
Last night I watched Into the Wild. Sean Penn wrote and directed this movie which is based on the book of the same name by Jon Krakauer. I read the book several years ago, and in my opinion the movie falls seriously short. It was a good try, but nothing about the film does justice to Krakauer’s tireless research or comes close to his obvious passion for the story.
With that said, the film did have it’s moments of glory, and the actors all played their respective characters very well. It also got me thinking about hitchhiking again and this story I’ve been meaning to write. Like I’ve said before, I have to start writing these things down before the details are lost from my memory forever. Already, I will have to dig up an eight year old journal in order to retrieve certain specifics for this one. Here goes…
Near dusk on a narrow rural route in eastern Oregon, just north of the town of Madras, I passed a lone hitchhiker in the fading light. Spotting the figure as I sped past, I came to a stop a couple hundred yards down the road, and the tall, middle aged man jogged toward my car as I reversed to meet him. He was thin, and several days growth of grayish brown scruff covered his face. His name was Vern, and Spokane, Washington was his destination. I agreed to take him as far as The Dalles, where I would be turning west toward Seattle, so he loaded his pack and bed roll into the back, and once settled into the passenger seat, began to tell his story.
Vern told me that his mother had recently died and he was traveling from his home in northern California up to Washington to have her buried and sort out her estate. He had left almost a week ago in his own car, which suffered a broken axle south of Madras. Lacking the funds to pay for the costly repair, he had gone to work doing carpentry at a local motel in order to earn bus fare to Spokane. After finishing the project, Vern was refused payment from the proprietor of the motel. They had no contract, and the manager simply stated that he didn’t have the money, and the room Vern stayed in while he worked was all the payment he would receive. I got a little frightened at this point in his story because Vern then told me that he was a veteran of the Viet Nam War - capable of killing a man with his hands, which he had considered doing to the motel manager. At a different time in his life he might have done just that he said. But, trying to live a more peaceful life now, he managed to stay calm, and took the matter to the Madras chief of police. The police couldn’t help Vern get his money (due to the lack of a legal contract), and divulged that the manager was already under surveillance for fraud and drug trafficking, and would get what was coming to him soon enough. That news seemed to give Vern a little comfort and satisfaction, but it didn’t change the fact that he was still broke and hundreds of miles away from Spokane. So the chief gave him his apologies and a ride out of town to the spot where I found him with his thumb pointed north.
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