back across the country

Alright, so when last I left you we were in New Mexico appreciating the cool of the desert night on our sweaty skin. I woke up in New Mexico and carried on. It is odd when you get these really long trips, ones that take three or four days (or occasionally 5 days) and really the only thing you are doing in driving. No backing into docks, no pointless waiting no bitchy shipping clerks. On one hand it is somewhat dull. There is nothing to break up the day but on the other hand, when you are paid by the mile these are the days that you are raking in the cash. at about 650 miles a day and $.34 a mile its about $220 for the day which is pretty good for doing nothing but sitting on your butt and keeping the truck on the road.

That day, after traveling across New Mexico (whose northwestern section is most definitely part of the great plains) I entered the Texas Panhandle. All day and at the truckstop the previous night I had seen trucks from one company in Saskatoon and they all had Haz-Mat placards on them that said "7-Radioactive" This is a rarer placard to see and is a little unnerving. Then I remembered that near Amarillo there is a place called Pantex. (Panhandle of Texas, though it sounds like some sort of "feminine product") Which is a military installation dedicated to the assembly and disassembly of Nuclear (Nuculer) Weapons. A how lovely. But the plains of the Texas panhandle are, in fact quite lovely, occasionally broken by narrow rocky canyons and one, Palo Duro Canyon, which is quite big, the next grandest canyon, you could say, but you can not see it from I-40. I stopped to buy some lunch at a Petro on the east side of town and a lot lizard (truck stop prostitute cruised slowly by in her car. She looked up at me in my truck and put her hand up and looked at me like "I don't know, what do you think?" I shook my head no, politely, I hoped and not condescendingly.
Texas gives way to Oklahoma, a state which, like the other plains states stacked on top of it (Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas) I quite like. I guess I appreciate the minimal landscape. I passed through Oklahoma City around dinner time and then as darkness fell It got more humid and green and I stopped for the night in Okemah. In the small gas station a bunch of seemingly (and very possibly) retarded indians wanted cheeseburgers but all they had was fried chicken.

When i woke up the next morning it was foggy and wet which was certainly a change and I carried on and the sun burnt through the fog in a most dramatic and wonderful way and then I was in Arkansas where the trees turn to pine and the air ha the overcooked vegetable smell of paper making and you know that you are in some sort of the south. Arkansas is one of those places you know would be great to get out and explore, hike though, go fishing or boating, but is dreadfully dull on the interstate (like where I come from, I imagine.) Little Rock, or the northern part of it, breaks the drive in half, the rolling west from the surprisingly flat east. Then you are in West Memphis, trucking capital of the mid-south (as this are is called (I guess the mid south is Arkansas, southern Missouri, western Tennessee, and northern Mississippi and Louisiana, I don't know) and then its across the river and into Memphis, which is a city with a strangeness on par with Baltimore to which more attention ought be given. I delivered the load to a very busy warehouse on the south side of town that apparently could not get enough x-boxes, (is there some sort of new microsoft game system coming out soon?) Te guard here was perhaps the most kind, helpful (and handsome) I have ever encountered in this line of work.
they had given me a bunch of loads and then canceled them before settling on one that would require me to deadhead (drive with an empty trailer, which no company wants to do since they have to pay you but they get nothing in return) almost 200 miles up to the non-existent town of Neely's Landing, Missouri, near Cape Girardeau. The drive up was pleasant in the fertile and flat flood plain of the Mississippi, cotton growing all around, ugly black sticks with white puffballs growing out of them. Some was ready for harvest and one harvester dumped a big fluffy dusty mass into a truck.
I spent the night in the gravel lot of an unstaffed fueling point near my pickup, a large Proctor and Gamble facility in the middle of nowhere. Missouri freaks me out. I feel like everyone there likes to fight with big foam swords.
I picked up the load and headed up I-55, though St. Louis and then across the Mississippi again and west on I-70 through the curiously named "Effingham." Would "Fuckingham" have been too rude?
Then through Terre Haute, Indiana and Indianapolis and Columbus and now I am just east of Wheeling in the slender northern pointing finger of West Virginia. Tomorrow I will tackle the length of the godforsaken (so narrow and winding) Pennsylvania Turnpike, cross the Delaware, deliver this load (of Bounty paper towels to CVS) and then, hopefully bobtail (drive with no trailer whatsoever) home.

The very next day...
So i made it across Pennsylvania and over the Delaware river (and through the toll booths) and to CVS where a young black man from the islands or africa tells me that no one, whatsoever, is there to accept my delivery (not even him apparently). So I have to drive 15 miles up the road to a Petro in Bordentown where I sit now, miserable that I did not get to go home tonight. but i will go home tomorrow and all will be ok, i hope.