Richard Rawley, Drifter – from ‘Talk to me, America’

I turned from the waitress trying to find me a working salt cellar and there through the window, disappearing into the gloom, was a gaunt-framed figure bowed under the weight of a shoulder pack, walking north up Route 191.

“I’ll be back,” I said.

The rain had halted and Richard Rawley eased his pack to the ground with a middle-aged sigh and tried to wipe the tiredness from a face that was not so much lived in as abandoned.

“I’m an unusual kind of a guy,” he began, an understatement confirmed in the next hour as his slow drawl filled the tape while his hooded eyes followed every passing rig the way hitchers do.

He’d been sorting out a brother’s marriage problems in southern California and now hitching back to his dug-out. Well, you thought he said ‘dug-out,’ so you just furrowed a brow and he slowly nodded.

“Thirteen years I been livin’ up in the mountains near Jackson, Wyoming – why I don’t know, always had a kinda woodsy thing in me. Dugout’s two and a half feet in the ground. Bought a shovel I thought was good and it broke on me so I don’t get it as deep as I wanted. Make my own bread, stuff like that…. kill a grouse maybe, squirrel…. snowshoe rabbits….”

“Usually have a tarp,” he said, resting an elbow on his pack, “but it was leakin’ so I left it back in Flagstaff. Just got a blanket. Cover myself up kinda like gettin’ in the pages of a book.”

And he began going through his life, drip by drip, through the early days running around with Seminoles in the Everglades, of gold-panning in Idaho, of ranching, of extra work in films, of the failed marriages and going off the rails and the fights. And then he sucked his teeth, avoided eye contact and you knew what came next was hard to tell.

“Two years ago, I did three trips to Florida to see my daughter – taking Psychology down there at University – to see what happened to me and her Ma….”

A rig passed and he followed the brakelights till they were lost in the night.

“She never saw me….Went back there last winter, didn’t see her then, either…. Four trips, twenty four thousand miles….”

When no more comes you’re forced to question whether his daughter, knowing he’d hitched the circumference of the Earth with eighty pounds on one shoulder, really wanted to see him and he pondered the possibility, biting the inside of his cheek.

“Well, I think so, yeah. She just didn’t come down to see me. It hurt, oh sure…”

He got up to stretch and you could tell by the contorted face and little grunts he was getting too old for all this.

“I think I’ll come down from the mountains. Sometime, maybe, but not so far away that I can’t get to them if I need to.”

Then, as he swung the pack over his shoulder and melted into the blackness, his more immediate future relying on headlights to pick him out and goodwill to pick him up.