Milan, New Mexico

The last time i was in Milan, New Mexico was right after I got this truck and was headed to Memphis from Long Beach with a truck load of X-Boxes. It is different now. Lightly powdered in places with snow and COLD. Today was not so bad, high around 50 but then as night falls so too does the temperature. The low tonight looking to be right around 0. North of here in Alamosa, Colorado the low will be more on the order of 30 below.
Earlier today i got a flurry of messages on the qualcomm. First saying I should swap the load with a driver in Winslow, Arizona. Then that i should take it to its final destination in Ontario, California (which I would have liked as it would be a hell of a long load (about 2700 miles) and would take me through the New Years holiday thus avoiding any possible delays because of the holidays (it is hard to get loaded on a day when no one is working)). The nuts in Omaha finally decided that what they wanted me to do was take it to Phoenix, which is not so bad, a load of 2300 miles and to a somewhat warmer place but it does leave me with lot of time that will undoubtedly be killed on the first day of 2008.

From Oklahoma a fine, though long, somewhat boring and very light brown day. The early part in darkness since I left at 3:45, thinking, as i did then, that i was trying to get to Albuquerque by midday. The sunrise over the Texas panhandle was pleasant. the flat expanses, and eroded arroyos. Gradually the land gets (somehow) even more drawn out, more vast and desolate and you cross the invisible line into New Mexico. High mountains just before Albuquerque were dusted with snow and a strong wind out of the north all day tried to push me into the fast lane.
Some pictures:
Texas Panhandle













Grain Storage (the iPhone has an odd but sometimes appealing way of distorting the images taken from a moving truck) somewhere in Texas








snow in the mountains east of Albuquerque

Kelleyville, Oklahoma

I’m headed to Albuquerque with a load of beer and Bacardi based malt beverages. I picked them up at an Anheuser-Busch brewery in Baldwinsville, near Syracuse, New York. They are actually going to Anheuser-Busch in Ontario, California, east of L.A. Why on earth it would make sense to make beer in a brewery and then ship it to another brewery 2500 miles away while passing within sight of two other Anheuser-Busch breweries (Columbus and St. Louis) is a mystery to me.


Throughout southwestern Missouri and northeastern Oklahoma, where the Ozarks roll and rock outcroppings sprout stout trees, the woods looked not quite right. The trees had no grace. They looked black and burned. But not burned, everything around them was fine. And then it occurred to me that a few weeks ago a vicious ice storm had rolled through here coating everything with an (apparently) astonishing amount of ice. The trees were all broken off, mostly at the tops, sometimes larger lower branches. The damage was impressively widespread. If I recall correctly the ice storm was followed by high winds and I guess that did it.



A nice walk down a country road at sunset, the sky fading from orange yellow to deep blue and silhouetting powerlines, ranch gates and broken trees quite picturesquely.

Memphis, Tennessee

Again I have come into the south. I suppose It was in Arkansas. I just don’t think of Missouri as the south. So it must be Arkansas. The signs here are things like Cotton Fields, Pine trees, brown grass, pale brown dirt, black folks.

In southern Illinois the southernmost city is called Cairo (which is pronounced Kay-ro) and is in the marshy confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi river which for some reason is called “Little Egypt.” Cairo, I have learned, thanks to Wikipedia, is further south than Richmond, Virginia and is equidistant from Chicago and Jackson, Mississippi. So this question of where the south begins is such a tricky one. Above is the Mississippi River at Cairo

Down around Memphis this area is really called the mid-south, a good melding of the Midwest and the south. It seems like both and the change from the plains of the Midwest to the plains of the south is really only one of climate and vegetation.

South of Memphis in Mississippi in the area erroneously called The Mississippi Delta I felt like I was really in a place. The Delta is technically an alluvial plain between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. It is mercilessly flat and full of fertile soil growing mostly cotton. This is the great spooky empty poor south of blues music. The place where Robert Johnson legend has it traded his immortal soul to the devil so that he might be the king of delta blues in this life. What a legend. I put the satellite radio onto the blues channel.
North of Drew I passed the large gate and dry grass of the Mississippi State Penitentiary. In the yard two men in black and white striped jump suits picked up trash. No kidding. I was in “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?”
I delivered the cans to a warehouse in Drew. Not the cannery. Just a storage warehouse. The air was perfectly silent all I could hear was my feet on the concrete. Inside was a single black man, a forklift and millions of tin cans stacked 20 feet to the ceiling filling the whole of the space. How many trucks worth?
My next load had two pickups and two drops. Pickup one in Memphis and #2 in Tupelo, Mississippi and drops at K-Mart DCs in Pennsylvania. I headed up to Memphis and spent the night at a pilot a mile up the road from Hamilton Beach where I would pick up in the morning.

Ina, Illinois

Once in Merrillville i delivered my salt to the Lowes and was delighted to find a Costco in the adjacent lot. I am very nearly evangelical about the merits of Costco. not being a big fan of big box stores i suppose i am pleased to find one that seems to be doing it more or less right(er).

My next load was a pick up in Milwaukee and a delivery to Drew, Mississippi. I had an extra day in there and it was supposed to snow buckets so I knew that i would be able to stop and see my chicago friends again.

I headed up to Milwaukee in the midst of Chicago's "rush hour" (roughly 6am to 8pm Monday through friday) and spent the night south of Milwaukee. The next morning snow was falling lightly as i drove up to the Ball Corporation on the north side of Milwaukee. These streets, these were made for trucks, hugely wide with big corners and easy to read signs well in advance. I learned to drive trucks in Wisconsin (green bay) and it is generally a joy to drive in this state which, regardless, is one of my favorites. the load was tin cans headed to Allen Canning who can things that southerners like (such as greens and black eyed peas) Then down into Illinois where I parked at the little Speedway Station on California and 35th which has only about 8 parking spaces and is closest to public transit, the best place to park when i am in Chicago and I have a trailer (if I don't i just park on he street) This place is my secret, if too many people find out about it i will not be able to park here so please keep it on the DL.

The next day I didn't get back to the truck until 1pm which was fine as i had plenty of time. I headed south down I-57 which I think is a bit of a neglected road as the plowing in spots was shitty. There were also a lot of spots fully open to large fields to the west from which snow drifted veil like over the road.

Catlettsburg, Kentucky

From Hampton Roads it was over to Branchville, VA where I was to pick up a load headed to Merrillville, Indiana (which could be said to be in the “Chicagoland” area, a term I find somewhat irritating for reasons probably relating to this girl I knew my freshman year whowas irritating and, when asked where she was from would reply “oh, the chicaaagoleeand eareea” in an irritating chicagoland accent.) I did not get over to Branchville until after dark and it was a challenge finding the place where I was supposed to go for three reasons. A.) no directions were provided. B.) The place was basically a grain elevator and C.) it was closed. (oh yeah and D.) it wasn’t the right location.)
Turns out that this location was the main office (which was somewhat difficult to believe) but that the pick up location was about 12 miles north in the town of Courtland. Three other drivers had shown up in the hour since I first arrived. One of them somehow managed to figure out this actual location and, because I was out of hours, I went there the next morning. This correct location was merely a larger complex of grain elevators.
I was pretty irritated that Werner had given me the wrong pickup address and didn't seem to know what the fuck was going on in general as far as this load was concerned. But here I figured out why.
The Shipper was Meherrin Fertilizer Inc. and their main business was mixing fertilizers and also mixing IceMelt (a mixture of salt, potash and a nonslip texture addititve.) Up to this point Werner had never done any shipping for them but Lowes (the home improvement chain) had called up Meherrin and said they would buy all the icemelt they could sell them or their stores in the upper midwest who were, you might recall, getting slammed by early season ice and snow storms. Virginia had not had any significant ice or snow in the last couple years and so had stores of this stuff. Werner does a lot of the shipping for Lowes and so off they sent us to pick up some ice melt. The other guys were going to locations in Michigan and I to Merillville.
Turns out they didn't even have enough product at this Courtland location to fill all 4 trucks and so I followed a truck load of african american fellows up to Sedley, an even smaller town about 15 miles away over roads that really were not built for semi traffic. Another grain elevator (well let's be accurate, there is no grain, all fertilizer and salt) and I bakced into this "dock" uneven and very much more grassy than your average Wal*Mart dock.
While four young guys stacked bags on pallets two older black guys bickered about how best to load the trailer for proper weight distribution. This resultled in the partial loading and unloading of the trailer at least twice which, at this point, was getting obnoxious. Meanwhile two fat old white men stood around and watched everyone else work and the whole scene felt strangely anachronistic.

Finally I was loaded and off I went through Petersburg and Lynchburg over the rolling hills of the Piedmont and gradually those hills grew taller and became the appalachians and I was in Roanoke. Then into West Virginia to Beckley and Charleston at sunset and as much rush hour as they could muster. then in the darkness into Kentucky, skirting the Ohio River and coming to a rest at a Flying J where I took a shower for the first time in some time.

Hampton Roads, VA

A journey across a 17 mile bridge! To Chicago (Again!) Into the Deep South and surfacing again!
all in this post.
And (all new, all color) pictures!

When last I left you I was at the bottom of Maryland's Eastern Shore in Pocomoke City after which I continued down the DelMarVa into the Va, a long skinny water riddled spit of land buffered between the wide Chesapeake Bay and the (somewhat wider) Atlantic Ocean. To the left is an image of the peninsula the skinniest part of it is the Virginia part of the DelMarVa. To the left is the Chesapeake Bay and to the right is the Atlantic and further north the Delaware Bay and the peninsula of Southern Jersey



At Cape Charles, the tip of this land people once figured there ought to be a fixed crossing to the Virginia mainland to the conurbanation known as Hampton Roads (the cities of Norfolk, Newport News, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Suffolk etc... did you know that Virginia Beach is the most populous city in Virginia?). The problem with a fixed crossing woud be the rough seas at the mouth of the bay and the fact that the distance between the two lands is over 17 miles. No worries a bridge was planned with mostly causeway and a few high sections to allow large boats to pass up the bay to Baltimore and into the Hampton Roads area, a big Naval and shipping center.

The navy wasn't keen on the idea of span that, by accident or malicious intent, could fall thus blocking the entrance and exit to this strategic point. The solution was to make one high truss at the northern end of the crossing and two tunnels beneath the main shipping channels between other sections of causeway. The passage over this bridge is an exceptionally bizzare experience. It is odd enough to be on the center of a bridge from which, on a day with even slight haze, no firm land can be seen but then the bridge just sort of dives beneath the water and then, about a mile later, resurfaces. Madness. You can see the point at which the bridge becomes a tunnel to the left.

I crossed the bridge and found the first Office Max in Virginia Beach where it took FOR-EVER to unload and which the manager, a lady later blamed on the fact that the unloading was being done by a man. While I was waiting I saw a door lying next to a dumpster. A nice solid door. I figured, Hey, I'm building a bakery, It will probably need doors and leaving this door here on the pavement would be tantamount to leaving a hundred dollar bill (at least) on the pavement when clearly no one else wanted it. So I wrestled it into the truck where It still is and will be until I get home.

The unloading at the second OfficeMax in Chesapeake went much more smoothly and before long I was on my way.

Pocomoke City, Maryland

It is a favorite topic of conversation, where does one region stop and another begin? When does the East Coast become Appalachia become the Midwest become the Great Plains become the Rocky Mountains become the Cascades become the West Coast? All the way across the country, vast changes in landscape and no clear idea when one becomes the other. (some are easier than others. It is very obvious, when at the Denver International Airport, where the Plains become the Rockies.)

Perhaps the most pondered division is that between “The North” and “The South.” When I hopped down from the cab today parked in the Wal*Mart parking lot in Pocomoke City, Maryland, the mild air scented with pines and paper, I knew that I had definitely crossed into the South.

I picked up this load, office products destined for two OfficeMax stores in the Norfolk, VA area, from the DC in Hazleton, PA. That was in the north. What changed? When did it happen?

I drove down the DelMarVa peninsula, an odd appendage on the east coast like a hand pointing south, comprised of parts of Maryland, Delaware and Virginia, separated from the “mainland” by the Chesapeake Bay. It is on this peninsula that 27 years ago I was born and where I lived until I went to college in the, not separated from any sort of mainland, Midwest. It is easier to take this dividing of North and South one area at a time so lets look at the DelMarVa.

An easy, although false feeling, answer is that the line is the northern and eastern border of Maryland, i.e. the The Mason-Dixon Line which separates Maryland from Pennsylvania to the north and Delaware to the east. Today I traveled south through Delaware on DE-1 and US-13. Near Wilmington in the north it felt like “The North” the land rolls with rocky outcroppings and vibrant fall foliage. It can look a lot like New England (Many people think that the movie “Dead Poets Society” was filmed at a New England boarding school but, indeed, it was shot almost entirely in northern Delaware) But in the extremely flat southernmost county (Sussex) you will find loblolly pines, enormous chicken farms (Purdue) and the northernmost cypress swamp in the country. That feels pretty southern to me.

I suppose where these lines exist depends on what sort of geographical or social markers you look for. Where you begin to find these markers you will say “here we are.” Take this for example: I had a teacher in high school who was originally from Egypt. She had gone to college in the US and lived here for quite a while. She and her husband were returning to Delaware from New York City when, after surfacing in New Jersey from the Lincoln Tunnel, she said to her husband “The south really does feel different.” I don’t know what her markers for what made the south were but apparently there they were, somewhere between the meadowlands and oil refineries of northern New Jersey.

Youngstown, OH

There are some trucking companies that try to attract drivers with the line "No NYC! No New England!"
There is a good reason for this. Of the places in America to drive a 70+ foot vehicle, the older parts,
the parts that, when built, could not have seen the need for streets and intersections open enough
for semis are, generally, not places where driving a semi is "easy." There is also a lot of traffic.

I picked up this load of Armored Cable in New Bedford, MA. which, down in the southeast corner of the state
along with Fall River, is sort of a forgotten niche of the state. It isn't boston, it isn't the cape, it isn't even Rhode Island
for god's sake. I trucked it just into Rhode Island and bedded down at a truck stop outside of West Warwick (or just outside
of Providence as everything in Rhode Island is) This truck stop billed itself as, yea indeed was called, "Rhode
Island's only 24 hour Auto and Truck Plaza" which seems a lot wordier than, say, "Pilot."
One of the real bitches about east coast and more urban truckstops is that they often charge for parking.
This is some real crap. It wouldn't be, I suppose, if every truck stop charged money, but well over 90% of them do not
and so, those that do really seem like they are ripping you off. Especially if they are in crappy little rhode island.

Across Connecticut the next morning traffic surged and slowed as it was pumped through the congested arteries
in New Have, Bridgeport and Stamford then into New York, across Westchester County, things opening up, down into New Jersey and through the Delaware Water Gap into Pennsylvania and woosh, to Ohio.

As you leave the east coast the traffic opens up ,the landscape opens up, everything seems to start to take deeper breaths
and you too take deeper breaths and life is good again because you are not on the east coast anymore.
Continuing on this breathing gets deeper and wider all the way to the rockies and then again opens up
and then over the cascades or sierra nevada before your breath comes back tight in your chest in seattle or san francisco
or los angeles, but in the spaces between, its not so bad.

The snow here is letting up, and I ought to get on the road and over to chicago before too long.

Roanoke, Virginia

They will not get me off the effing east coast! I told my dispatcher, or “Fleet Manager” as Werner calls them (which is better than Schneider who called them “STL” or ”Service Team Leader” (When did business become so enamored of stupid euphemisms. They always seem to conceal something.) anyway, I told my dispatcher that I would stay out on the road for 5 weeks in order to save up days that I could take off for Christmas. Technically I can do whatever I want since I am a “contractor” but I do want to have some money. So anyway I also asked my dispatcher if I could get west sine I would be out for so long. But no. This time out I have just barely gotten west of the Mississippi (at the brewery in St. Louis, about 500 yds from the river) And since then I have been really east coasting it up.
From Lebanon, PA I went to Chambersburg, PA to pick up K-Mart clothes to take to a DC in Greensboro, North Carolina and from there I deadheaded (no trailer) to New Concord, Ohio (Deadheaded! That was more than 370 miles! wtf) where I picked up Colgate/Palmolive products and took them to another Colgate/Palmolive place in Trenton, NJ and from there it was up to Carteret, NJ to pick up some import merchandise headed to a Lowe’s DC in eastern Connecticut and from there another long deadhead to Syracuse, NY to pick up cast fittings for electrical installation (like the things that hold conduit in circuit boxes) at Cooper/ Crouse-Hinds going to one of their DCs in Roanoke, Virginia where, as you can see from the title, I am now. I’m at a TA by I-81. I’m waiting. It’s Sunday. I also only have 1.5 hours left on my 80 for tomorrow (and 5.5 left today) so I am not really in a hurry.
SO… I want to answer some of your questions. A long while back a reader of my blog posted the following:
“I'd love for you to write more about WHY you're trucking -- of all the things you could do and have studied to do, why have you gone back to this? Is it the money/ease equation? Do you like driving? Can you see yourself doing this forever? What does your family think?”
First a little background. This poster and I went to college together so she knows a few things that a reader of this blog who I do not know would not know. (isn’t that cute, he thinks there are people reading this who he doesn’t know!)
I went to Grinnell College in Iowa which is a well respected (expensive) school. Very few of the graduates of Grinnell have probably worked as truckers, for whatever reason. I also went to a private boarding high school and come from an upper middle class family. What I am trying to say without seeming like too much of a turd is I am overeducated and not in the demographic that people usually associate with trucking. Note: “That people usually associate with trucking”, I have met truckers from all over the socio-economic spectrum. So, without further ado, here are the answers to your questions, Hillary:

Let’s start with the first time I started trucking, as I think I covered in the first post. After graduating from college I was looking for a job. I was having a lot of trouble with this. I thought, perhaps because it is a line I have been fed since birth “get a college degree and you can do anything” I thought I could do anything. Now I know that I could do anything, the tricky part is convincing others of this. I have never been a good salesman, especially for myself, since this seems unnecessarily immodest. But more than that I think there has been a sort of sea change since the 90s. A change that created an overly zealous job market in which employers needed false affirmation that you could do a job and have commitment and all the skills and prerequisite experience before hand rather than believe that an intelligent person could easily learn any job.
So I got fed up with this bullshit and went for a job that a.) I definitely didn’t know how to do but b.) someone (Schneider in this case) was eagerly willing to teach me. I liked this. They believed that I (or just about any non-felon who could pass a drug test) could learn this job, a job, I think, that requires a lot more specific and difficult skill set than telemarketing or some other crappy cubicle job. At that point, when I first started driving, I needed a job. I had bills (especially college loans) that needed to be paid. I also have always enjoyed driving and figured I could manage the “workload.” It also certainly had the allure of being “exotic.” Something that I saw all around me but knew almost nothing about. (a reason I think people enjoy reading this blog.)
But then I left. I left because I was bored. I left because I thought I could get a job doing something in “the industry” in LA (I graduated from college with a degree in theatre design, technical stuff like lighting and set design and construction) again, overzealous job market based heavily on having previous experience, usually experience that does not pay, which was not an option, and based, in LA, maybe more than anywhere, on who you know. I left also because I thought trucking was killing me. I was out of shape and did not feel “well.” I blamed trucking but really it was me, I was not eating well and I was not exercising, at all. (this time around I am doing better on this front.)
I came back to trucking this time around because I figured out what I want to do with my life (well, at least part of my life). I decided to build a brick oven and open a small bakery. In order to do this I needed to make some money. Money to pay off debt (student loans, and credit card debt that I accrued mostly while living in LA and Olympia with little or no employment income) and money to build this oven. The job that I had, working at an outdoor school, I liked but paid terribly and so I went back to something I knew would make me a fair amount of money. An especially fair amount of money considering I am single and have no housing expenses. (I get my mail at my parents house and split my time off, every other weekend, max) between Chicago and my parents’ home in Maryland. If you would like to follow the progress of this oven project I have started another blog, find it in the sidebar or on my profile page. (keep in mind I can only work on this project when I am home, once a month or so, so that blog will be updated even less frequently than this one.)
So that’s why I am doing this now, money.
As I said above, I do like driving. There are probably other jobs I could have gotten that pay more or less the same. But driving jobs are easy to get, and there is no “boss” not on that is present at least. It gives me a lot of time to think and read and write (like this excessively long entry) I get to see places and become more familiar with this fascinating industry. That being said it is not something I want to do forever, or even more than a year or two, and in that respect it is better this time around since I have a goal. It is a means to an end. And so I can not see myself doing this forever.
My parents don’t mind at all. They are open minded folks and they too know it is a means to an end. That being said, if trucking was something I wanted to do for a while or forever and it made me happy, they would be all for it.
I hope this answers these questions. If anyone else has any other questions please post them as comments to this post. Anything at all from basic trucking “logistics” to the great metaphysical matters that I consider while cruising across Kansas on I-70.
Additionally I invite any of my friends who have the time and inclination to come with me on the road. (this offer is only open to people I know, and even then not everyone :) Details: you would have to have no plans for at least 2 weeks. The only cost is that of food and any other miscellaneous expenses that you incur. Fuel and "lodging" (there are 2 beds in the cab) are obviously taken care of.

Lebanon, Pennsylvania

I am here at Valspar, a company that makes varnish and the like, with a load of plastic cans/buckets from Central Can Company in Chicago, a shipper that was indeed my first load when I started driving a truck for Schneider way back in October of 2004. That load was full of buckets that were labeled for holding Calcium Carbide a “dangerous when wet” substance. Apparently it gets all exothermic and places that melt down scrap metal throw the buckets whole into the glowing vats to increase the temperature and speed up the process, at least that’s what some dude a the carbide place in Kentucky where I delivered said cans told me.
Toady I rumbled along the Ohio and Pennsylvania turnpikes for the umpteenth time having come across the Indiana one the day before. I read somewhere that there was an early plan to connect New York and Chicago with toll roads. Now the intent probably wasn’t to charge people a lot of money as much as it was to connect the two cities with multilane limited access highways and the early versions of these were, in fact, all toll roads. (The completion dates of the roads in question: The New Jersey Turnpike, Pennsylvania Turnpike, Ohio Turnpike, Indiana Toll Road and Chicago Skyway are 1951, 1940, 1955, 1956, and 1958. (The Interstate system wasn’t even authorized until 1956 and not completed until 1991, although, technically, there are still some parts of the original plans that haven’t been built.)) The cost for a car to travel from New York City to Chicago (including the toll on the George Washington Bridge and the bridge crossing the Delaware River) would be $53.15. The same distance in a truck would cost $241.20. The bulk of both is the damn Pennsylvania turnpike which charges trucks $142.00 for 359 miles of tight, hilly, congested, poorly paved road, or six hours of delightful mountain scenery, depending on how you want to see it.
Prior to loading these cans I had Some Beer from Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis that I picked up after the Fruit2O delivery across the River in Granite City. I took that up to Arlington Heights on the northwest side of Chicago where I swapped it at the distributor where I was supposed to deliver it with a guy who was out of hours to deliver his load in nearby Morton Grove, a load of Potato Chips. With our powers combined what a party it could have been.
When I showed up at Anheuser-Busch they told me the load would not be ready until 10pm (13 hours from then) and so I settled in and got some work done and wondered what I could do. Although the day was cold and rainy Downtown St. Louis was only about a 2 mile walk up the street and though I have been through the city a number of times I have never seen what was there, nor indeed ever exited the vehicle in which I was traveling. I figured I needed to do what everyone should do in St. Louis. See the arch!
If you are searching for far and away the weirdest thing that the National Park Service has to offer, visiting the Arch would be it. Did you know you can travel to the top in a sort of elevator type thing?! Neither did I. So Weird! This elevator thing is completely bizzaro-world and really looks in all ways like something cast off from the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Check it out on Wikipedia.
Seriously though, all thoughts of imperialist manifest destiny and Indian genocide aside, the arch is a beautiful monument to the inexorable westward movement of European settlement in the north American continent and an engineering marvel.

Granite City, Illinois

Here I am in what they call the American Bottom. I has something to do with being down here in the flood plain of the Mississippi, a flat low area and a great miserable metaphor for the hell on earth that is East St. Louis a place where apparently, at least at one time, there were no manhole covers because the wretchedly indigent population had taken them to sell for scrap metal and the town government had not the time and or the inclination to replace them. They apparently created a bit of a driving hazard.
The beautiful capricious nature of freight left me with this load, a great truck full of Fruit2O, one of a collection of water/juice drinks popular these days (Sobe’s Life Water, Vitamin Water, etc…) probably because they are, presumably, low(er) in calories and higher in vitamins and shit and loved by producers because they are mostly of their cheapest ingredient, water. Well maybe their 2nd cheapest ingredient (after corn syrup). The load is from Kraft in Ayer, Massachusetts which I picked up on the 21st and wasn’t due here in “the bottoms” until tomorrow (the 25th) morning. So I got to spend the thanksgiving holiday with my friends in Boston (Somerville to be precise). I parked the truck at a medium size (enormous size in New England terms) truckstop and biked in the very misty foggy morning to the commuter rail station at Grafton.
The ride in was uneventful through a thick and persistent fog which outlined the skeletons of birch and maple and aspen in a breathy silence and out of which I thoroughly expected Squanto and the Pilgrims to emerge with turkeys and fish (to bury with the corn of course). Suddenly spindly treed wood dotted with pleasant houses and Volvos give way to something that looks like a suburb, but not in a way that anyone who wasn’t familiar with the east coat would understand.
Dinner was lovely as were drinks at the bar afterwards with another friend and a bartendress who invited us to enjoy pies and (what must have been room temperature) shrimp laid out on one table the thought of which, on such a full stomach, was gross. She also chided us because “ya like haaff myage and ya fahkin sittin theyah, get up and have some fun.” Or something like that but definitely with the accent which is almost as hard to phoneticize as it is to replicate.
I woke up early and then went back to bed and then woke up again, still early but not as much as before and biked in what had become a bitingly brisk morning up beacon to the Porter Square stop in the red line and shuttled into South Station hearing Eliot Smith and pretending to be Matt Damon as the train arced over the Charles. The ride out on the Framingham/ Worcester line was quicker since it skipped all the stops from Yawkey (the Boston equivalent of “nasty”) to the 30 or so stops that have Wellesley in their name.
Then another brisk ride up to the truck and I was off. Thick traffic on I-84, everybody was going to the mall. Through the Poconos (not mountains I recently found out, but a deeply dissected (by rivers) plateau, which, when you look at it makes sense and also explains why the place is so creepy.) Across Pennsylvania, a bit of snow glittering in the headlights and finally into Ohio and coming to a rest near Seville. Nearby there is a town called “Barberton” and I wonder if there is the same sort of ridiculousness going on here as there is southwest of Chicago in Joliet and Romeoville.
This morning it was cold. Winter is here (along with Christmas carols and unbridled spending). Through the rest of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois. Nothing new here. Settling into a groove, appreciating the Saturday line up on NPR.

Seneca Falls, NY

That was the shittiest shower ever. The room was very cold. The pressure was terrible.
(and that is as far as I got in Seneca Falls)