Jubilee Hitchhiker by William Hjortsberg Page A

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.
    â€œIt 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