A Writing Life

I’ve been at the same job for nineteen years and eight months. It will be twenty years driving trucks at my next anniversary. I’ve driven all across this country. I've seen polarizing politics, unique fried food, the same damn chain stores all across America. I’ve navigated some of the best roads crisscrossing the nation. I've seen the variance of life, of culture and the subtleties of being. When I go to sleep--the road lingers in my mind. The endless highways and freeways with their long white lines and dotted yellow ones. Headlights as far as the eye can see. 

I have never taken a vacation. I bank my time in hope of retiring early. I don’t call in sick. I just drive. My fantasy is to be a traveling writer. To take the roads I know so well and use them as they are. The vessels that carry life from one shore to the next. I want to live a life lived differently. Absurdly in the face of what we think is normal in our reality. I want the road to take me not as a trucker, a cog in the machine of logistics and consumption. But as a poet. A writer and a traveler. A suspect on the loose from what was created before me and what I was expected to believe. But I don’t want to believe it anymore. I’ve spent forty five years believing, and now I’m disillusioned. I want to walk through the world paying attention. I want to be free. 

Everywhere I go I’m writing. I write in my mind and memorize the words. When I'm on the road, I recite.  

Where does the road ever end? 

The last stretch, 

the last haul,

the long press of the gas,

the pull of the brake...

When do we open and shut the last door? 

“Jim, how was the ride?” the boss, sitting in his over-sized chair leans back and puts his hands behind his head. 

“Just another haul,” I say, dropping a flat box with all my paperwork onto an unused desk. 

The haul was 3,500 miles total. It was hours spent on the road listening to the radio. Hours of writing inside my head and reciting the lines back to myself alone in the cab. I picked up a hitchhiker only once and it was an older gentleman who was trying to get to Glendale to see the grandchild he had never met. She was turning sixteen. When I asked why it had taken so long he wept. It was 3,500 miles of mountains black against the sunset. It was cacti and sand in the deserts of Arizona and California. It was snow on the peaks in Wyoming and relentless rain in Texas. It was thunderstorms like fighting gods.

“You should rest up for the next few days,” the boss continues. “I got another big one for you next week. Make sure you take a look at the route before you leave.” 

I imagine myself turning in the chair, a smile just visible across my lips. ‘About that,’ I say. ‘I think I’m done with this life, Bob. I think I'm going to quit right this minute. In fact… yes. I’m done. it's been real swell, honest. But I need a change.` 

But I don’t say it. I just smile and nod and go about my paper work. “I’ll take a look before I head out,” I say. 

I have three days to recoup. The weekend passes as most do. A blur. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, beer, TV. I haven’t had a woman since Clara nearly six years ago. My belly is growing larger every day and I feel like I'm just killing myself, but I feel powerless to stop it. 

It's Tuesday morning, nearly 5 am. I'm sitting inside the cab of the truck. The dome lights on, the engine is rumbling. Before I leave I check the tires and the chassis. I go to the back of the trailer to make sure the doors and lock are secure. Inside the cab I look at my route one final time. I make sure my paperwork is all there and in order. When I put the truck in gear it whines and sighs pulling the weight across the asphalt. 

The highways are the veins of transportation, bringing goods from one end of the country to the other. I snake up through northern California, Oregon, Washington. Heading East I cut through the top of Idaho and Montana, then down into Wyoming, Colorado and then over to Utah and back up into Idaho. The whole way I’m stopping at warehouses and rest stops. Picking up pallets and unloading them. Eating the worst food this country has to offer and hating myself every time I do. When I finally reach my second to last stop in Idaho at a dock in a town called Star, I sit in the cab and look out at the mountains while the loaders deal with the cargo. I have this overwhelming feeling to walk away. To disappear into the landscape, and go wherever I end up.

As I daydream, looking off at the haze that shrouds the mountains I'm startled when one of the loaders knocks on the window. 

“All done, boss,” he says. 

Back on the highway I feel a compulsion to turn off into a different direction. I hear the poetry inside my head. 

To cut free.

To live, 

To breathe and explore the world beyond my... 

I take an exit I shouldn’t. My heart skips a beat in a strange manic pleasure. I get out once I've parked in a large commercial parking lot. My hands are shaking because I know what I'm doing. I begin to walk away from the truck but I stop and turn to look at it. I pull out my phone and as I walk back to the cab I dial the office.

“S and K, this is Natasha, how can I help you?”

“Natasha, it's Jim.” 

“Oh, Hi Jim. What can I do for you?” 

“Is Bob around?” 

“Well, he’s in a meeting with a vendor. Can I have him call you back?”

“It's important. Can you tell him I need to speak with him?”

“Is everything okay?” 

“No... I mean, yes, well, sort of. Can you just get him please?”

“I’ll tell him it's important. Please hold.” 

The hold music is a piano sonata. Maybe its Beethoven, or is it Chopin? There must be a fire somewhere, the haze against the mountains looks like smoke. The hold music stops. 

“Jim, what is going on? Everything okay?” 

“Bob,” I say, distracted by the haze. I imagine fire burning somewhere, orange tongues reaching up and coiling around a Douglas-fir. 

“Bob…” 

“Jim? Are you okay?” 

“I just wanted to tell you that I quit. I’m going to take the truck. When I’m done with it I'll tell you where you can find it,” I hang up. 

I don’t know where I’m going anymore. I roll down the window and let my arm hang out. The highway seems endless, and in some ways I think it is. I drive East toward New York because why not? It doesn’t matter anymore. I’ll go anywhere. And I compose long prose poems inside my head about life on the road. When I end up in someplace that looks interesting I pull over and hit a local diner where I write the words down. I sip coffee and drink beer and let my imagination run wild. I push the little hint of fear that rises in my guts down with a drink. I sleep in the truck and ignore my phone when it rings. 

After three days I call Bob again and tell him I’m sorry, that I want to leave the truck in an easy spot for him to send someone to pick it up. I tell him I’m thinking about driving toward Illinois and dropping it there.  

“You have to be fucking kidding me. Do you need help? Do you even know what the fuck it is you’re doing? Jim… are you okay? Is it the twenty years?” 

I end up going north through Maine and then down through Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indianapolis, then Illinois. I feel a novel growing inside of me, this little simmering of words that bubble up into my mind. I let it heat up as I drive and it's when I’m at O’hare sitting in a restaurant that I begin to write the words that brew inside of me. I pick up my phone and dial. It rings. 

“Can I speak with Bob please. This is Jim.” 

Over the loudspeaker in the airport I hear them calling for my plane to board. A line forms and people begin showing their tickets. 

“Jim?” 

“Bob. The truck is in Illinois. It's sitting in a lot at the end of Lawrence avenue just outside of O’Hare. Should be fine there. But you gotta send someone soon. Can’t sit forever. Lawrence avenue,” I repeat. 

“Jim. Where are you?” 

“O’Hare.” 

“What are you doing there? Jim, I'm going to have to come after you on this? You know that right? I can’t just let this shit go? Where are you going?” 

“My plane is boarding. The truck is there in the lot. Send someone to pick it up.” 

“Jim,” I hang up. 

On the plane, when we take off I look out over what feels like the entire world. I think about where I'm going and what I might find there. In my mind I’m writing. And when we are over the Atlantic I’m still writing. As the plane makes its descent toward a runway a world away from anything I’ve ever known, I know that what I’m about to embark on is the rest of my life. What may come might be unpleasant, or it might be beautiful like I hope it will be. Whatever the outcome it will be life on my own terms, my own design, the path outside of the one I woke up on. And the only question I have, which needs no answer, is where will I find myself? How will it all end?