So it all came down to this: We were going to be eaten by coyotes, frozen, poisoned by spiders or killed by porta-potty stench. We were alone in the wilderness. I could hear my ancestors whispering to each other in pioneer heaven: “She’s from your side of the family! My roommate sat on a rock, her sobs masked by the rushing water of the river invisible in the darkness.
Then, out of nowhere, a sudden wave of the kind of righteous anger that only a pampered suburban princess in danger of not getting her way can experience passed over me. Channeling my inner Scarlett O’Hara for the equivalent of pulling down the drapes in Tara to make a dress, I rummaged the bottom of my filthy daypack for my one remaining soggy Kleenex. Wiping off my face and shoes I marched back to the fishing camp. Marlboro Man was now sitting in his battered pickup, listening to the radio. Something about the determined look on my face must have impressed him, for he rolled down the window as trudged up. “You have to have to help us!” I demanded. MM looked at this new, enhanced version of me with a different expression. “So your group really hasn’t come back for you?” “No,” I said. “And they’re not going to. If you don’t take us to Maupin and something happens to us, it will be your fault” I declared like the lawyer I didn’t then know I was destined to become. “All right,” said Marlboro Man, grinding out his cigarette in the pickup’s ashtray, “Get in.” Desperately concealing my tears of joy at my new-found powers of persuasion, I shouted for my roommate to join us.
The ride to Maupin was surprisingly uneventful. Clouds of ghostly late-summer moths danced in the bouncing cone of the pickup’s headlights while ground squirrels darted across the washboarded road. A conversationless twenty minutes after leaving Shearer’s Falls, our savior dumped us unceremoniously in the financial district of a town that can best be described as a badly-imagined Hollywood Wild West movie set.
Across the street was a bar dim with burned-out lightbulbs and loud with jukebox country music. We peeked timidly in through the ripped screen door to see a tableau vivant of buxom, leathery-skinned women of a certain age, rawboned older men in threadbare chambray shirts with bolo ties, and a scowling bartender. Half expecting to jukebox soundtrack to switch to Ennio Morricone’s whistling theme from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” I shuffled up to the bar and asked if I could use the telephone. In an eerie repeat of the afternoon’s experiences with Marlboro Man, he said “No, and get out of here. You’re underage.” I was sure what he really meant was “You’re a snot-nosed suburbanite college kid like all the others who parade through here every summer with your fancy gear and your shirts with the little man riding a horse embroidered on them. Well, little missy, we ride real horses around here and don’t need no fancy-pants sissies from Seattle and Portland telling us what to do. Now scram while I go shoot some spotted owls.” Anyway, since I actually was underage and was sick of arguing with people at this point, we left.
It was now getting cold. Across the street stood a phone booth, its halo of hospital-bluish-white fluorescent light an oddly uninviting beacon in the surrounding blackness. Between us my roommate and I determined that we had 35 cents, enough for one phone call, like condemned prisoners. We squoze into the booth, shutting the door behind us against the growing cold, nervously pushed the coins into the slot and dialed. The operator answered, sounding nearly as cranky as the bartender. I explained our situation. “That’s not a real emergency,” [historical note – this was before 911 existed]she responded. “Call back later if no one comes to pick you up. In despair, begged for a number for the Sheriff’s Department. The operator relented and started reading it to me, when I suddenly realized I didn’t have a pen. Just as all hope appeared to be lost, my roommate pulled a half-eaten peanut-butter sandwich out of her bag. Leaning up against the phone booth’s glass door, she wrote the number in peanut butter on the back of the lunch bag.
As fate would have it, at that moment I spotted a Wasco County Sheriff’s car trolling slowly by. I dropped the phone and burst out of the phone booth, skittered briefly on the loose gravel and took off in a burst of speed that would have made Florence Griffith-Joyner proud. Seeing an apparently insane person running behind their squad car, and lacking Marlboro Man’s freedom to ignore us, the officers stopped. As I ran up, the officer on the passenger side actually rolled up the window and pulled his shotgun forward, not pointing it at me but making sure I could see it. ‘This is absurd,’ I thought. ‘They’re afraid of a 100-pound unarmed coed?' I pounded on the window, and Officer Friendly lowered it a crack. “What do you want?” By this time my roommate, who had started crying again because she hadn’t seen the squad car at first and thought I had finally snapped and gone insane, came up to join us. I explained our situation. As usual, my sublime persuasive powers yielded utter disbelief, until I got to the part about the plan to take the injured girl to the hospital in The Dalles. The officer radioed the hospital, and lo, a miracle occurred. The hospital confirmed that yes, a group of rafters had been there late that afternoon, and had discovered that two of their members were missing. The officers softened immediately. “Come with us,” they said. “It’s a long way to The Dalles [about 50 miles]” so we’ll get you something to eat and drink and then we’ll take you there. They called the owner of a nearby coffee shop, who came down in her bathrobe from her apartment above the store, unlocked the door and seated us in a dark booth and gave us powdered donuts and glasses of orange soda. We were regaling the officers with our adventures when I spotted headlights coming down the gravel road. It was one of our vans. For the second time in the evening I sprang up and sprinted out into the street, waving frantically. The van screeched to a halt, and our friends came tumbling out. “We thought you were in the other van!” “We didn’t realize you were gone until we got to The Dalles!” “We drove all the way back shining a flashlight on the side of the road looking for you!” Thanking the officers, we clambered into the van and headed east back toward the college, into the faintest suggestion of dawn.
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