These Times

What Ron did during Monday’s high heat

Kirk Ericson | Jul 11, 20240

Our five-day heat siege made me worry about Ron, a friend who’s in his mid-60s and lives without several 21st-century conveniences, like electricity. He has a residence, but barely.

Maybe you, too, had someone you worried about during our sweat dome. It was that kind of hot.

Ron lives alone in the sticks in Thurston County, and he makes money by manual labor, and by selling the art he makes and the treasures he finds. He fishes most of his food from dumpsters and his winter heat comes from wood he scrounges. Ron’s cash goes to rent and not much else.

Ron doesn’t have a car. He has a bike, and he told me he’s biked the distance to the moon — 238,900 miles — and is now halfway on his return trip to Earth. That’s 358,350 miles in 50 years. That’s an average of about 7,000 miles a year, or 20 miles a day. Ron weighs the same today as he did in high school.

A friend of ours, John, remembers bicycling about 20 years ago and having Ron breeze past him on his unicycle up a long, steep hill. Ron is nearly 25 years older than John.

Ron answers to no one, especially anyone who’d like him to show up at a particular time. It seems a hard way to go through life, but Ron has a joy about him. He enjoys life in a fundamental way that others do not.

About 10 years ago, Ron showed up at our house to see whether we had any yard work. He needed money to pay back rent to his landlord.

“You need it today?” I asked.

“Yeah. He says he’s going to evict me.”

“Isn’t he always threatening to evict you?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, grinning slightly. “But I think he means it this time.”

I hadn’t seen Ron in several weeks until Monday night. When the weather turns extreme and I haven’t heard from him, I go looking. I found him Monday around 9 p.m. at the Town Tavern, the kind of bar where if you ask bartenders whether they’ve seen Ron, they might deny knowing anyone by that name.

Ron was sitting at the bar. He said he was able to buy a beer because he sold a poster of Kurt Cobain for $4 that he found at Goodwill. Then he corrected himself. “Actually, it wasn’t a beer. It was a gin and tonic. It’s a really good drink for the heat, and it comes with ice.”

I asked how he was doing. He said he hurt his arm 10 days earlier, and that he had 27 cents in his pocket. Then said he’d been riding around for 19 hours, bicycling around Olympia, Tumwater and Lacey, scouring Goodwill, finding two unopened sports drinks in a garbage can in a park, taking a 6 a.m. nap on some grass in downtown Olympia, looking for our friend Doug because he had a bicycle he could sell …

I interrupted, which you have to do with Ron.

“You haven’t worked in 10 days?” I asked.

“Unless you consider riding my bike all day looking for treasure not working,” he said.

I had another question. It was 9 p.m. now, I told him, so if he’s been riding around for 19 hours, that means he would have started his day at 2 a.m.

Pause.

“What’s today?” he asked.

“Monday,” I answered.

Turns out, he’d been up and riding around for 37 straight hours.

“Has the heat affected you?” I asked.

“Sometimes I get heat strokes,” he said, “but I was at the Goodwill for three hours and they have air conditioning. I found this lighter with a neat image of the Space Needle, and I know Catherine [my wife] likes Space Needle stuff …”

Good. Ron was OK.