You Can’t Get There From Here

D. E. Larsen, DVM

It was finals week for Spring term at Oregon State University. I had been out of the Army for almost a year now.

I never had to study much, but tomorrow I have a final exam in Physics. Courses requiring math made me do a little review. I was a whiz at math in high school and the first couple of years of college. But after nearly four years in the Army, not using math at all, I had to work a little now.

I got up from the kitchen table in my little trailer house and poured the last few drops of coffee into my cup. I had bought this old trailer house for two thousand dollars and lived in a trailer park on the western edge of Corvallis. It wasn’t much, a model from the 1950s. It had probably been a showpiece in its day. But it served its purpose for one or two people, and the living expenses were cheap.

It was dark out, so it must be after nine.

Just as I returned to the table, there was a knock at the door. It startled me enough that I slopped a little coffee on the math problem I had been studying.

I set my cup on the table and opened the door. Everything was very compact, so I only had to take a step or two to reach the door.

There, standing in front of me, were two guys from the shop in Germany, Ron Tibbits and Jamie Marks.

“What the hell are you two up to?” I asked.

“We both just got out of the Army,” Jamie said. “I was out here visiting my sister in Portland, and Ron drove down from Tacoma to say hi. We sort of ran out of stories to tell each other. I mean, we both knew the stories anyway, so we figured we would run down here and see if we could find you.”

“Come on in,” I said. “Things are sort of a mess, this is finals week, so I have been a little busy.”

The three of us just about filled the room. I realized that the coffee pot was empty, and I knew that neither one of these guys drank beer. I didn’t have much to offer them.

“We had quite a time finding this place,” Ron said. “We had your address from the phone book, but I sort of got turned around, and we ended up on some hill over on the north side of town.”

“There was this old guy out walking his dog,” Jamie said. “We stopped and asked him how to get to fifty-third Street. He turned in circles like a dog getting his bed ready, almost tripping himself with his dog’s leash. He finally looked at us, confused like, and said, ‘You can’t get there here.”

“I thought Jamie was going have a heart attack. He was laughing so hard,” Ron said. “Anyway, we turned around, got back downtown, and figured out the street numbers, and here we are. We would have been here a lot soon if that old guy knew his town a little better.”

“So listen, I’m a little cramped for quarters here,” I said. “If you guys plan to stay the night, one of you gets the couch, and the other gets the floor.”

“We told Jamie’s sister we would be back tonight,” Ron said. “So she is planning on us tonight. It looks like you are busy anyway. We don’t want to have you flunk a test just because we showed up.”

“I really don’t have to study much,” I said. “This will be a multiple choice test, just like one of those Army tests. I will breeze through in half the time, miss a few questions because I failed to read the negative in the question, but I will get a solid B. That’s all I need out of this class.”

“You sound like you are doing okay here,” Jamie said.

“School is much easier now than before the Army,” I said. “I have more money for one thing, but I also realize there are worse places I could be.”

“Like a hundred feet up a frozen antenna tower,” Jamie said. “My feet still bother me from that climb.”

“Say, why don’t we run downtown, and I will buy you guys a cup of coffee and a bite to eat before you head out of here.”

We went downtown and talked over a couple cups of coffee until after midnight. We rehashed our time together on the East German border and then on our plans for the future.

My future was well planned, with another five years of school. Ron was hoping for an apprenticeship as an electrician. Jamie was still hoping to plan for next year, as the ink was not dry on his discharge papers.

They loaded into their car and headed back to Portland, over an hour’s drive, and I went home and closed the book on my physics review.

Morning came, I got my B in physics, Ron did land his apprenticeship, and Jamie ended up working back east. Five or six years later, I visited with Ron while I was living in Enumclaw. Jamie, I never saw again.

Photo by Dirk Schuneman on Pexels.