"BLINDED BY THE LIGHT"...... CHAPTER 2

 

   I recently had a disturbing flashback (or I thought I did), to a long forgotten memory of a tragic and enigmatic incident told to me by my late Uncle.  It was the tale of a teenage boy who disappeared while hitchhiking at night on a remote country road, only to turn up dead (after several days of being missing),  just a few yards off that road in a wooded area,  under very mysterious circumstances.  In fact the memory was so foggy and I wasn't sure if it really happened or if I imagined it, as I was probably only six or seven years old when it occurred.
   I went to the local library looking through dusty, old newspapers until I found what I was searching for and indeed my memory was correct.  I discovered a brief story there about the strange and unsolved occurrence.   I even found the name of the newspaper's reporter and called him on the telephone and yes he did remember the article that he had written many years before as well as the shock and disbelief of the victims family.
   It was the mysterious death of a young man who was found dead of exposure just yards off a country turnpike, after having disappeared two nights before.  It was a sad and unanswerable tale of a lethal combination of alcohol abuse and youthful impulsiveness, or was it ? ...

Somewhere in rural Pennsylvania.... dead of winter.... sometime in the late 1970's

  The mystical and reverbing intro to "Blinded by the Light" came on just as the gorgeous symphonic chorus of "Dancing Queen" faded out.  The pony tailed, nineteen year old at the dumpy, roadside bar had just finished his third bottle of beer and was about to head home and out on foot into the chilly winter night.  "Denny-Yves"  had to walk the five miles plus home though, as he had lost his drivers license after acquiring several tickets for driving under the influence.  Patrons at the bar said that he seemed to be fine when he left the tavern, but he was never seen alive again... until he was found dead, face down in a half frozen forest stream just within view of the country road that he was walking on.
  There were many strange questions to his death and why he was found where he was. He was discovered in an area that made no sense to hike through as it was a very swampy and overgrown part of the forest with painful thickets of green-briar, pricker bushes and impenetrable thorny vines.  Why would he try to enter the woods there with all of those obstacles?  It would only be heading in the wrong direction to deeper forest and not to any road or path home.  It turns out that there were an abandoned small group of bungalows half a mile into that area, that many young people went to drink alcohol, smoke and do whatever else.  Was he going there to meet someone, or maybe just to rest?  But why there, after being in the bar all night?  Nothing made sense and still doesn't make sense today, all these decades later.  He was found with bruises on his shins and a bruise on the side of his face where he fell (supposedly fell).  It seems to be that after all of these years since this mysterious death that no one knows what really happened to D-Yves but he himself, or they're not talking, and it could just be that it comes down to alcohol impairing better judgement with deadly consequences.
   He was buried on Valentines Day at nineteen years old.  He was a slim but very fit youth of French Canadian descent and so everyone found it shocking and unbelievable, that he could just fall in the woods and die of exposure in the manner that he was reported to have died.   It was said that he would often hitch hike to get around and knew short cuts through the power lines and deep forests of the area.  So why did he end up in this swampy area that lead to nowhere?  His parents were clueless and had no knowledge of the life that he had been living under their roof.  He was leading a secret orbital existence of abusing alcohol and other substances every day,  all fueling an uncontrollable drive to be out on the road with or without a car, constantly .
   The case of D-Yves came and went like a brief cold wind and no findings of his mysterious death were ever released.  Strangely, know one ever discussed it again and forgot about him and his tragic ending almost immediately.  It was possibly that toxic combination of alcohol and the irrational behavior that comes with it that ended a life at only nineteen years old.  Years later,  the patch of swampy, roadside forest where he was found is now an asphalt-paved over area of small stores and no one in that town even remembers the name of the hitch hiking boy who died there mysteriously.