Dwayne The Hitchhiker
In the state of Washington a congenial looking fisherman with his thumb extended was walking off the ferry landing at Lopez Island as we drove by and I stopped and picked him up. He had been fishing for salmon near the tip of San Juan when his boat stopped motoring. The fisherman paddled the boat to shore and a woman living up the hill saw his predicament and offered to take him to the ferry and that's how we ran into him. As we drove along he pointed out local houses of interest and told us a bit about the occupants. We dropped him at his weekend house which was in mid construction and he showed us the inside and suggested a place or two on the island to check out in the one hour we had to kill before catching the ferry to Anacortes. He said he had seen seals at a point on the way out that morning so we went to that point and also saw seals, fat juicy seals sunning on the rocks. A few days later leaving out of Hood River, Oregon, towards a town on the other side of Zig Zag Bernadette as driver approached an intersection where stood another--somewhat less congenial looking--hitchhiker and she said, should we pick him up? and before I could clear the hairball stuck in my throat she had pulled over and Dwayne was getting in the back seat. It was eight in the morning and Dwayne was reeking of beer and exuding the love of Christ or someone like Christ, a being or group of higher powered beings with whom he had regular conversations. Dwayne was a talker not impeded by his missing teeth and for twenty miles regaled us with tales about his mother and his father and his spiritual and political leanings. He stayed with his mother sometimes even though they did not really get along too well. These things he talked about when not talking about the mushrooms he was out to hunt in the woods of Oregon and which he would sell, according to him, that same day somewhere in Washington state, hitchhiking all the way. When he was a kid he had found a dollar on the street that he had watched a number of people pass by and his father had taken it and put it in an account. Did you ever see any of that money I asked even though I really did not want to encourage him to speak any more than he was speaking. He would not shut up but I didn't want him to think I was one of those people that picked him up and then told him to shut up, which he admitted was a thing that happened to him occasionally. He said he never saw a penny of that dollar and that was some kind of money back in those days, like he was 85 years old instead of what he was, which was 46. He early on had challenged Bernadette to guess his age and Bernadette had not wanted to hurt his feelings because it was obvious that he was suggesting that he looked much younger than he was but in fact he looked about 8 years older. She guessed 40 thinking she was being kind and he was ok with the 40 guess but he let on that other people thought he was much younger and that he sometimes still got carded when buying alcohol. He spewed on and on about his version of spirituality which was a convolution of Karma meets God meeting the Easter Bunny who then is sucked up by a UFO piloted by a liberal ill-informed Democrat. He kept insisting that he would be ok when we let him out in the middle of nowhere thinking that we would wish to take him all the way to his particular patch of woods laden heavily with desirable mushrooms. These were not hallucinogenic mushrooms he was after. I want to make that clear. However, Dwayne was wrong about us. We did not want to spend anymore time with him. We let him out and said goodbye, and take care, see ya, good luck, okay then, hope you find a bunch, we sure will look for you if we come back this way, and then goodbye we said again wishing he would shut the door and he eventually did. In the future Bernadette and I will probably have some discussion before picking up hitchhikers. Not all of them are ax-murderers but some of them are Dwayne.
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