Jubilee Hitchhiker (10 page)

Dick and Barbara each went to stay with a different family. Baby Sandra was taken in by another. Several days later, when the floodwaters receded, they reunited, and Mary Lou made one last trip over to Glenwood to retrieve her possessions. She would never return. Barbara remembered wandering the riverbank with her brother. They found jars of salmon eggs washed out of the stores and full bottles of pop. It was like a treasure hunt.

After the flood, Mary Lou rented a place at Seal's Motel at 1600 Sixth Avenue West in Eugene, two rooms with a kitchenette and a shower for $149.50 a month. In
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
, Brautigan wrote of when he lived “in a cabin at an auto court, but we didn't have an automobile.” He claimed he and his family “were guests of the Welfare Department.” The fatherless Porterfield family was extremely poor. Mary Lou had worked as a waitress, never a lucrative job, even in the best of times. Now unemployed, with three kids at home, she often had to rely on public assistance over the next few years.

Dick Porterfield became a lifelong fisherman during his stay in Seal's Motel. At a time when Chambers Street more or less defined the western boundary of Eugene, the little motor court was practically out in the country. A half-dozen sawmills were located in the area, bordering logging ponds alive with bluegills, crappies, perch, and catfish. A steam railroad servicing the mills ran north and south, and the local highway rose on an arching overpass above the tracks. Beyond lay open fields and abandoned fruit orchards. Apples, pears, cherries, and plums grew wild on the edge of town. All waited within an easy walk for an eleven-year-old boy with adventure on his mind.

An old hermit lived in a shack built from packing crates at the edge of one pool. A family of fat people in bib overalls came at night to fish, unloading a roomful of furniture off a pickup, making themselves at home along the bank, fishing poles in one hand, coffee mugs in the other. An air of the fantastic permeates later literary descriptions of this bizarre logging pond world, but Barbara
remembered it all to be true. She was afraid of the old bearded man in the shack, but the large couple with their sagging sofa became a treasured memory from her nocturnal angling expeditions with Dick.

Barbara was entrusted to her brother's care when she was a toddler. The two Porterfield children went everywhere together. “The first memories I have, I have of [Dick] and not my mother or a stepdad,” Barbara recalled. “I never talked about anything with my mom, but if I had any problems or wanted to know anything, I'd always discuss it with [Dick]. I'd never go to my mother for advice or anything.” In his sister's opinion, Dick was given so much responsibility at such an early age, he “grew up very fast. Very fast.”

Barbara trusted her big brother completely. Walking to the logging ponds, they never followed Highway 99 because of the heavy traffic. There was only one way in and out of Eugene in those days, and the road was always very busy. The kids cut across abandoned fields and orchards instead, stopping to eat whatever fruit they came upon. During the day, they fished for bluegill, bass, and perch. Neither had proper equipment. Dick cut willow stems for poles, rigging them with string and safety-pin hooks. On a slow day or if they caught so many it grew boring, they jumped on the big logs floating in the ponds. Neither knew how to swim. The water stood over twenty feet deep, but they gave no thought to the danger involved. It was too much fun jumping from log to log, pretending to be lumberjacks.

At night, they returned to the ponds, angling for catfish. They built a big fire on the bank for warmth and because the light attracted fish. They stayed out quite late, past ten or eleven o'clock. If Mary Lou had concerns about her children's whereabouts, she made no mention of it. Dick had the responsibility of caring for his younger sister, and that was that.

Dick Porterfield proudly brought his nocturnal catch back to Seal's Motel. “He would supply nearly everybody with his darn catfish.” The little family on welfare ate a lot of fried catfish. Dick and Barbara heard people calling frog legs a gourmet delight and learned how to “jig” for them, dangling a treble hook baited with bits of red flannel in front of squatting bullfrogs.

When they brought the frogs home, Mary Lou refused to have anything to do with them. “They jump around in the pan,” she said. The Porterfields lived in the end unit at Seal's, down by the laundry room. On the other side lived “a real nice lady,” who shared the kids' gastronomic curiosity. “If you get any, I'll fry them for you,” she offered. Richard cut the legs off, and the neighbor lady cooked them. “It was the best food I ever ate,” Barbara reminisced.

One morning, Mary Lou answered a knock at the door. A neatly dressed stranger stood outside. “Mrs. Porterfield?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Robert Geoffry Porterfield.”

Another affirmative. The man asked if he could speak with Mr. Porterfield. Mary Lou told him her husband didn't live there. He inquired if she knew where to find him. “No. I haven't seen him for a long, long time.”

The stranger identified himself as an FBI agent. Tex Porterfield was charged with wartime desertion from the navy. Eddie Slovick, a U.S. Army private in France, had recently been executed by firing squad for a similar offense. Mary Lou's hair stood on end. She remembered Tex telling her, “You don't know what I did to get you.” The G-man asked a few more questions, but she wasn't much help, having no interest in finding Tex Porterfield. He was ancient history.

Dick Porterfield attended classes at Lincoln Elementary School, an old two-story clapboard building at the corner of West Tenth and Monroe, not far from Seal's Motel. Mary Lou never attended any school functions. When the time came for Barbara to start first grade, Dick brought her with him at the beginning of the fall term and parked her in the proper room. He had already previously enrolled himself so it didn't seem like such a big deal. Barbara remembered that when the teacher got to the end of the roll call, she asked if she'd missed anyone. Barbara Porterfield raised her hand. She didn't have the proper papers. The authorities went to talk with her brother, and things got straightened out.

The two kids did almost everything together. Not having money for real toys, they used their imaginations, improvising six-guns out of wood scraps and cutting tree branches for their fishing poles. They played guns a lot and were always running, pretending to be horses. A long-gone wrecking yard located about ten blocks from where they lived provided an enticing place to play King of the Mountain. They climbed over the wrecks, leaping from one junker to another. Barbara was afraid to jump and recalled her long-legged brother saying, “Come on. You can do it. You can do it.'”

Barbara gave it her best shot, landing half on and half off the adjoining wreck. Dick pulled her across, and she cut her knee. She started crying. “Hey, guess what?” Dick said. “You're King of the Mountain.” As if by magic, her knee no longer hurt.

Early in 1947, the Porterfield family moved from Seal's Motel to a rental belonging to Frances Shields, a woman with “a bunch of kids.” The Shields house seemed enormous after the confinement of motel life. A two-story home located at 1765 West Thirteenth Avenue between Grant and Hayes out in the country on the edge of town, beyond Chambers Street, where the Amazon Creek flooded the unpaved streets almost every year, turning the area into a vast swamp. People abandoned their cars and rowed around in boats until the spring runoff subsided.

“It was old, and several of the rooms upstairs weren't finished, and everything creaked,” Barbara remembered. Her mother worked late at various menial jobs, waitressing or cleaning motel rooms and medical offices downtown. “She'd leave, and we'd be there sometimes until twelve, one, two o'clock in the morning by ourselves. She couldn't afford a babysitter. Richard's job was to take care of me. He would fix my meals and tell me it was time to go to bed and get me up in the morning and get me ready for school. He was a surrogate mother.”

The Shields place stood surrounded by a huge yard shaded by old black walnut trees in front and cherry and apple trees out back. A perfect place for kids to play, but the new yard held much less interest for Dick and Barbara than the outlying fields and forgotten orchards or the eternal promise of angling adventure at the logging ponds. In the summer of 1947, the two youngsters began picking fruit to earn much-needed spending money. Dick already gathered discarded beer bottles (worth a penny each) along Highway 99, filling a gunnysack to the bursting point.

Blackberries provided a more accessible yield. In Oregon, the thorny vines grew unrestrained, weedlike, taking over vacant lots and coiling along the roadsides in concertina-wire profusion. “Blackberry Motorist,” a Brautigan short story, recalled the past. Near their new house, in “an industrial area that had seen its day,” vines engulfed the sides of several abandoned warehouses. Barbara remembered planks laid across the vast snarling thorn-bush, “like bridges.” The ripest berries grew toward the center, and much “medieval blackberry engineering” was required to reach their bounty. “I'm too heavy to go up there,” Dick told B.J., “so you go up and pick them.”

The kids peered into the “deep shadowy dungeon-like places” and discovered the carcass of a Model A sedan lurking within the tangled thorn fortress. Dick Porterfield tunneled his way through the needle-sting of the vines until at last he sat behind the wheel of the Model A, “staring from twilight darkness through the windshield up into green sunny shadows.” Barbara remembered the old Ford hidden by vines but had been scared to climb down inside. Dick clambered into the rusting car on every visit.

During blackberry season, the kids picked along the vast bramble “at least once, if not a couple times a week.” Some of their yield went home for jam making, but mostly they sold blackberries door-to-door by the quart when they “needed more money than the price of a movie.” Once, lacking enough ripe fruit to fill a basket, they packed the center with green ones artfully camouflaged by their best berries and sold it to an unsuspecting neighbor.

“It seemed like we always bought food with our money,” Barbara remembered. “Corn was like twelve ears for fifty cents. We would walk to the store, and he'd buy twelve ears. They'd always throw in an extra one. And we'd come home and that would be our lunch. I'd probably eat two ears. He'd eat eleven out of thirteen. Sit down and eat eleven ears of corn without stopping.”

Summertime meant commercial picking season. Dick and Barbara bought their own school clothes with earnings from picking on the farms in the Willamette Valley. “We'd have to buy everything for the whole year,” Barbara recalled. They weren't the only ones who needed the money. All the neighborhood kids picked beans and strawberries and cherries for two or two and a half cents a pound. Farm trucks collected the youngsters around six in the morning at designated spots downtown and hauled them out to the fields.

The kids worked in teams of two on either side of the bean rows, filling five-gallon metal buckets. Full buckets were emptied into burlap sacks tagged with the picker's name. The sacks held thirty to fifty pounds of beans. Once the sacks filled, they were tied off with twine and loaded onto trucks bound for the cannery. The goal was to pick a hundred pounds. The most industrious picked an additional hundred. The rowdy crowd horsed around instead, starting water fights.

Bean picking was “a miserable job,” according to Gary Stewart, who lived on the same hard edge of town as Dick Porterfield. They met in the summer of 1947, out at the big blackberry patch. The two boys became immediate friends, the “odd paths” of their imaginations linking on the outskirts of the fantastic. They wondered how it would be if the vines had actual muscles and could move like a blackberry octopus, coiling and striking with their briars. “Would they take over the world?” Dick and Gary spent all summer and much of the school year together.

They were dissimilar as Mutt and Jeff: a tall kid with white hair from a home broken many times and a short redhead from a big happy family. Gary's father, Milo Stewart, worked for the highway department and had converted to Mormonism five years before. Dick Porterfield attended no church although he read in the Bible every night before bed. Bonded by imagination and a shared poverty, they toiled in the bean fields and fished the logging ponds. Once, finding a nest of baby pigeons high in an unused lumber yard teepee burner, they speculated on how wonderful it would be to fly.

The two boys went camping at Paradise Campground sixty miles up the McKenzie, a swift dangerous river. They fashioned a lean-to from a tarp and length of rope, sleeping wrapped in blankets on the ground. A log had fallen across the main channel. Dick and Gary crossed this bridge many times to a deep pool on the other side where they could look down and see
beautiful huge trout holding. They dropped their bait right in front of them, catching “some pretty good fish.”

Several other kids remembered Dick Porterfield as a tall loner in overalls like Huckleberry Finn, hitchhiking up the McKenzie with his fishing pole. They called him “Whitey.”

Dick bought himself the best equipment as soon as he saved the money. Big commercial tackle suppliers like Eagle Claw manufactured inexpensive split bamboo cane rods. “He had a fly pole that he really, really liked,” Barbara recalled. “It broke down in three or four pieces and fit in this little bag with a drawstring.” Dick Porterfield enjoyed the freedom of a fatherless household. As if in celebration, his body grew eleven inches during his twelfth year.

“He towered over everybody.” Melvin Corbin, another kid living “out in the country,” on Eighteenth Street, remembered Dick Porterfield from the fifth grade at Lincoln. “All of a sudden, he was just there. I didn't think he belonged and asked the teacher, ‘How come this big kid is in grammar school?' She told me that he was just exceptionally big. That he was a genius. I didn't know what a genius was at the time.” Corbin's teacher claimed young Porterfield read at an eleventh-grade level.