Walt
He slipped something into my hand and said I was a good friend...
The first time I lived in Eugene, Oregon, I was a stranger to everyone, including myself. I was twenty-one years old, but felt much older, or younger, from moment to moment. I moved there on a whim one day from half the continent away. It was summer – sunny and warm. I bought a bicycle, the first I’d had in about eight years, and rode it around all day, just breathing the clean air. Eventually, I discovered the purple things growing along every fence and roadside were blackberries and I ate far too many of them, wondering why I wasn’t hungry for dinner when the sun finally went down and I arrived home. I worked when I needed to. That need increased as the weeks passed.
One particularly warm day, I stopped at home for a short nap. When I woke up, I noticed a tent pitched in the back yard of the vacant house next door. A tall, thin man with a massive, untamed beard emerged from the tent dressed in flannel and jeans. He looked like he was about fifty, but at that time, I thought everyone older than 25 was elderly. I went out the side door of the house, and walked toward the man, his back turned toward me, hunched over a pile of something.
I said something insignificant. He turned to me and held his hands up slightly. He apologized for being there, and said he’d move along. I told him not to worry about that. I turned and ambled around pretending to attend to imaginary projects in my back yard. He pulled a camp stove from his pile of something, sat down and began to heat a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew, the label still in place, singeing as it sat over the open flame. After a while, he called over to me and offered to share. I declined. I always decline the first offer. I don’t know why. I told him I was full of blackberries. He chuckled and motioned for me to come sit with him. I came over and sat nearby on the grass. He didn’t make a second offer of stew.
As he ate he told me about himself. His name was Walt. He had tried to be normal for a while in his earlier life, but it didn’t work out. He had been married, and he had a teenage daughter he saw regularly, who absolutely adored him. In the winter, he lived in the forest, in what had at one time been his family’s hunting cabin. He had access to a 1972 brown Chevrolet Impala in the winter as well. In the summer, his ex-wife and her new family, being normals, used the summer cabin as a summer cabin and he had to go. He was not allowed to take the car with him. She would take him, and his old bicycle and his “kit” and drop him off in Eugene, where he spent all summer living in homeless camps mostly along the river, doing odd jobs for food or money. She would pick him up again when it started to rain and take him back to the forest. He was camping in the yard because he was looking for my neighbor, a paraplegic psychologist who apparently was one of the better sources of weed for homeless guys named Walt.
Walt would come and go all summer. I told him it wasn’t any business of mine if he slept in the yard, so he would be there maybe once a week. One evening he knocked on my door. That was unusual. I went outside and he asked if I would like to meet some friends of his. I said I’d be happy to. He said he would come get me after dark. Around ten PM, he stopped by on foot. I have no idea where his stuff was. We walked off. We crossed the town and entered the university campus, lit with street lamps and bright stars in the clear sky. We went down a path between classroom buildings and crossed a busy road. Then we walked between the Quonset hut art studios and science labs dodging enormous raccoons and aggressive nutria and into the greenbelt by the Willamette River. There was a footbridge leading across the river towards the football stadium, but we didn’t cross it. Instead he led me off to the left of the bridge and into the blackberry brambles running along the river itself. Invisible to the naked eye, but very much there nonetheless, was a narrow path through the blackberries to the river’s edge. The Willamette at this point is clear and very fast-moving. It gave the impression of making a heaving sound, there was so much water moving so quickly. About ten yards into the river was a fair-sized island covered in plants and trees. We jumped across the river on stones to the island.
In the center of the island, surrounded by the trees, was a campfire surrounded by a group of men who, in the flickering firelight and smoke, could easily have been identical copies of Walt.
He introduced me to the guys. There was Bill and Steve and Pete and Will. There was a guy called “Friendly” who never talked. There was Head-Injury Stan, who had fallen off a logging truck onto his head and forgotten how to be an English teacher. There were probably a couple others I don’t remember. They had weed, which I didn’t want, and cheap liquor which I didn’t want, and in a hole at the edge of the island inside the cold water of the river itself they had about a hundred cans of beer. I wanted about five of those. They said I was welcome, but that I had to pack it out. Have to respect the river. We sat around for a long time being mellow. Some of them talked about their pasts. Some of them just sat there staring at the fire. Walt talked about a strawberry harvest he wanted to work and how he needed a ride to the farm. One of the other guys said he’d take care of it. The sky started getting lighter, so I put my cans in a plastic bag, said “good morning” and headed home. Walt said he would probably come see me in a week or so. I walked home as the sun came up, throwing the cans away in a dumpster near one of the art sheds.
In the winter, the level of the river rises enough that this island completely disappears.
The last time I saw Walt, he helped me load up my U-Haul to move out. I was moving far away. I tried to give him a twenty but he refused. He slipped something into my hand and said I was a good friend and he’d always remember me. Then he got on his bike and rode away. I looked at the object he handed me. It was a rolled-up one-dollar food stamp. When I unrolled the food stamp, there was a big, fat, bud of marijuana inside it. I gave the stuff to my neighbor who told me that if Walt was giving me things like that, I must be a pretty special person to him.
Four years later when I moved back to Eugene, I tried to find Walt, but the consensus was he had disappeared two years before and nobody knew where he went. The remainder of the time I lived in Eugene, I’d look at every tall, skinny bearded drifter, but none of them were ever him.
Patrick McCarty writes about what interests him, which is a little bit of everything and a lot of certain things. Right now, he lives in Houston, Texas.
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I wonder how many of us have someone come into our lives, like Walt, who make a huge dent in our souls. A transient friend who turns our eyes in another direction, then disappears. Your Walt is fascinating. Thank you for introducing us to him.
I absolutely love this. So much heart, kindness, grace & vibe amidst the melancholy. A sweet window into human nature.