Jubilee Hitchhiker by William Hjortsberg

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.
    â€œIt 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