The Return of Rick

The last three nights we have the pleasure of playing host to my friend Rick and his girlfriend Erika, whom I met for the first time when they arrived at our driveway in her Toyota SUV, laden with all of their possessions (mostly her stuff, as Rick travels very light).

The last time I saw Rick was last June, when he was working as a cook at Camp Tamarack in the Oregon Cascades near Bend. He got canned from that job after complaining after the quality of the food being served to the kids---he's too much of a troublemaker that way. The good result was that he would up back in the hostel in Eugene, where he had been living before his adventure in the Cascades.

There he met Erika and shortly after that they moved in together, so that he finally had a bit of stability after the months of chaos following his abrupt ejection from his previous home in Fresno. In fact, as I pointed out to him, it was almost exactly a year since he arrived in sorry shape with his meager belongings at the bus station in downtown Portland, and I drove him out to our place on East Burnside, before checking him into a motel.

"You look soooooooo much better," I told him. "Ten years younger." It was true. He looked like a broken old man a year ago. He was taller and straighter, and with more color in his cheeks.

"You saved my life," he told me, soon after his arrival here, as we mused about the weirdness of the recent events in our lives. "Who would have known that the next time we saw each other it would be in Arizona?"

I was so pleased that they had made it here to our house in Fountain Hills. Despite my vociferous and repeated invitations, I was not sure I would see them here. Rick had said that on their way East they wanted to the take the "southern route," but I feared they would cave to the "shortest route" principle and cut across Nevada instead. I was happy to be proved wrong.

It was only a couple weeks ago that they were holed up in a cheap motel in Troutdale, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia, waiting out the snow and ice storms. At the time they were attempting to negotiate the purchase of an old gas station (with living quarters) in a tiny town in Eastern Washington on the highway between Spokane and Pullman. It looked like almost a sure thing. But the deal soured, as it turned out that they might not be able to live on-sight after all. I was a bit relieved myself when it fell through, as somehow it didn't seem right for them.

Then followed another attempt at a house in rural Eastern Washington, but it turned out to lack basic amenities such as running water. Not a good start for a potential AirBnB business. They had some cash to play around with for upgrades, but it is not infinite.

After another week, in which they cooled their heels in Troutdale, they changed plans radically. They were both tired of the Northwest and decided to look for something very far away to the East. A short search found an ideal property on a house that is almost 200 years old, and which seems ideally suited for turning into a AirBnB property, as it on a tourist circuit. The location of this I will not divulge for now, since I don't feel it is my prerogative to do so, suffice it to say that is very far away from the Pacific Northwest.