Wherein I keep on truckin’
A friendly hand shook me awake.
“Mom?” I said groggily, wondering when my bed had become so uncomfortable and covered with faux leather.
There was a giggle and then a drawling response. “I ain’t your mom, Sugah. Don’t make me feel so old.”
I sat up and groggily returned to my senses. I was still in the roadside diner in Oklahoma. I had finished my very delicious burger and fries. Audrey said she’d work on getting me a ride, so she let me sit down in the corner booth for a while. Since it was late, she wasn’t sure when a ride would show up. At a certain point, I had just gotten so tired. I told myself I would just lay and relax for a few minutes, but I guess sleep overtook me.
I squinted out the windows and saw it was morning – just barely. The sun was just barely over the horizon, the daylight much more gold than I had ever seen it. If I hadn’t been so tired, my eyes so red, I would have enjoyed it more. Instead I found myself searching my backpack to see if I had sunglasses. No luck.
When I had gotten more of my bearings, Audrey came back over to me. “I did find you a ride, Sugah. Never let it be known that Audrey doesn’t come through.”
I stood up, grabbed my backpack and thanked her profusely. She handed me a paper bag with a muffin which she claimed was “on the house” by way of it being a day old. That was fine with me. I continued thanking her before stepping outside into the blinding morning to find my ride.
Squinting through the darkness, I found myself shocked at who my ride was. It was the humongous trucker, Bill.
Welcoming me with a handshake and a grunt, he led me over to his truck. As massive as him, it was parked off the road, as I had seen it last night. He opened the door for me and then I climbed up onto the massive beast, putting myself in the passenger spot. I looked behind and noticed that this truck had a sleeper. I realized that Bill had eaten dinner last night, than slept a few hours in the truck. Audrey must have woken me right before he was to leave.
He slid himself into the driver seat. I had never realized before how big the front seat in a truck is. In most vehicles, being in the passenger seat puts you right next to the other person. In a truck, you only feel like you are in the same room as the person, both staring out the same windshield. Between us was a massive console of knobs, levers, gearshifts, and buttons. I didn’t realize so much was needed to drive a massive truck, but maybe he had the augmented version with ejector seats and surface-to-air missiles. I know if I drove a truck, I’d have that model.
“Ready?” he uttered briefly, turning the ignition, causing the entire truck to shudder as if the roar of a monster.
Admittedly, I was nervous. As I had mentioned, the redneck trucker stereotype was still fresh in my mind. Sure, he was doing me a solid, and I had to be appreciative of that. But I wondered what this trip was going to be like. Sheepishly I gave him a smile and a thumbs up. He kicked the truck into gear.
In minutes were rolling down the highway at seventy five miles per hour, the roar of diesel fuel and the vibration of the truck the only things I could feel. The scenery rushed by, but I wouldn’t dare open the window. I’m sure poisonous diesel fumes would be sucked back in through the window.
We sat in silence for the first hour. It was only an hour in when Bill finally grunted something about Route 66. “Sometimes Route 66 is called the Mother Road.” He paused. “It was John Steinbeck that first called it that.” Then there was silence.
I smiled appreciatively at that, but had no real comment. I had no real comment on the Mother Road or on Steinbeck, other than if Bill wanted me to be George to his Lennie, I was willing to dive out of the moving truck at any point. I had no desire to live off the fat of the land on a rabbit farm, and there’d be nothing but trouble when he tried to stroke some chick’s hair.
There was a long silence, then Bill had another fact about Route 66. “The whole original Route 66 isn’t drivable. Some of it is closed, and some of it can’t fit a truck on it. Interstates have taken the place of Route 66, so no one needs to drive it. People have to make an effort to drive it.” He paused again. “I try to drive it as much as I can. I make up the time on other roads. It’s just sad it’s not used. A lonely, unused part of America.”
He made a few more of these informative declarations, each a little longer than the next. On the longer ones, I actually had enough to comment back on. And after a while, we slowly eeked out something like a conversation. It was strange, but the longer I spoke to him, I sort of started to get a feel for this man called Bill.
Bill was a thoughtful man, far more than you would think. There was much in him that he reasoned out in his head, long before it reached any sort of speech. Truly an introvert, he rarely spoke without thinking ahead. He was also a man purely of inertia. In the same way that bodies at rest tended to remain at rest, Bill’s mind and social skills were the same way. He was a man of few words if you interacted with him briefly. If you said Hello to him, you’d most likely get a grunt from him, because he hadn’t spoken in a while, so it was an uphill action to speak. But sit him down somewhere, start slow, and the man would open up. His inertia would be overcome, and he would be able to keep talking. So spending hours with him in the truck allowed me to really get to know Bill.
I had to change my opinion of him as a redneck. He wasn’t in the way we would think. He was not thoughtless, uneducated, stupid, or low class. There was some of what we associate with rednecks, but that was not his fault. Growing up in Arkansas, that’s all he knew. He grew up with country music, chicken fried everything, grits, and a strange set of values. You can take a man away from his place of birth, but typically something carries over. Sure he may learn new things, new ways. But like us all, anything new we don’t learn tends to default back to how we learned it growing up. Those things can change too, but if we never try to change them, they tend to be the habits we learned way back when. Such were Bill’s habits. If he had lived in a cosmopolitan city, he might have been someone else. But as a trucker, travelling the heartland, there were certain things that were going to stay the same.
So all in all, though it started slow, it was a good trip with Bill. He had some company for his drive, and I got to somewhat revise my view of redneck truckers. Slightly. There’s always one exception.
We rode for twelve hours before it was time for us to part. My butt was heavily numbed and I could feel the rattling of the truck in my bones. I could not imagine a world with sensations of buttedness and stable bones. The truck pulled into a rest stop as the sun began its descent from the sky.
“This is your stop, little buddy,” said Bill.
For a moment I had a strange flashback of Gilligan’s Island, but it mercifully passed quickly. As I opened the door, I said. “Thanks, Bill, it’s been a pleasure.”
He gave me a bashful smile with a grunt. I closed the door and the truck rode off. I looked around the rest stop. Currently it was empty except for a few tourists using bathrooms, getting touristy maps and buying worse-than-typical lunches from the McDonalds.
I rubbed my hands together. Which of these suckers would be giving me my next ride?
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