At the end of my first week on the job, I stayed in Quincy instead of going back to Portland with Bob who drove to Portland on Friday's and back to Quincy Sunday night.
On Saturday, after the flag ceremony and after lunch, I had nothing to do, so I walked down the highway toward Rock Island Dam and Wenatchee to Trinidad.
Trinidad was a rail stop.
It had one building, the Smith Brother’s General Store.
This store was like a portal to another century.
It was a silver, weathered gray three-story wood building that didn’t look like anything I had ever seen, except possibly in western movies.
I had an unpleasant cop experience on the way back to Quincy when a state cop stopped in front of me as I walked up the highway and asked me if I wanted a ride.
Although this was probably mile five of a seven or eight-mile walk, I was happy with walking, and certainly didn’t want a ride from a cop.
But he insisted, citing the heat of the day and distance yet to be traveled as reasons.
The heat was fine and I wanted the exercise, but I had the feeling that refusing the ride was going to cause cop suspicion and paranoia.
I couldn’t help but see George the Cop - a guy hired by our neighborhood association in Portland to put on a uniform and drive around at night and shine flashlights out his car window at the neighborhood kids: a paragon of professional cop paranoia - in front of me, so I got in.
By the time we had arrived in Quincy I had been asked obliquely every way he could think of just what it was that I was doing walking out in the middle of nowhere in the heat of the day.
Getting in the car, it turned out, hadn’t dampened his cop suspicion and paranoia.
I think the only thing that saved me was that when he let me out at Henry’s Motel, I actually went right into a room.
Just like I had told him, I was renting a room from Henry.
“Maybe,” he must have thought, “he actually does work for Pettijohn.”
