THE OPEN ROAD

I worked late tonight. I got caught on a gas leak in--huzzah!--Pontiac, a gas leak in which a gas main had somehow broken underground (60-year-old steel pipes tend to do just that) and the natural gas had subsequently begun to collect in the sewar systems. Always a dicey situation!

But, hell, I wrote enough about work yesterday. This is about the drive home from work.

It was 12:48 in the morning. The weekend had just gone to bed and people working normal hours had done the same. So it was just me on the highway, good ole I-75 South. Across the median, I saw a few or ten semis hurtling past in the other direction. Where were they going? What were they hauling? Did they have any good stories?

It struck me then: Why would anyone want to be a trucker? You work un-Godly hours, you're always by yourself, oftentimes there is no one else on the road....

Oftentimes there is no one else on the road....

Maybe I'm kind of an introvert and maybe it manifests itself in this manner, but: I LOVE the empty open dark road. The open lonely road. No one but you and your God, flyin' a balls-to-the-metal 80MPH. (Or 90, but don't quote me.)

It's meditative, I think. Actually, I know it is. I wouldn't be writing this, otherwise. You turn on the radio, crack a window (even if it's 40 degrees) and you just let your mind...wander. There is nothing to think of (with no asshole drivers veering in and out of traffic, no turn signals to remember). There is nothing to think of, so that's exactly what you do.

Images and memories and snatches of conversations and song lyrics just kind of drift through your semi-consciousness. That is not to say that you're falling asleep at the wheel or that you are drunk...that is just to say that your body has taken over the wheel--you're on auto-pilot--and your mind is left to do what it does. Think and chew things over without, really, even thinking at all.

Thoughts are nebulous, but, in an odd way, more permanent.

It's almost a disappointment, sometimes, when the journey comes to an end. I may be going somewhere fun, like to one of my superb sister's home, or maybe other assorted family members, but sometimes? Sometimes I just wish the drive could continue.

[("Drive West, young man, and don't stop driving until you're driving onto the white sands of the Pacific."--Horace Greely?)

Okay. I have a term, now: Wanderlust.]

When I pull onto an exit ramp and cycle the gears down to a moderate 35MPH, it is almost as if Life rear-ends me. One can only flee for so long...eventually, Life catches up.

That's not to say that I have a bad life. It could be better, in many areas--as could anyone's life--but I am also blessed with an amazing family and pretty good health.

It's just that, while on the empty open dark road, doing nothing but steering and thinking, there is a sense of Freedom that is lost when one has to brake down to Earth-speed.

[picture me as a 7-year-old] "I wanna be a trucker!"

Plus, and don't bring this up in a court of Law: Some of dem truck-stop hootchies is hawt!