I’m home. And I’ve never been so happy to be home.
As you may have gathered from my last few non-paywalled posts, I found my excursion to the big city a grating (though, admittedly, anthropologically fascinating) experience.
Thankfully, I’ve now swapped the intolerable rolling ever-sprawl for the rocky crumbles of my home soil, and, once I’m done recovering from the experience, it’s back to work.
Recovering from the experience?
Well, as much as I like road trips, I seem to have a talent for finding adventure on the Interstate, largely of unexpected and unwelcome sorts.
A Legacy of Madness
I must stress: I don’t go looking for trouble, especially on the open road. Trouble, on the other hand, has a way of finding me, especially when interstate moves are concerned.
And it doesn’t even have to be me that’s moving.
I didn’t ask to be stranded at four-thirty in the morning after a twenty hour drive at a ramshackle privately-owned hotel in upstate New York in 2018. I didn’t ask to turn around a 26ft cargo truck in a 28ft wide parking lot which was sloped like it wanted to give up and let gravity sweep it down into the gully below. I didn’t seek out a hotel with the ambiance of a horror film, staffed by a clerk who only spoke Hindi, a hotel room that had a bathroom where the bathtub was built around the toilet and the entire bathroom was obviously a converted closet from the time when the twenty-room hotel had once been a farm house. I especially didn’t ask for a room below a couple who were fighting and threatening one another with firearms, knives, and other things, and who were nonetheless calmly taking turns coming out into the common area for smoke breaks as if there was nothing wrong with them other than the blood streaming from cracks in their skulls. And I really didn’t want to then drive a further seven hours in search of a hotel room, which I finally found in Robert Frost’s hometown in rural Vermont after stopping at four other hotels only to discover that their online “vacancy” listings were fanciful fictions, after which I flopped into bed following 27 hours of domestic-violence-punctuated driving.
But it happened.
There was also the time I was driving a truck that was 2 tons over its weight limit down the 20 mile steep grade in Oregon, only to have the brakes fail from overheating just as a grizzly bear galloped across the road in front of me, missing my front bumper by a few inches while I was struggling to keep the truck on the serpentine road at eighty miles per hour.
Or the time before that when I stopped at a gas station on a road trip to find a Gulf War vet with bad PTSD quietly having a heart attack as he smoked a cigarette in front of the attached convenience store.
Or another time when my traveling companion stepped backwards out of a truck and broke her wrist.
Or the time the gas station attendant left the pump hose in my gas tank while hurrying me out of the station.
Or the trip where two rental trucks had transmission failures and had to be towed and cross-loaded by the truck company, causing me to arrive 2hrs late at the airport where I was only able to catch my flight because the plane had been delayed due to bad weather and worse engine trouble.
Or the trip where the vehicle I was riding in (not driving) went into a six-wheel power slide on a mountain road and wound up hanging a toe off the edge of a cliff, only stopped by the depth of the snow drift right at the cliff’s edge.
Or the…well, you get the idea.
With a record like that, you’d expect that I’d never venture out into public again, and certainly not in a rental truck.
But if such was your expectation, I fear I must disappoint you, because the one lesson I have consistently failed to learn in life is “sometimes the drive just isn’t worth it.”
Which brings me to my ill-advised escape from the city and back to my mountain home:
There was a cargo van involved. I’m Dan enough to admit that up front.
But the condition of the vehicle was not my fault.
The rear bumper was held on with a stripped bolt, baling wire, and wishful thinking, the front tie-rod ends were drawing Social Security benefits, and the front wheels had tires that would have given Patrick Stewart’s hairline a run for its money.
But I took it, because it was literally the only such vehicle available in a four-state radius. I figured that life insurance had to pay out sometime, so what the hell.
Using the steering wheel required the kind of blind faith one would need to bet on a sleeping cow to win the Kentucky Derby. Driving over a smooth, freshly-paved road with the truck unloaded was a good way to dislodge bowel obstructions. My only hope was that, once I put a few tons of cargo in the back, it would make it over the Rockies without deciding that guard rails were a dare.
One of the reasons I have survived all of the above stupidity (and more) is that, once upon a time, I loaded trucks for a living. Sounds incongruous, right?
Well, when you’ve got thirty tons of cargo going over mountains in a tractor-trailer setup, you’d better load the load tight and even, with perfect weight distribution, or the driver’s next-of-kin is liable to show up to your place of work and teach you about bullets.
I got that moving truck loaded. I just didn’t know if I loaded it right, because I had a fever (and a lot of enthusiastic, but inexperienced, help) at the time. Those first hundred miles were pretty damn exciting as I waited for the load to shift and knock the truck over.
But due to the great smiling grace of Cthulhu (or luck or somandething), the load shift never came. I babied that truck for the next couple thousand miles until I landed it safely at the return depot, despite having discovered along the way that some enterprising fellow had painted over the check engine light (which was most persistently on) so as not to spoil the surprise that, at any moment, the engine might want to go to be with Jesus.
Once it was safely returned, I quietly scurried back to my mountain hideaway and fell into my bed and slept for two days straight.
So now I’m home, and back to writing. No huge lessons this time, except perhaps this:
If you want an uneventful cross-country move, free of crazy adventures and unexpected reversals, consider getting someone to move you who is not me.
But don’t be surprised if that doesn’t help. The roads have a will of their own.