From Louisiana to Maryland

I got a message that they wanted me to swap the load with a driver in Shreveport. He was from Kansas and needed a load towards home. His load was headed to Maryland. Too bad I had just “come out of the house” (i.e. had a weekend) or it would have been pretty much perfect.
I had talked at length with a driver from Kansas the last time I was in Tulsa. We had delivered together, the load that was to become a pool supply store and chatted while they took the stuff off our trucks. I wondered if this driver from Kansas might be that driver from Kansas.
Turns out indeed it was George whose name I could not remember, and his wire haired terrier Oscar, whose name I could. I backed in next to him at the Love’s, 3 miles from Texas and we swapped trailers and equipment. The temperature had dropped from the mid80s near Lafayette to the low sixties. It was grey and misting. I was loving it.
I headed down the road just a bit to the Petro.

I took a walk around the lot through the mist.
After my walk I went into a small convenience store to buy some beer and a snack. It was small and I was the only person in the place except for the clerk who was a middle aged black woman on the phone behind the counter. I picked up her conversation in mid flow.
“and she says “you heard about yo Huz-band?!’ and I says” a bit irate “no I ain’t heard about my huz-band!” and she says ‘You ain’t heard’ and I says ‘no, I ain’t, what about my huz-band?’ and she says ‘he in jail.’”
Oh boy, I thought.
Reluctantly I approached the counter to complete the sale. The clerk held the phone between her shoulder and skull as she rung me up. She got most of the way through the transaction before looking at me sideways with a little smile. “You gotta id.”
I handed it to her. She looked at it once and then walked to the other side of the register and picked up her peepers with chain and looked again.
“It’s in red near the middle” I said.
“Oh” she laughed, “you plenty old enough.”
“thanks a lot” I said.
“did I ask you for yo id lass time you wuz in here.”
“I’ve never been here before in my life.”
She completed the sale and I walked towards the door. She resumed her conversation.
“I had to ask him fo his id cuz he didn’t look old enough but he was plenty old enough.”
Her voice trailed off as I entered the mist.

The next day was a long slog across the south. Rolling woodland is about all there is to central Mississippi and Alabama. West of Atlanta I put some fuel in the tanks. East of Atlanta a man berated me with all kinds of slurs on the CB because I veered a little too close to the line as he was passing. Something else had been bothering him.

I stopped for the night a little bit further down the road, Carnesville, GA, at a Petro whose parking lot was oddly deserted, It seems like there is too much parking where it is not needed and woefully little where it is needed desperately. (The west coast, the northeast, Florida.)

The next day it was up though the Carolinas and Virginia and then into the DC metro around the beltway and into Montgomery County. The load I had was going to a Power Plant on the Potomac northwest of DC. I stopped in a weigh station on I-270 between Washington and Frederick, I considered stopping there for the night but then thought, while I still had light, I ought to head over the back roads to the power plant rather than wait till morning when the light might not be as great.

I was glad I did. The roads were tiny and hilly and curvy. Very scenic, but scenic rarely means truck friendly. Down a tiny little road I found the entrance to the plant. The guard called the construction supervisor who was apparently mildly perturbed that I had shown up early. He directed me to a place to park overnight in the midst of a lot of other equipment that had been delivered recently. Another driver was there with a similar load but he had brought it from a mill in Alabama. He was a driver who was dedicated to this company, meaning he hauled primarily their freight. He wanted to talk more than I did.
I ate some dinner (carrots and humus, crackers and some cheese and an oatmeal cookie) and read and went to bed. The truck was slanted so my head was slightly above my feet and I sleep very well when it is like this. Maybe I should get a craftmatic adjustable bed.

In the morning they directed us to the location where we would be unloaded and told us to unstrap the load, large metal I-beams painted grasshopper green (like the drink, not the bug). Then they left us alone for a while, I don’t know where they went but it was almost 3 hours before they came back. As our trucks were unloaded I chatted with the foreman. He told me that they were building a structure that would house a system that would recirculate the dirty coal exhaust from the plant and reburn it with limestone resulting in 95% cleaner emissions and a byproduct of gypsum which could be shipped out and turned into drywall. Something like that. I thought that was pretty great.

Now I am in Huyett, just west of Hagerstown, the closest truck stop, at 47 miles away. There are no truckstops near DC, a city that does not produce much of anything.