, to attend a Bluegrass festival.

Mind you, this was not some aged transient, not some relic and holdover from another long-lost era, the last of his kind or something, no; he could not have been older than 23 or 24, I swear.

He described to me his adventures busking back-and-forth across America, playing such long-forgotten instruments as the mandolin, the banjo, etc--and not in Mumford and Sons cover-bands or Arcade Fire-esque Indie experiments, no!  He told me of a dixie-land band he jammed with in New Orleans of all places, because of course he did.  I'd have been disappointed if he hadn't.

Yet for all his transient lifestyle, he did express a desire to settle down--he told me of his plans to return to Washington this Fall for "cherry-picking," which he straight-faced claimed one can "make good money on!"  He said he wanted to "buy a piece of property," just a place he could always call his own, as though he were some migrating Okie in the Depression or something, or some Oregon-trail pioneer or wandering mountain-man seeking a place to call home.

Maybe I should have asked him about the current President, whether he favored Harding or Hoover in the next election, just to make sure.  Who knows.  But I won't get a chance to call him up and check, because he had no Facebook account, nor cell-phone.  By any standard you could devise, he was a young man out of time.  Maybe literally.

I picked up another hitch-hiker just across the Oregon border, and I took him the rest of the way to Portland.  This man was more middle-aged, and much more Hemmingway-esque, what with the stoic manner in which he was defeated but his spirit was not defeated and so forth.  He casually mentioned his time in the Navy along North Africa (I wonder if he dreamed of the lions on the beach), of his years as a country-crossing truck driver; and when a wildfire blocked the I-84 for a couple hours (because mother nature likes to remind us that she's still in charge, and that we cannot disrupt her weather patterns with impunity), he mentioned his "greenhorn" season as a firefighter in Yellowstone, back during the legendary fire of '88.

That is, he was a strong man, a mighty man even, in his youth; but now his wife was leaving him, so he was hitch-hiking back to a home he hadn't seen in 15 years, "to work on the docks" if he could, broke and with little more than a backpack and a terminal cancer diagnosis.  I dropped him off at the Mission on Burnside in downtown Portland past midnight, then kept on driving back to Washington.

We like to think our world is getting smaller and more connected everyday, but there are still whole worlds of people out there who resist and escape our every post-modern impulse to account for everything, and Heaven bless them for it, for they are who keep this world big.