The Wanderer

Yesterday, I spent the better part of my 4 hour shift hiding with my self-propelled, push lawnmower.

Our team is a lawn-mowing MACHINE. We've DOMINATED the grass at Peter's Pond Park. there was seriously nothing left to mow. My two teammates took the day off, I sat in the woods.

I pushed my mower back to the garage an hour early and was just cleaning it when another member of the maintenance team came running up. There was some random dude talking to our maintenance supervisor, and the kid who came running up to me explained that the random was stoned as hell, just BLAZED, and was looking for someone named Ellie Straw in a Rockhurst trailer. The guys had referred him to the office, twice, but each time he came back to say the office was closed, or there was no one in there (it was open, and there were TWO people in there).

The guy had flowers, which I heard were dead, and wanted to tell Ellie that he loved her. He thought that our supervisor, Gary, was Ellie's dad. He is not.

WE tried to help the kid, but he was seriously messed up. He didn't make any damn sense. I went to the office, but there were no Straw's in the campground. The kid was just wandering around. One of the employees had found him sitting on a bench in his site, and had been following him since (ironically, it was one of my mowing teammates on his day off).

Eventually, we decided we couldn't have a lit up burnout just wandering the grounds, so a guy from the office escorted him out of the grounds. Moments later he came running back in from just inside the fence.

The office called the cops.

As just that time, a green pickup came up to the front and picked the kid up. Two of the maintence kids had make sense of some of the muttering and incoherent rumblings this kid was tossing out like wordvomit, and found the site he was looking for.

The kid was messed up. We were trying to talk to him up by the gate and he came up with something along the lines of "Tell me something, does all of America think it's funny that I'm the new version of the Truman show? I'm 21. I don't need this, I don't need everyone here messing with my mind."

Seriously, if you cut the kids skull open, I bet you'd find something that looked like green split pea soup, only much much more runny.

Well, as were standing up by the gates talking about it, the cops showed up. Three cars, unmarked SUV and car, and a squad. At first they thought I was the guy! The description they had: Red hair, red braided beard and white t-shirt.

I guess I have a beard and was wearing a white t-shirt, but C'MON!

Well, the cops went down to the site, and after about 15 minutes they came back with the kid in the back of the squad car. They were taking him to the hospital to get checked out.

On his way out, the cop in the squad car asked me "Sure you don't wan't to come? Half day of work?"

I suppose he thought he was clever......