James 'Jim' Réchar
Six months before
Jim squinted at his mother and father as they lovingly argued with each other. It was one of those arguments that only happens between people who care for each other, where they are both vehemently against what the other is saying but as soon as it's finished they'll not care that it happened and carry on organising the washing. Jim stood to the side of the loving argument.
"There's no way I'll allow my boy to run off to Oregon with some strangers to go camping for three months!" Lou-Anne said, her hands straining and swinging as her Creole accent peaked through. She was getting irritated.
"What's the worst that happens, he dies?" Jim's father, Martin asked jokingly. Lou-Anne glared. "Alright, but he asked to go, shouldn't that mean anything? You've always - always - said that you wanted him out the house more, and now he's offering to go two-and-a-half thousand miles away from home. He's 19, Lou, let him become a man."
The newspaper clipping was still held ever so gently between Jim's thumb and forefinger, as if pressing to hard would let the sweat gushing from his pores run the ink off the page and ruin his chance forever. He really wished he could see what his mother looked like right now, but this was too tense of a situation to go into the next room and collect his glasses. He also thought she was staring at him.
"Get your glasses, Jim. You look like a doofus giving me that look," she said. Jim grabbed his glasses and returned to the kitchen. Everything was crystal clear now; the exasperated look of unhappy guilt on Lou-Anne's face in contrast to the hopeful look of glee carving its way across Martin's skull. "Fuck! Fine!" Lou-Anne stormed out the back into the garden and slammed the door shut. She walked to the bushes at the back and sat down on the bench in the middle of them, as if being caged by the rhododendrons meant she was safe for the time being. Martin ruffled Jim's hair.
"Listen, kid. You're special. You cook, you cry, and you play that stupid damn board game about the dragons. I ain't sure if you know what you volunteered for, but I'm not gonna tell you neither. This lookout gig, it isn't gonna make you a man. You're gonna 'come a man as soon as you're capable of it. And I don't think neither of us know what it is to be a man, but it sure ain't fixin' cars or saving wenches. I got a good reckoning you're gonna learn what it is to be a man up in Oregon. You ain't just up there for yourself," Martin said. The word 'man' was being highlighted specifically here. He had a solemn look in his eye, years of questioning and a growing resentment to his effeminate son finally coming to a saddened head. He had had to convince his beautiful wife to ship off their son for the summer so that he may have some chance at not being secretly embarrassed by their son, and publicly held to account for the total lack of boyishness.
"I know, pop, thanks. I know mom ain't too impressed neither. Avoid the whisky while I'm out saving forests, you know what she's like when one of us are gone."
One week before
Lou-Anne howled at the bus depot and all of the waiting passengers were ripped from their daydreams as they tried to find the baby being shredded. Another mother sending their kid away to camp, Christ.
"Mom, God, will you go easy? I ain't got spare eardrums," Jim muttered, looking apologetically at the loiterers around the bus stances.
"Watch your attitude. I'm sending my only child away to live with bears and malaria for three months. Show some sympathy," Lou-Anne managed between gasps. A resounding thwack echoed as her tired finger slapped Jim at the rear of the head. He nodded.
Greyhound bus number 758 headed for Milwaukee is leaving in five minutes. Greyhound bus number 758 headed for Milwaukee is leaving in five minutes. Thank you.
"That's me," the youngest said after a few seconds, unsure of how to break the weighing silence.
"Yep," his parents said in sync. Jim reached around and hugged both at the same time, then let them go and grabbed his bags. Martin melancholically slapped his son on the shoulder while Lou-Anne held back to avoid raining snotters on her departing child. Jim climbed up the steps and let the driver punch his ticket, and found a seat near the front next to the window. The bus filled up quickly, but the seat remained empty. Right up until Memphis, when it was filled by an obese man who farted as he sat down and his food over Jim as he slept, the young man only realising as he was awoken by his next passenger, a girl slightly younger than himself, trying to dust off the seat while sitting in it. Jim struggled awake.
"Are you alright?" he asked.
She looked up, eyes wide in frustrated horror and looked back down, muttering something meant for him but not realising the roar of the engines was drowning it out.
"I'm sorry, I missed that," Jim said a little louder, trying to drop a hint.
"I said you spilled your packet of chips everywhere, you grubby fuck," she said in a monotone voice. Jim repeated the look of frustrated horror and turned back to the window, closing his eyes. "I can feel the Cheeto dust through my tights. What are you gonna do about it?"
"Lick it off," Jim replied without carefully considering his response.
"Lick it off my tights?" she asked.
"What? No. The seat. It was a joke. Can you please stop being so loud?"
"They wouldn't know what it's like to have Cheeto dust in their ass crack."
"You haven't seen the state of some of them," Jim replied. The girl, with her glare of contempt, broke it for a split second and grinned.
"To be fair, it was probably that fat guy who was sitting here before me. fairly sure he had orange dust on his shirt as he got off," she said, sitting herself down, unhappy with the current state of the fabric.
"And yet you still gave me all that?" Jim queried.
"Yeah, well, I'm a girl, we're supposed to give the inferior genders a hard time," she said with a wink and a giggle. Jim laughed and the old woman behind him kicked his seat. Jim laughed quieter.
"So where you headed?" Jim asked. He looked at the girl a little closer, sleep dust not obscuring his vision. She was quite a bit younger than he it seemed, probably about 16. She was way invested in the punk lifestyle, he guessed. Her hair was ratty and died black, the grease making the black blacker. Her tights were ripped and on top of them were ripped jeans: the rips aligned at one point to pass right through to bare skin. Jim looked away. Her shirt hadn't been cleaned in a week or two, but had been worn every second of it. She was more than likely a runaway.
"Puerto Rico," she said. There was no sign of a joke, but that didn't mean much with her.
"What's down there?" Jim asked.
"Nothing that's here. A whole different set of anything."
Jim looked at her for a moment, considering what she was saying. It rang true, and he knew what he was leaving was everything he knew. Enter this new, short life of anything except what he had. Jim nodded and turned back to the window. "What are you running from?"
"Honey, we don't have the time," and suddenly this young punk was a thirty-year-old accountant with financial issues and a failing marriage, problems Jim's feeble 19-year-old brain couldn't understand. He shut up again.
"And where you going?" she asked.
"Oregon. I've got a job up there," Jim said. She sounded excited when she pursued the line of questioning, and Jim was happy to answer. He was excited, and wanted to discuss it after all. They talked for hours, well into the early morning when the sun was climbing over the distant mountains, eager for a breath of fresh air. The last stop was Milwaukee. The bus pulled into the depot and everyone climbed off.
"I guess I better wish you luck in Oregon. Save those forests, tiger," she said.
Jim paused a moment. "If you ever reach Puerto Rico and you find the same set of stuff that you were leaving, find me. I won't be home until September, but I'll give you my details. The name's Jim," he said. He stretched out a hand and she took it and pulled it to her stomach.
"Sadie," she whispered, her long eye lashes sweeping his cheek. She grabbed the slip of paper in his free hand and ran to the next bus, looking behind and waving child-like as she leapt on and handed her ticket to the bus driver. All the while Jim was trying to think.
"Wait!" he finally shouted out. It was too late though as the doors closed and Sadie looked down at the paper in her hands, lip between her teeth. Her jaw relaxed but her brow furrowed as she looked out the window as Jim waived his hands. She shook her head, and he shrugged his shoulder sorrowfully, giving a single wave of his hand as her greyhound sped off onto the intersection. The last of Sadie he saw was the slip of paper slammed against the window, clean as fresh snow, untouched by pen nor pencil.
Three days before
Jim slammed his fist against the wall next to the tellers booth. "What the fuck do you mean you don't have a service going through to Santiam National Park? You've just got that whole section of the I5 not on a service?"
"Listen kid, no-one travels that way, the service ain't gonna fund a bus to do the run if nobody uses it. Hitchike like every other idiot kid," the teller said. He did not have an Oregon accent. It sounded like the Yat accent in New Orleans, or the New York accent. It made Jim hate the teller more.
Jim walked away and headed towards the I5, his rucksack strapped tight across his chest and the Oregon sun already causing rivers of sweat to streak down the concave in his back, his shirt becoming a wet rag in mere minutes. Only another 115 miles to go.
The sun never relented, but people passing by obviously saw the condition of the poor boy. Five or six cars pulled over, all eager for him to jump in and let them drive him, but he was either too scared of being murdered and sold to a butchers as a cheap replacement for pork, or he was still trying to figure something out. Something, of what he wasn't sure, but definitely something. He took their water and food, guiltily and then happily, and would use their vehicles as respite from the sun, but he never took so much as a meter from his walk in a car. A cute girl pulled up and offered him a nap in the back seat while she could take them to Santiam, but he said he had enough time to sleep later. The fact she was very pretty made Jim more determined to continue walking. Was he a man yet?
The Day of
It wasn't until he had realised he wasn't squinting anymore that he knew he had hit a forest. Hopefully Santiam, he thought, but it was soon confirmed by a large wooden hand-carved sign by a gravel road. The boy followed the curve of the road around, sliding feet rifting up tornadoes around his ankles. His body leaned forward as if he were about to break into sprint, and his arms were fixed at the elbows but broken at the wrists like a caricature of a tyrannosaurus rex. The road wound up and through and down the trees of Santiam National Forest, but Jim followed reluctantly, eager to comply. His face was brown from sun burn on sun burn, all turning into sun tan. At the end of the last little hill, a monumental effort that included crawling at one point, James found the parking lot mentioned in the information packet. There were no cars, and no signs of humans. Maybe he had chosen a great posting, far away from human idiocy and their tendency to light things on fire, thought the guy who had walked 120 miles through blazing heat for a desperate attempt at understanding manliness. At a far corner of the gravel lot, under plenty of shade but well within view of the road, Jim set up his tent and crawled inside, finishing off one collected bottle of water and settling down for a nap with the other pressed tight against his burning chest.
It wasn't until considerably later, or only ten minutes, that Jim was awoken by a noise outside the tent. He couldn't even tell if it was tires or human steps, but he unzipped the fabric door nonetheless and peeked outside, the blinding sunlight forcing his eyes having to readjust ever so slowly.
At first, ditching the baseball scholarship to pursue a more stable career had seemed like a great idea. As much as Garrett loved the sport, it seemed more logical to major in something that proved to be a steady source of income rather than take his chances playing a game that may or may not be successful. Naturally, his father was delighted and was confident that his son would one day join him in the political arena that was the Georgian government. It was a very secure and sure future that was rather appealing in the heat of the moment. However, by Christmas time, he had come to the realization the economics and pre-law was not for him. Try as he might, he was struggling to keep his grades at passing, and by Easter, he was failing half of his courses. Granted, part of this was owed to the fact that skipping class was all too easy and it was much more fun to stay out late with friends rather than study for exams. By the end of the year, he had given up and was starting to worry about what the future held for him. In the midst of crummy professors, failed tests, and the spring midterms, all anyone could talk about was summer vacation and their plans for next year. Now that they were responsible adults, most of that entailed internships and working. It was then that a friend of Garrett's recommended a unique opportunity deep in the Oregon wilderness. "Maybe some time away to get your head straight and your feet planted will do you some good," he had said. The only reason he didn't go himself is because his health wouldn't allow it. 
