The Treasure of a Friend 

 

         2008

 

Have you ever met somebody, and it seemed as though you’d known the person all your life?

 

 

It was the summer of 1975, during college. I had a job as a lifeguard, was off duty for two days, and was returning from visiting my folks, having hitchhiked the approximately hundred miles home the day before. I was in the Wisconsin Dells area, just north of my destination of Devil’s Lake State Park and the tiny cabin I was renting for the summer.

    It was a sunny day, warm and humid. The rides had been good, but now I found myself semi-stranded along Highway 12. The tourist traffic of the Dells area apparently was just not as hitchhiker-friendly as the rest of rural, southern Wisconsin. 

    Until finally, a car pulled over and stopped. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but I was about to meet my best friend of the next thirty-three years.

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    His name was Victor Ramsey. He was a lifelong bachelor in his early fifties, thirty years my senior. He was not a large man—his height was below average, his frame slender, with a bespectacled appearance that was neat and tidy. He didn’t normally pick up hitchhikers, not since a bad experience some years earlier, when his generosity in giving a lift to his fellow man resulted in an attempted carjacking. 

    However, when he spied me with my thumb out and discerned a nonthreatening demeanor, he allowed himself to make an exception to his rule. It was a comment I heard with some frequency on the road: “I don’t normally pick up hitchhikers, but you looked clean-cut and respectable, so I decided to stop.”

    We drove and talked. My ride had a rare authenticity about him, devoid of any pretense. He was a workingman, as down to earth as one could be. He had grown up on a farm in the area, the younger of several siblings. He had lived in Milwaukee for more than twenty years, eventually deciding to return to the rural area of his roots. He was kind enough to drop me off almost at my doorstep, my little cabin being among those at the corner of County DL and Old Lake Road, comprising a quiet haven called Silverdale Resort—my home for the summer.

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        Part 2.

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