In a scratchy drawing of a sheriff's posse on horseback, a wheelchair is tipped over in the desert. The sheriff turns to the others. "Don't worry," he says, "he won't get far on foot."
That caption is the name of the forthcoming Gus Van Sant movie about the life of prolific cartoonist John Callahan, a quadriplegic who spent his adult life zipping around Northwest Portland in a motorized wheelchair and published his bad-mannered drawings in Willamette Week for more than a quarter-century. It is also the epitaph on his grave.
Callahan, who died in 2010, believed in moving forward—by whatever means available.
"Self-pity or getting stuck was his enemy," says Rena Whittaker, executive director of the Good Samaritan Foundation. "What he loved to do was encourage people. To say, 'Hey, this is your life. What are you going to do with it?'"