I’m not the kind of guy who picks up hitchhikers. In fact, in my sixty years, I had never even considered giving some freeloader a ride. But that day was anything but normal, and I found myself with a complete stranger named Dakota in the passenger seat of my Volkswagen.
He looked just like every other vagrant that stands by the highway with his thumb in the breeze and all his worldly possessions on his back. His long brown hair was tied back with a braided string. His arms bore the sinew of years of manual labor. Pale blue jeans with a hole in the left knee and a flannel shirt covered his lanky frame, and a pair of dirty brown workboots completed the ensemble.
The song playing on the oldies station brought to mind the first time I had heard it; those mop-headed English boys were just what a defiant American youth needed back in 1964. Decades later, the sweet harmony of “I’m into Something Good” still made me feel like a teenager.
Dakota must have noticed me enjoying the song. “You really like these guys, huh?”
“Herman’s Hermits have always been one of my favorites, but I was enjoying the memories more than the song. Ah, those were the days.”
He turned to me with a puzzled look on his face. “You aren’t enjoying these days?”
“I’m trying, Dakota, but when you get to be my age, life has worn you down a bit. I can’t read the paper without my glasses, I have to pull myself out of a chair, and I wake up three times a night to pee. When the present is wretched and the future, what little there is left of it, stands to be worse, all we old folks have left to enjoy is the past.”
“Jerry, you aren’t that old. There’s no reason to give up on life when you have so much of it yet in front of you.”
“I have about ten years left, maybe twenty if I’m lucky. Twenty years of declining health, growing dependence, and deteriorating mental faculties. It’s not something I’m looking forward to.”
I expected he would give me some old cliché like ‘you’re only as old as you feel.’ Instead he asked a simple question. “How old do you think I am, Jerry?”
“I don’t know, 30?”
“Way too low.”
“Maybe a bit older than that, say 40?” He shook his head again, and jerked his thumb skyward as I called off numbers. “45? 50? 55? Come on, you aren’t that old.”
“I’ll be 139 years old this September.”
I laughed at the preposterousness of his statement, but instead of laughing with me, he quietly stated, “I’m serious. I was born in 1868. My father fought for the South, by the way.”
“It’s not possible. The oldest person alive today is 110 or so. And she looks it. How can you be that old? And how can you look as young as you do? Are you some kind of medical oddity, like those kids that age too fast, only backwards?” Without even trying to answer, he reached into his pack and pulled out a smaller bag that was tied closed with his headband’s twin.
I watched transfixed as he pulled the string; the bag was moving, pulsing in a chaotic rhythm. “There are a lot of things the ancients knew, that we modern folks have forgotten or dismissed. Most of them are what we believe them to be, nonsense and myth.” He put his hand into the now writhing bag. “But a few are the real thing. The Fountain of Youth that Ponce de León sought wasn’t a pool of water, it was these.” As he spoke the last sentence he pulled his hand from the bag, holding in it a shiny black beetle about two inches long, its legs and antennae wiggling furiously.
“There are more species of Coleoptera than there are of plants. Do you know why that is?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s because beetles don’t die, at least not from natural causes. You eat a few of these a day, and you can get that benefit. Think about it Jerry, forever young.”
He reached over, offering me the struggling insect. I was too stunned to refuse it. Then he reached into the bag and pulled out another. “Cheers,” he said as he tilted his bug toward mine. The he popped it into his mouth and with a sickening crunch, bit into it. After some horrific chewing he swallowed.
“Now you,” he said as he gestured toward the beetle I held between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. I lifted my hand and felt the tickle of hard insect legs on my lips as I opened my mouth. Sensing my hesitation Dakota offered encouragement. “What have you got to lose?”
“Indeed,” I thought. "What have I got to lose.”