As my faithful readers, you know that my job calls for a lot of travel. In some senses it’s my dream job. When I didn’t have a job that required travel, and I encountered someone – my brother, for instance – who did, I was deeply envious of that person. Whenever I applied for a job that promised or threatened “some” or “frequent” travel, my mouth watered and my palms got sweaty. It must be borne of my youth when, as one of a poor, large family, we traveled only rarely, and then only by car. I thoroughly enjoyed sitting in the back seat looking out the window at the world surrounding the interstate, and I thought about how fantastic it must be to work as a truck driver, to be able to see the country as a by-product of your profession. It was one of the jobs I wanted to have as a little boy dreaming of when I’d be a grown-up.
The emotional zenith of my teenage years is the day I earned my driver’s license. I had spent my youth in the passenger seat of my father’s pickup truck watching as he manipulated the stick-shift, the “three-on-the-tree,” as the steering column-mounted manual gear-shift was known. By the age of ten I knew how to drive a stick-shift. I never drove a car until I was 16, but I played make-believe enough in my father’s truck to know I had the rhythm down. When I received my license I couldn’t wait to drive a car with a manual transmission. I couldn’t wait to make a road trip on my own. I always volunteered my (parents’) car and to drive when my high school friends were gathering, and we’d pile eight or nine of us into it to get to a cast party or our favorite pizza place.
In the military I couldn’t volunteer fast enough to train on the “deuce‘n a half,” the workhorse two-and-a-half ton truck, the 44-passenger bus (think typical school bus) and later, the M-925 five-ton truck, even though it has an automatic transmission. The opportunities to drive were few, but the desire was strong
During the down-time I would decompress on the road. I’d hop into my car and drive for hours, just seeing the environs, willingly getting lost on my way to finding my way back to where I started.
After a few episodes of real-world driving, the luster of a truck driving career wore off a little when I learned first-hand that maneuvering one of those lumbering beasts through narrow German streets and heavy traffic was a certain sweat-inducer, that backing into a narrow spot was mentally akin to an unpleasant dental procedure, and I grew a new respect and awe for the guys who drive trucks every day.
As things go, my interests evolved into the realm of the creative. I grew more comfortable surrounded by things electronic rather than things mechanic. I was consumed by the visual arts and was determined to make my mark on the world in that manner.
My post-military strategy broke down into an hierarchy of plans, each subsequent one contingent upon the failure of the antecedent: Plan A - to be discharged honorably from the military and then enroll at a university and earn my degree, and then embark on a career in television. Plan B: embark on a career in television, degree be damned! Plan C: become a police officer. Plan D: truck driver. So the itch never fully left me. Plan A would suffice provided I could drive to work every day.
As I lived Plan A I slowly drifted from any interest in driving a truck for a living, even if the bottom were to fall out of my life. Then, when I started my current job, there was stated a requirement that I study, test for, and earn my commercial driver’s license for the purpose of driving the company’s large box-truck (think the biggest furniture store delivery truck you’ve seen, and then add six feet of length). I was all for it until I had a glimpse of the future in which the job for which I was hired was subjugated to the company’s need for their truck and its contents to be two time zones away in a matter of days. I didn’t take the job so I could drive a truck, so I reneged on the truck part of the deal, and dragged my feet on getting the permit until they dropped the idea.
That was four years ago.
Today, in a fluke series of events, I wound up riding shotgun on a local errand in the very truck in which I was supposed to train lo, those many years ago. The man driving is new to the task, so I gave him as much advice as I could remember from my few moments of driving in the military and of my stunted training with this company. I looked out the windscreen, and it was as though that gray strip of asphalt before us had reached up into my gut and beckoned me forward, teasing me into the desire to grip that steering wheel, feather that clutch, and head for the wind-blown tundra for exploits untold. The reality would be ugly, but the dream is all about the moment, the thrill of being, the joy of driving, the innocence of a young boy’s vision of the world around him as every experience is new and every turn of the wheel brings a fresh adventure.
No comments:
Post a Comment