I hear in France every truck stop has a different menu. Here, ninty percent have the same menu, the same bufffet everywhere in the country, every single day. This is a huge country. Individuality... The interstates... Something bad's rotting us from the inside. These days, you never have to realize where you are. Truck stops, there are a few independents: Tiger Truck Stops, Little America. In the Deep South, there's still a culture of truck stops. I'm Northern. All my life I've heard about torture and lynching in the South. When I first find myself walking dirt roads in kudzu, I flinch when a branch sways, at a barking dog. After time, I forget to flinch. In the trailer at the University of Mississippi, the black day workers and me, northern white woman, sweat unloading two hundred headboards for the dormatory. But I hear things are bad. In the flat lands of North Carolina a guy tells me his father moved to California because he was scared to death that he couldn't withstand the tension. He thought he'd end up killing somebody. Mostly in the South, there are black people and white people in truck stops and they sit along side. They take their food off the same buffet and the independent buffets all have grits. We all drink Sweet Tea.

The third time's charmed, no lines, no smoking engines. We pull up to the shop. Only one truck in line. I wait to make sure. Tony goes inside. He's out in a minute. Two trucks ahead. I take the dogs on leash. They dance and prance. Tip bucks it up. There's a breeze to lick off the sweat. Sun fat in my eyes. Men's cargo shorts down to my knees and an extra large tee shirt. Nothing enticing. I never have a problem. Around Atlanta, walking out of the truck stop, bad ju-ju's in the air but not because I'm a woman. Out in New Orleans, African Americans missing front teeth, swaying to the chemicals stop to say a kind word to the dogs. I hate the truck stops around DC because they're filthy, there's no grass but no one bothers me. It's the trick of camo so eyes slide right past. Walking out a strange truck stop, the plan is right turns. As long as we turn right we get back. Tony says bring my phone. I can always call him. I say what good's that? You don't know where I am. I don't know where I am. I take my Timex. Navigation based on the spiral of shadows falling off the trees, timing between turns and tracking a single direction. We are never lost.

March 29,2010

What's the place I hate the most? Not marooned on Long Island with our shipping blankets spread like carpets in the shade of the underpass. Not Newark where the corner cafe has grilled goat in a Brazilian sauce. Especially not the Manhattan park where our truck dog, in equisite ecstacy, humps non-stop, every small, coifed, male terrier. I hate Phoenix where I burned the palms of my hands trying to pull the metal racks out of the trailer. One fat-girl-store after the other in endless shopping malls. That night, the rain in the truck stop parking lot falls hotter than the air. The rain spreads like grease against my skin. Get out of Phoenix, Hwy 17, head straight North for Flagstaff where the air is light enough to rise and take Phoenix with it. Little America, out in back the deep green lodge pole pines, the trail curls around this way and that and finally peters out down below at the creek. Inside the store they sell Annie Oakley oil and lotion. When the dark sets in, climb into the extra deep bath tub filled with cool water. Look inside the shower, there's a bench. Ask for two extra big, white towels. Take a long time.

Who named Odessa-Texas, Odessa, I want to know? But take that right onto Hwy 302. It's flat and it's going to get flatter and higher. Past Redbluff start the hand painted signs: twenty acres, nothing down. Old RVs squat pasted with red dirt dust. This is a two lane road. The truck bucks and the air seats rock back and forth. Land is dry, keeping dry, locking itself up hard as glass. Gaudalope mountains wedge up like a hatchet face and the steepest part, the blade shines as if iced against the sun. The road twists and scuttles sending the jake brakes into a roar and then the truck climbs back up shifting, shifting, the rythm of the double clutch. The pull-outs are farther west. Almost out of the mountains. There are three. Bed down for the night. Turn the truck off and the stars press down. In the morning, there's a stile over the barbed fence. The black and white dog takes off after a mule deer. They race around prickly pear cactus. The deer is playing the old dog who barrels after. Then, the deer takes off and is gone. The dog comes back with a hitch in the hind leg. We bend down and make the most of him. We search each of his pads saying we're looking for prickers. The dog is very proud. Later we'll fuel up in El Paso at the half-ass Petro. Across the street is the Mexican restaurant where they don't speak English. We both get Chicken Adobo. Later we'll walk down to the bakery. You'll drink sweet coffee and I'll drink bitter.

Exhaustion

There are these bunch of guys and they think they know everything about loading. They've been loading what? Three years, five at the tops. Post office loaders...in Texas. Eighteen straps they say. No one has eighteen straps. Sixteen I say. Eighteen they say. And it takes the whole enitre day. One word, just one little word like the snap of a twig in the desert: Fucking asshole. (God Damn Fucking Asshole) Later on in the quasi dark of the truck stop, pull in face forward because that's all that's left out here and inside too. Just pull in, pee in the gallon container so rank, gagging, and then fall onto the bunk and pull my knees up. Both trucks idling alongside, the light off the pole shining in the slit of the upper bunk window. Sleep reaches up from the center with both hands and yanks me down.

Ten years ago

I'd have it set up in my mind's eye, what I'm going to write. Clipped steps between tables searching for the booth with the phone set on the wall, the phone that worked. Compuserve with a 1 -800 dial up, cost per minute and sometimes the connection failed three quarters through. Doss, if there's one mistake, start over: C: cd "Documents and Settings: Dir c: cd "documents and settings " Administrator\Desktop. Is the D in documents capital or lower case? The middle-aged waitress with the sagging belly and sore feet wanting to know what kind of soup. Tony's asking how thick the clam chower is. Is it wall-paper paste? Then, the driver across the short wall leans over, asks in a Southern accent, blows a circle of smoke, how hard making into Laramie over Elk, the wind, the wind. How many trucks piled up coming through the blizzard on Vail, coming down to TA heaven at the bottom. And how about that tornado crossing over toward Pensacola? Louisianna, that storm, Tiger Truck Stop waiting it out, thought he'd bust a gut all that coconut cream pie, had to be eaten with the power out, outside the tiger pacing back and forth through sheets of rain. Shut up I say because any second the connection will blow and I've got five days to get through because I never made it on the last connection and there's no real truck stop in Galveston where the state park has paper cups blowing up against the beach logs and the sand is brown. I look into the waves and the future is nothing but murky. The birds are overstretched apostrophes. Both dogs are running through the bristle of beach grass. A minute of freedom out of the cab, not one of us is touching the other.

Texas, dinner time, you think of trees Tony. After-hours industrial park becomes Oasis. The same as solitary camel herders collapsing under a palm tree. Inside the cab, a truck presses against you. It fills your ears with its roar. It forces you against its spine and feeds off your intellect. And you travel the routes. Unload shipments at back doors, loading docks and pull out for the next delivery that is almost late, almost closed for the night. But that isn't possible because everything is timed and you have to calculate the miles across the entire country in a zig zag fashion. Every warehouse has a different set of hours and the hours change according to Standard Time. Finally you are somewhere down by the Rio Grande. There is an industrial park where the grass is watered and so are the trees. Tony, turn the truck off.

Texas is background filled with what you put upon it. Bugs squash on the windsheild. Wind rushes into every space. Wind leans into the highway signs. When you walk out of a truck stop, the TA in Amarillo, the pavement falters and dies and you're on dirt, a little crushed gravel. You don't know it but the wind is at your back. You're thinking about the song sparrow singing on the fence post that happens to be leaning away from you. Keep walking. Keep walking. And then, you turn around. There's that wind purring into ears, every hole: you can't go back. You can never go back.

When I wake up in the morning I don't know where I am. You are sleeping. Your mouth is half open. There is mold on your breath. Maybe outside will tell me where I am. Maybe I am in Lamar. But I feel like Laramie. Molly and Ralph, resurrected, will walk down the street. The lines in our faces have smudged and lightened. The sun will be shallow with the smell of snow high up. Ralph has his cowboy hat on. His hair is straight as cornsilk and crinks over his ears. Molly, you are a bad haircutter. We end up in the Chineese restaurant where the carpet's worn.

Except it is me passing; it is you passing. It is not the river passing. It is not the river or Soda Springs, or Idaho itself passing. It is you and me, Tony and Penny, and we are passing at such a terrible speed that already the snow is melting. And the only thing to count on is the hood ornament lining just to the left of the outside lane marker. No matter what, keep the hood ornament and the outside lane marker in alignment so that no matter where you go, at least you can count on being in your lane.