Super Dave Needs to Be Rescued

Today, I met Super Dave, stranded at a Subway sandwich store by the highway. Super Dave is a transient, a man without a home, who for the last seven years has spent all of his time biking up and down the coast with his faithful dog, Jasper, and a cart full of gear in tow.

But when I came upon him, his derailleur was broken. He had run over a piece of plastic, and it had gotten caught in his gears, and now it was a twisted hunk of useless metal. (For those of you who don’t know what a derailleur is, it’s the mechanism that switches gears. If it’s messed up, the bicycle can’t be ridden, unless the chain is shortened and the derailleur is bypassed, but we didn’t have to tools to do that.)

I wanted to take a picture and interview Super Dave, but I felt weird asking. Journalists always seem to flock to the homeless, prostitutes, drug addicts, and anyone else in terrible, often public, situations when they want Pulitzer-baiting fodder. And so often, the people they cover get little help, and are forgotten. So I feel nervous and ashamed when talking to them, much more when asking to take their picture.

But I can describe him. He was tall and very lanky, with a heavily-weathered face and thin, white hair that stuck to the back of his neck. He obviously had a hard time, having the scars and wounds to prove it. He pulled up his pants leg to show me a bandage that needed replacing, covering something I really didn’t want to see. Apparently, doctors have tried to amputate his leg a few times, but he’s sure he can work through it. (He said he was once hit by a car and paralyzed, and he recovered from that when the doctors said he couldn’t, so I guess that’s proof.)

All he does all year long is bicycle from the Mexican border to the Canadian border, camping out by the side of the road, and depending on the kindness of strangers. He says that he gets about $20 every week, which is enough for him to but enough oatmeal to eat. He never begs, just takes what he is offered freely.

And that included his companion Jasper. A black lab-looking dog (I don’t know anything about dog breeds), the old mutt lays docilely beside Dave as he brushes his coat with a black come. Without a permanent address and a job, Dave can’t adopt from shelters, so a church group did it for him.

In fact, churches do a lot for him. Or, as he puts it, “God always provides for me, without even asking. He always makes sure I have what I need. It’s because of Him I’m still here.”

Super Dave goes to any and every church he comes into contact with, be they Pentecostal, Episcopal, or UCC. After all, he doesn’t stick to one city, so why stick to one denomination? “Sometimes God and Jasper are all I have, and all I need,” he says.

Know what the kicker is? Dave wouldn’t have it any other way. “People always act like they pity me, but they’re just jealous. They’re jealous of folks like you and me,” he told me. “We’ve got a freedom they’re afraid to have. People want what we’ve got, but all they have are jobs and things to tie them down. Yep, we’ve got the life.”

Amen. (Although, it is a bit lonely for me, without a dog.)

I passed a lot of the day with Dave, trying my best to figure out a way to shorten his chain so he could just make it to the next town and get his bicycle fixed. No one else seemed to want to help him, and none of the pickup trucks would give him a ride. Dave suggested that we rope his bike to the back of my bike, and I tow him to Eugene. And he wasn’t joking.

I’m not that strong.

So I had to leave him. To bike in the rain. Again. It never stops raining. Never.

At least there’s elk!