CCpart2ch19

15 September
“somewhere in the middle of Montana”

This is where Merle Haggard once sang that
he wanted to be turned loose and set free from
whatever “dirty old city” he was in at the time.

Well, thanks for the great songs, Merle.
This one’s for you.

I have not been through Big Sky country for
years. I’d have to go back to when I drove
for Werner for the last Montana trip I had in a
rig, so that is four years at least. I forgot how
much I love this part of the country.

Last night I parked aside an I-90 on-ramp in a
place called Wyola, within the Crow Nation, just
this side of the Wyoming line. If there is any semblance of a town near that exit, it was not emitting any light or making any
noise, because when I shut the truck off around 12:30 AM it was dark and quiet as any place I’ve been in a long, long time.
I hopped out to stretch and pee, not expecting to see much of anything at all, and when I closed the door –Good God
Almighty, there were so many freakin’ stars! I had driven under thick clouds and occasional heavy rain all across South
Dakota and northeastern Wyoming, and they were only beginning to break up as darkness fell over my portion of the earth,
so I had no reason to suspect there were clear skies (no moon in sight –we must be at or near the new moon phase). But O
delight! a celestial fiesta was going on above me, and everyone was invited! Even the stardust wisps of the Milky Way were
in clear view across the half-dome of sky visible to me between hills.

It had been a little while since I felt so

enchanted in the natural world –too long

really—so I went to sleep with a new kind of

contentment I have been missing of late.

The Big Sky was out in its full splendor when I

woke up around 7AM, as was the first genuine

chill of the season, the first

under-the-

goosedown-sleeping-bag morning. It made the

cup of Americano I got at the Mountain Mudd

espresso in Laurel

as welcome as any coffee

product I’ve had on the Camerado tours. Just

as welcome was the sight of snow on the

peaks of

the Beartooth and Absaroka Mountains

to the south, the high country that Robert

Pirsig’s “Phædrus” explored and described

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

The sight of the snowcapped mountains and

the crispness of the air

suggested that, while it

is still technically summer, at this latitude I have

certainly arrived at autumn. It felt like a very

pleasant change.

I think a new season is arriving in my life as

well. Whether I find it pleasant or not is yet

to be seen, but it is coming for

sure. Yes, I

am going to be coy and save that

discussion for later. It is too nebulous right

now. That was an irresistible

segue, but I

apologize for the teaser (if this were radio,

we’d break for about five minutes of

commercials now).

* * * *

You may have noticed a gap of almost a

month between datelines in the

Chronicles. That is the time it took me to

write “The

Continuing Story of Ananias and

Sapphira.” Fiction will always move slower

for me I’m sure, that’s just the way I write

prose. My moods had more of an up-and-

down pendulum swing to them than we saw

for most of the first 2 ½ months, and

consequently there were days that I hardly

put anything down on paper.

But I am very pleased with the results, and

if I can write a more concise introduction,

pending an official wordcount –I’m

guessing between 8-10K—it may be

something I can shop independently to

literary periodicals or Christian magazines.

I am

intrigued with the idea of trying to

pitch that story to a Biblian publication. I

don’t think there is anything patently

objectionable in it to anyone but those in

the fundamentalist wing of the Western

Orthodox Church, and the idea of giving

some homage to The Last Temptation of

Christ with such an audience has definite

appeal too. All depends on that word

count. I don’t think there is a whole lot of

fat I’d want to cut from that narrative. We’ll

see after I type it.

So where have I been since my last

geographical update, when I was closing in

on Portland before going to Ashland?

Well, I

could probably do my own version

of Johnny Cash’s “I’ve Been Everywhere,”

but the town names wouldn’t rhyme and

there would probably be no cadence to

them either. According to the odometer, I

have driven just a hair under 10,000

miles. Oh, and Camerado turned

500,000! Just north of Roseburg, Oregon,

on the way back to Portland after the home

time. Everybody sing “Happy Birthmile,

Camerado!”

Other highlights:

--My second trip went from Denver to

Laredo, Texas. On the way down I tried to

park under a big oak tree to go to a

church

service in a little Hill Country town north of

San Antonio called Ballinger. But one limb

that hung over the road was

just an inch or

two too low and I kinda mangled Camerado’

s upper rightmost corner side panel and

almost knocked the

exhaust stack off.

Sadly, I also tore the limb right off the tree.

It came from the side yard of what looked

like an abandoned

house, and no one was

around to raise a fuss –though surely

someone came along later and wondered

what this massive tree

limb was doing lying

beside the street. Camerado still carries

his wounds; he’s a tough customer.

--Mexican food aficionados: if you ever find

yourself in Laredo (God knows why you

would unless you are Mexican or a truck

driver; it isn’t on the way to anywhere

gringos

go in Old Mexico), you must go to Taco

Palenque, off I-35 exit 3 near downtown. It

far-and-away the best over the counter

Mexican food I have ever had, and that

says a lot

because I’ve sampled them all. I

discovered this place back during the

Werner years, and

I have made a ritual of going back each

time I am in Laredo. They are open 24

hours a day, and any of those hours you

can

get a cup of margarita for 99 cents, or

a 32-ounce pitcher for $1.99 before 11PM

(certainly not a five-star margie, but for

that price, it doesn’t have to be). If you are

omnivorous, starve yourself for a day and

a half and get the “tampiqueño”

platter,

which has a good portion of literally almost

everything, including the best carne asada

I have had in the States. For

vegetarians

and vegans, I cannot vouch for the safety

of the beans, and there is not much

English spoken behind the counter,

so if

you want to be absolutely sure of being

lard-free, there is a Subway next door. [Or

ask “Hay manteca en la comida/los

frijoles?” (Any lard in the food/the beans?)

“Hay” is pronounced like “eye.”]

(I understand that there are two other

Taco Palenques in Texas, down near the

mouth of the Rio Grande in McAllen and

Brownsville. Just in case you are planning

a Mexico City or Gulf Coast roadtrip along

the Pan American Highway. It could

happen.)

--Saw Game 2 of the championship series

of the independent Central Baseball

League (formerly the Texas-Louisiana

League),

in which the host Shreveport

Sports were mauled by the clearly superior

Edinburg, Tex. Roadrunners. There were

fewer

than 1,000 folks at the game from

the start, and probably under 100 by the

9th inning, but I had great fun gibbering

with a

couple local guys, one guy’s girlfriend

and the other one’s son. Made what would

have been a rather dull baseball experience

in a

drab ‘80s-era stadium into a memorable one.

--A day after having a six-piece catfish dinner with all the trimmings in

Shreveport, and thinking I was headed north later that

night, a cancelled

load and reassignment led me back down to south Texas to pick up for

Atlanta, which meant I’d be

running I-10 across Louisiana. Which meant I

would be eating lunch from the buffet at Cajun Charlies’ in Sulphur. It is

another trucking-based culinary ritual of mine, and I never miss a chance at

the all-you-can-eat catfish, jambalaya, crawfish

ettouffe over dirty rice etc.

Usually, despite my best intentions, I stuff myself to the gills and have to

more or less roll myself

back through the above-ground cemetery and

under the freeway to the truck stop where I park. This time I was lucky: I

arrived at 2:45, just as “Miss Elaine” was getting ready to break down the

buffet for a two-hour hiatus before dinner (that is

when they serve the high-

end stuff, like broiled crawfish, snow crab legs and alligator tail, for twice

as much as the peasant

food lunch buffet). She was happy to let me take

whatever I liked of the food that would soon be discarded anyway, so to keep from holding her up I made myself just one
plate (a gigantic one, but one only) and ate until I was pleasantly full (“Pleasantly full” of Cajun food for me is probably what
the average adult American male experiences after Thanksgiving dinner.)

Note: In case you are counting, that makes three very large meals in four days. Also, when I got to the customer in Georgia
a couple days later, I stepped on the scale they use to weigh their product, and fully clothed I was closing in on 200 pounds
[I’m only 5’10”, in thick-soled shoes], whereas the last time I checked about a month before I was 185 nekkid.
Coincidence?

(Don’t worry, I think that’s the last food-related item. The scale sort of scared me straight.)

--On the way to Georgia, I stopped in Montgomery, Alabama for a
Biscuits game. They are the latest addition to the AA Southern League,
a Devil Rays’ affiliate. Montgomery is the latest city to lure an
established team away from a city (Orlando) that would not pony up
the dough to build a new retro-style playground. In most cases I find
this to be detrimental to the game: not only do we lose historic ballparks,
but the vacated parks tend to be in close proximity to downtown or
well-established neighborhoods, whereas the realities of modern business and real estate tend to locate the newly constructed
parks out in the hinterlands, in suburban or exurban settings that give them the feel of a shopping mall.

But I could tell from the Biscuits’ website that this

would be a delightful exception to the trend.

Riverwalk Park is situated

right in the heart of

downtown Montgomery. Not only that, but the entire

right field side of the park –the side which faces

downtown—is built out of a 100-plus-year-old train

depot, so the park blends into the urban environment

perfectly, just like Fenway and Wrigley Field.

The reality of the park did not disappoint one bit. It is

truly a near-perfect venue for baseball –great souvenir

shop, excellent

ballpark food (the Philly cheesesteak is

worth the money), no intrusive ushers so you can sit

wherever you want and move around at will, a

circumfrential walkway around the field, picnic areas

and grass seating galore. And freight trains still

rumble by off and on just past the left field fence

during the game. Just awesome. The Camden

Yards of new minor league

parks.

And the team is called the Biscuits. You can’t top

that. (No gravy jokes please.)

--The Biscuits game was on a Thursday night.

They beat the Mobile Bay Bears after a one-hour

rain delay that kept most

fans at home and ran

off most of those who had come, so I just about

had the place to myself. After the game I drove

two-

thirds of the way to Lawrenceville, Georgia

and finished the trip in the morning. Then I was

summoned up to a Coca-Cola

plant in Cleveland,

Tennessee to pick up for a Coke distributor in….

well I’ll be dag-gummed, Montgomery, Alabama!

Problem was, by the time they had me loaded in

Tennessee, even if I ran non-stop I was going to

miss the 7PM deadline that

night. And unlike

most deadlines, this was real, like all the Coke

heads go home for the weekend and there ain’t

nobody there

to unload me (must be a union

shop). And unlike most weekends, this one was

going to last three days due to Labor Day.

Friday afternoon and Monday mornings are the

worst time of the week to get USX to respond to

any complications, plus the

fact that the latest

hurricane of the season, Frances, was about to

plow through Florida, so the Operations

department was

probably all in a tizzy.

Long story short: I arrived in Monty at 9PM

without a secondary plan, but with a new delivery

appointment for Tuesday

afternoon –which,

incidentally, was when Frances was projected to

be visiting central Alabama. Nice.

But I really didn’t care. So I had no income at all

for 3 ½ days. So what? That’s just money. The

Biscuits were opening a

four-game season-

ending series against their intrastate nemesis,

the Birmingham Barons. Life was good.

I drove straight to the ballpark, and was let in for

free in the seventh inning. This time I had

enough cash for a Biscuits T-

shirt. The home

team won again, breaking a 5-5 tie in the eighth

with a brilliant suicide squeeze bunt. It was good

to see the

park with a lively crowd, families

lounging on blankets in the grass area, hundreds

of little tykes running around playing their

own

games, too young to be interested in the action

on the field.

The rest of the weekend was as mellow and

pleasant as any time I can remember in the rig. I

wrote a good chunk of the

Ananias and Sapphira

story, I rearranged the bottom bunk to have a

nice sitting area and a permanent laptop station

(I moved

the mattress to the top bunk and sleep

up there now), I got a haircut, and I caught up

with several people on the phone for

hours.

Saturday night I went back downtown for another

Biscuits game. It was a night for fans of

University of Alabama

and Auburn University to

wear their respective teams’ gear and colors to

herald in the upcoming football season, lots of

crimson and orange-‘n-blue in the stands. This

time Montgomery won with a two-out rally in the

ninth, which turned out to

be the first ninth inning

comeback in the young franchise’s history (the

media sheet said they were 0-for-whatever when

trailing after eight innings during the season).

Sunday morning I went to a service at the Dexter

Avenue

King Memorial Baptist Church, right below the

towering

Alabama state capitol (which of course was the

govern-

mental home of nice white men like George

Wallace, and

the first seat of Jefferson Davis’ Confederate

States of

America presidential administration). This is the

actual

building where Dr. Martin Luther King served as

a pastor

from 1954 to 1960, and where the Montgomery

city bus

boycott (Rosa Parks, et al) was organized. It was

an awe-

some experience to be sitting in the very building

where the

civil rights movement was born, in front of the

same pulpit

where Dr. King began to inspire the black

community and

told them “we shall overcome.” As I have come

to expect

in majority-black churches, the congregation was

extremely

welcoming to us (I wasn’t the only cracker; there

were

some hurricane refugees from Florida who

probably also

came for the sense of history) and went out of

their way to

greet me and make me feel at home. The

service,

surprisingly, was only a little less stiff than the

LDS church,

and other than a primarily solo rendition of “I

Shall Not Be

Moved,” I wasn’t terribly moved by the choir.

But it was pretty cool to look around and see the

faces, many of which were on the older and more

weathered side, and

know that some of these

folks were probably preached to by MLK himself

as children or young adults. I felt a sudden rush

of shyness at the end –plus I felt like I had been

there about five hours—so I didn’t ask anyone

about their history at the

church. I also figured

they get the same questions from sympathetic

white visitors all the time, so best let them stay in

the

present and let the man rest.

“Sleep, sleep tonight, and may your dreams be

realized.” –U2, “MLK”

Most of the rest of my Sunday was spent on the

phone or leisurely emailing and web surfing at a

Panera coffee shop, where

the Wi-Fi is free (At

Starbucks and Borders, for instance you have to

have a T-Mobile wireless account, which blows;

they

are more expensive than the truckstop

network, which at 30 bucks a month seemed like

the logical limit for my internet

expenses). I

intended to catch the last three innings of the

Biscuits again as I did Friday, but I forgot that

Sunday games

start at 6:00 instead of 7:00, so I

showed up after it ended. The scoreboard

showed a 3-1 victory for the locals though, their

fourth in a row. (Unlike Birmingham, which won

its division, Montgomery was not anywhere near

contention for the

Southern League playoffs, so

this was their last hurrah for 2004.)

Monday morning brought a message from the

mothership that someone had talked to the Coke

folks and got them to let me

drop the trailer load

of refreshing soft drinks at their facility instead of

offloading it Tuesday, that a security guard would

authorized to accept delivery of the full trailer.

Cool. I was not upset at the prospect of waiting

another day, but I also

welcomed the chance to

leave before Frances showed up. Driving

around with an empty trailer on wet roads with

heavy

winds is a little bit like sailing, and I never

learned to tack properly (I’m not even sure I used

the term correctly), so leaving

Montgomery on

Monday might have saved me two days rather

than one. By Monday night, I had a trailer full of

Star Wars

Trilogy DVDs I picked up in Huntsville

(I don’t get it –haven’t they made five movies?)

and was safely back in Tennessee.

[The DVD run took me to Toledo as I recall, then

the next destinations were Minnesota; pick up in

northern Wisconsin for

Iowa and Kansas City;

then a massive struggle to get hooked up to a

Northwest load (see the upcoming Epilogue for

explanation of why I kept having to fight so

hard to get back to the West Coast), which I

finally got by driving through the

night to up near

Sioux City to swap trailers with a guy who needed

to go south. So that tour of duty was about to

end as I

wrote this chapter, crossing Montana,

northern Idaho and Washington.]

That is about all I have time to cover now. I just

came down the western slope of the Cascades

and I am reaching the

suburbs of Seattle. Here I

shall spend 3 ½ days with David “Flash” Lopez,

my old buddy from the Maryland days. At the

request of Ben, we will observe Rosh HaShanah

by eating apples and honey at the Mariners

game tonight, then his parents

are getting to

town –the Lopez house in suburban Baltimore

was a home-away-from-home for me during the

college years,

so I am thrilled to be seeing them

too. Saturday night we will all attend the

Washington-UCLA football game (Dave did grad

school at U-Dub). Surely there will be boundless

merriment in between and after. I see downtown

Seattle looming ahead,

poking up over Mercer

Island. Time to shelf the notebook. See y’all

later! – HC Seattle, Wash.

a Fish Out Of Water production

ext

-- C

hapter