The Young Rider

As soon as we rounded a corner near the top of Flesher Pass, I saw something conspicuous on the right side of the gravel road ahead of us. “What is that?” I asked Desiree.

“I don’t know,” she answered.

At first, I thought it might be a collection of junk someone had pushed out from their car door and left on the road, but as we drew closer, I could see it was a young man lying supine in a patch of shade provided by the thick forest around us. I stopped when we were alongside the young man and rolled down the passenger window for Desiree. “Ask him if he is okay, Des.”

The young man assured Desiree he was okay and then popped himself upright alongside the passenger door. He was clean-cut, not yet in his twenties, and clutching a nearly empty bottle of water. “Are you heading to Helena?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Can you give me a ride?”

“We are not actually going all the way into Helena.”

“Maybe you can give me a ride to the bottom of Flesher Pass?” In saying this, he appraised the truck and could see we had the back seat piled high with an assortment of things we were hauling home from the cabin. “I can ride in the box in back,” the young man added.

“Sure. Hop in.”

The young man clambered into the bed of the truck and we continued on our way, kicking dust up behind us. By the time we’d reached the highway at the bottom of the pass, Desiree and I agreed to offer the kid (he was a kid) a ride to Bob’s Valley Market in the valley. I stopped the truck and offered the kid a ride to the valley. “I can move the cooler into the back so you can sit up front,” I offered.

“I’m fine back here.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

I gave the man a fresh bottle of water from our cooler and asked, “Would you like something to eat?”

“If you have something.”

I gave the young man a cinnamon roll and then we drove on to the Helena valley in the ninety-degree heat. Desiree and I talked about the kid along the way. The young man was not unclean, he did not seem strung-out or lost, he was just a young man without resources. Maybe he had a troubled life back in Lincoln where his day started.

The kid jumped from the truck as soon as I drew to a stop in the parking lot at Bob’s. “Would you like something more to eat?” I asked.

“If you have something.”

I produced a few bites of cheese from our cooler and handed them over. “Is there someone you can call?” I asked.

“I know where I am going. Thank you.” The kid reached out one more time to shake my hand. He offered a firm handshake—a respectful and righteous handshake.

“Good luck to you,” I told him.

We soon pulled away to drive on as he began walking along the highway. Some people are meant to simply glance off your life in strange ways, as did the kid we picked up along the road home.

—Mitchell Hegman