For the Wild-Hearted Souls

I needed a ride from Medford to Portland. The idea of seeking out a carpool on Craigslist was, to put it lightly, “sketch as balls”, but the fact of the matter is, I’m cheap. And the Greyhound bus was expensive. So I called up the most reliable-sounding ride I could find last-minute, and had one of my beefy man friends drive me over to meet said ride. 

The hospital was a strange randevu point, I thought, but trusted that it would all make sense eventually. And it did when I saw the driver leaning beside his pale blue four-door, smoking a cigarette, with a big cooler at his knees. Doug was the guy who transported blood, organs, and drugs between the hospital in Medford and the one in Portland every single day, five days a week. The hospital paid for his gas money, so he’d begun offering rides to make a bit of extra spending cash on the side. 

He was an older guy - had been married, but then divorced, and had a beer belly despite living a pretty outdoorsy lifestyle. He had black facial hair, and looked kind of like he belonged in a two-tone Ska band, though I couldn’t say exactly why; he just did. 

I was apprehensive about him at first. He was gruff, blunt, and opinionated. He had a short way of talking about things, but somehow seemed to dominate the conversation even so. And he had two mysterious scars on either side of his face, running diagonally down his cheeks. They were made by a blade; I knew that much from studying my own scars. But despite being wide and deep, the wounds hand’t been stitched closed. 

Doug asked me to hand him a CD case under my seat. I worried about what kind of music he’d want to listen to, for I had forgotten my own headphones, and would have to grin and bear it if he picked something I didn’t enjoy. I wasn’t about to tell him what he could and could not listen to in his own car. 

But instead of CDs, the case contained movies on DVD, and he picked on and pushed into the car’s player. Thus, we rolled on down the road at seven miles over the speed limit while Doug watched his movie, chatted with me, and texted his friends, all while driving perfectly between the margin lines. Even so, I was sitting there, white-knuckled and tense the whole time. 

At one point on the freeway, a massive 18-wheeler cut us off. Doug was pissed - I could feel it. So when we passed by the trucker again, Doug rolled down my window and said, “Do me a favor: Give that guy a piece of my mind, would ya?” 

So I shrugged and stuck my hand out the window, and flipped off the driver. 

Such was Doug. 

I drove to Portland with him many times after that. He made venison chili for me once, and when he picked me up at the truck depot, he’d have me order dinner for him at the Taco Bell. In the summertime, I borrowed a tent from him to use at Burning Man. And once, he drove me to and from Ashland to pick up my passport, which I’d left in my dorm before leaving PDX for a trip to Grand Cayman, even though Ashland was not on his route.

We became friends, though he hardly contacted me outside of sending me an audio file of Dueling Banjos at 6:00 in the morning as an inside joke (he’d made me watch Deliverance on one of our trips in retaliation to me making him watch some equally twisted movie the previous week). And I hardly contacted him unless I needed a ride. 

But it’s funny how you meet certain people sometimes. He is an interesting character, and I do hope I’ll find the time to see him again. Even if I don’t though, I’ll probably never forget him. Every trip with Doug was kind of like an adventure.