A story about Tim O'Brien's "escape" versus getting drafted to the Vietnam War. The narrator, O'Brien, receives a drafting letter to the war. He leaves his parents heading for Canada. During O'Brien's journey of escaping his government commands, he visits this wise old man named Elroy Berdahl and stays with him for a couple of days doing a little manual labour probably questioning why he is here. The old man is like a new friend to the narrator; like one of those new friends where you just talk and listen to what the other is saying. The man only listens though, showing significant expressions on his face. It's like the old man knew why O'Brien was hiding or escaping from his hometown. He helps him escape, but eventually O'Brien punks out and starts hallucinating.
I felt awkward just reading the description of the old man and Tim O'Brien sitting in a boat with no one else around them; beautiful surroundings of nature and "the rainy river"; O'Brien crying his eyes out; seizing , making a fool of himself while the old man is failing to catch a single fish and imaginary people like President Lincoln watching the whole thing. I could picture it in my head. I felt so sorry for him. He was so close to the other side. It's almost like one of those movies where you wish the person would do what you say (if that makes sense) and everyone would have a happy ending. But, unfortunately, the person fails and you wonder what is going on in that person's head. In O'Brien's case, the people cheering him on into crossing that Canadian border was floating around in his head. And all he could do was cry and think about how embarrasing the moment was for him and Mr. Elroy.
However, if he did manage to cross that boarder between America and Canada, there would be know rest of the story. Tim O'Brien would have probably been married with children; not even having any experience in military. A middle class, boring man. But then I would have thought he was a person that would give up when something got hard. There are a lot of "what if's" in this story...
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