Free The Other by David Guterson Page B

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    W HILE I WAS WANDERING in Europe, John William—according to aerogrammes I got in Avignon, Barcelona, Grenoble, and Brunico—was hiking in Oregon. His long-winded letters were scrawled in a cramped hand. He wrote to say that he’d hitchhiked to Portland and then walked toward the ocean on the south bank of the Columbia—on railroad right-of-ways, the verges of marsh, and trails used by anglers and goose hunters. He ate a dead carp washed up in a side water and got the runs and a fever. Curled up in a duck blind, sick but sheltered, he nearly abandoned his plan to hike to the salt water. But then, in a Dumpster behind a tavern, he found some fish and chips, and that got him going again. I was in Avignon eating a pêche Melba while reading about this, and it seemed, under those circumstances, more than a little hard to understand.
    John William unsettled a trio of late-winter birders launching their skiff in a slough by walking past them at first light. He also came on two sturgeon-fishers, with their rod butts anchored between stones, who’d built a lean-to out of plastic and saplings and sat in it nursing a blaze while boozing. John William stayed in the woods downstream, hunting crawdads, until they reeled up and left, and then he occupied their lean-to for the night, encouraging the coals of their fire. The next day, he walked in rain and watched mew gulls. Eventually, the country became estuarial, and, beside the channels of the river, his boots filled with mud. At a boat launch, he found an oily sardine tin and a poorly cleaned salmon carcass in a garbage can, and at Astoria he gathered enough coins to buy, at a corner market, a banana and a day-old ham sandwich. Fortified, he walked through the night past Warrenton, and from there to the coast, where he slept in brush. There were gulls, he wrote, with their heads down.
    John William walked to Seaside, where he stood outside the arcade collecting coins from late-night pinball addicts. Later, foraging in garbage bins, he found a lode of canned goods, and after smashing open cans with a rock, ate a lot of fruit cocktail. This was the first night of visible stars since he’d left Portland, and, walking under them with the beach well lit, he gathered driftwood, and, later, above some dunes, scraps of lumber from a development where view homes were going up. John William built a high-mounded blaze, and when it died to coals he spread them out, dressed them with sand, and slept.
    His aerogramme read: “I was arrested at dawn and handcuffed. ‘Suspect is a vagrant, age 20, 6', 180 lbs., brown eyes, brown hair, carrying no ID but giving his name as Gempler, (nmn), Ivan’—that’s what they got from me. In jail I met this Pete Moss—like Gempler, supposedly an arsonist who’d crisped a beach house. They thought I was an ecoteur with a nom de guerre, like Moss, even though the handle I gave them sounded Amish. Fortunately, I was liberated the next day by a lawyer who came for Moss and two other hippies, so I got a ride to Eugene in a lawyer-Volvo. Maybe it’s another nom de guerre, but my pro-bono savior gave me his card, which I’m looking at right now—‘Mark Sides’—actually a smart guy, pissed about the right stuff. He got me some work, or got Ivan Gempler work—counting standing deadwood today and tomorrow. No pay, but I’m domiciled for nothing in this mail-order tepee with Moss and some other freaks. I showed these potheads what’s up with a fire drill. They think I’m God because I make fire with sticks and catch mice with my Paiute rock-fall trick. Even Mark Sides is impressed.”
    “Hey. Countryman,” John William wrote, at the end of his last aerogramme, “don’t forget to write me back. Drop me a line. Don’t be a stranger. And don’t get lost, blood brother.”
     
     
     
    I N THE D OLOMITI , I sat by the chapel with the American women and brewed tea on my cartridge stove. They were sisters. They both had the look of