Fellow Traveler

"We moved into this RV park 6 years ago. Sold our home in Oregon and got rid of all our stuff. That was the hard part. Letting go of my tools... my fish poles. I had some nice tools. The garage sale lasted a week...."

"I don't know what I'm going to be doing when I get up everyday... unscheduled."

"How's that working for you?" I asked.

"Great... wish we'd done it 10 years sooner." He sits in his comfortable lawn chair under the umbrella and reads. Six foot, five inches, tanned, wears a large brimmed straw hat and shorts. Smokes unfiltered Tucson's. Indian cigarettes, cheap... no tax. I spoke to him one morning after noticing a masonic sticker on the front of his RV. He was master of his lodge... several times... in Newport, Oregon. Found it interesting that my father was master of the lodge in Newport VT. Another coincidence, he had worked as a captain on Foss Tugboats around the Pacific.

In the 50's, he was on a Coast Guard supply ship steaming around the far east; China, old Hong Kong, Subic Bay. He said he most enjoyed the small islands, talked about showing movies on the wharf for the native islanders, of walking through the jungles, avoiding the wild dogs, to climb through the caves and tunnels the Japanese had built during WWII, coming across, derelict tanks, planes, bones...

He was at sea, off Seldovia, south of Homer Alaska when the big earthquake hit in 1964. He said it felt like they had hit a reef. "Just picked us up out of the water and shook us." They received orders to return to port. He talked about the utter devastation along the waterfront in Anchorage

I told him we were roughly following the highways that William Least Heat Moon had written about in his 1978 book, Blue Highways and that Moon had stopped in Depoe Bay, Oregon. He told me that is where he had lived, working at the Coast Guard base. Lots of coincidences...

We talked about routes, stops, weather, roads. Fellow traveler, Master seaman, Master Mason; quite a man.