Republished by Blog Post Promoter
About 40 years ago I bought a semi-truck and hit the roads of America hauling furniture as an contract trucker for Mayflower Van Lines. I spent 2 years of my life running back and forth, up and down the freeways, byways and back roads of the U.S. of A — about 200,00 miles of driving. I wanted to escape the city life of LA and years of reading spreadsheets all day as a corporate CFO. There isn’t any other experience quite like driving 10 hours a day across the highways of America. I worked all day loading my van with a house full of shit people wanted to take with them in search of another life. I was physically exhausted, but mentally revived. I got into the best shape of my life: 160 lbs. of rock-hard muscle that made women want me more than I wanted them, even after being alone for 3 months between a visits with my (ex)wife.
There isn’t any way to see a country and meet it’s people unless you go there in person, seeing; listening, eating truck stop food, sleeping in cheap-ass hotels and spending five thousand hours in the cab of a truck all by yourself. A trip across Texas take 3 days — north, south, east or west. No matter where to go in Texas, there’s more of it, and there’s almost always nothing there except more of nothing. Scrub brush. A few cows. Dirt and dry grass. Ironically, my current wife is from Texas – born and raised. She’s the love of my life. I’ve never known a more nobel person or a kinder soul.
The western US is the embodiment of desolate beauty. The old Route 66 across Arizona and New Mexico to Chicago has an aura all it’s own: you can’t help feeling like there are alien space craft hidden in the Mesas whenever you go there. Colorado is a planet all it’s own. Cresting the top of Eagle’s Pass for the first time scared the shit out of me when I saw how steep to decline was on the other side! Air brakes have a limit and so did my courage. Every region, every state is possessed by the beings that congregate there. There is a spiritual presence of the people who share the reality of the South. The Civil War never ended for them. The Northeast is like one big Courier & Ives post card: the crimson and gold hues of the trees in New Hampshire and Maine are a magnificent reflection of the Face of God!
I finally left the road behind after two nights sleeping in the single-bed bunk of my cab in the parking lot at a truck stop in Kansas City, MO in a blizzard, at Christmas time: it was 20 degrees below zero and the wind-chill made it twice as cold! What a god-forsaken shit hole! The tires of my truck were frozen solid to the ground with no hope of a load to get me out of town! I called my dispatcher in Indiana and said, “Honey, fuck this! I’m coming in.”
It turned in my truck, collected my final check and drove a “drive-away” car to Florida — anywhere to get out of the fucking frozen tundra of the Mid-West! I’ve been to Nashville and Milwaukee since then and finally learned my lesson: Never, Ever Go Back East In Winter Time! Hell was never as cold as Wisconsin in the dead-winter of February! Since then I’ve stayed on the Golden Shores of California. Thank the Gods for sunshine!
Retrospect (the rear-view mirror of 20/20 hindsight is your reward in old age ) reveals that I wasn’t your average truck driver. I spent all those isolated hours driving 60 miles an hour, 10- hours a day, toward the horizon listening to cassette tapes of classic literature and philosophy. I completed the education I never got in college on the asphalt highways of America. You can listen to a very big pile of books in two years if that’s all you do all day long, every day, 10 hours a day, seven days a week.
Many years later I became a writer. My first book was ‘THE OZ FACTORS’. My editor was Carol South, my wife’s best friend. She died — young and painfully — of breast cancer. We are blessed to have received the benefit of her tenacious intellect, aesthetic sense and technical ability.
Those two years I wasted on the road were more valuable to me than a 55-foot tractor-trailer full of gold. It was there and then, in a hundred towns across 10,000 miles, that I conquered the physical universe on my own, mile by mile, load by load. There are few things more gratifying than moving a baby-grand piano up a flight of stairs all alone. I learned that it wasn’t my muscles or my body that made it move — it was my soul: the essence of myself deciding to make it go. What else is there to know?
This song and video remind me of my days on the road. It wouldn’t do it again, but I wouldn’t trade the lessons I learned for anything. — (Lawrence R. Spencer. 2012)