Out of Florida

So there I sat in St. Augustine sweating away until the next morning when I got a load assignment. I was sent over to Lake City sort of right in the middle of northern Florida, the crackeriest part, to a place called Corbitt Cypress.
I turned into the drive of a very messy, run down yard. Stacks of shaggy felled cypress reached 30 feet in the air. I pulled onto a pretty ragtag looking scale and from a little shack out came a short black woman. She took my info and inquired with the guard about my load, He looked it up and said that I would need to go to lot two and I was given directions. “just remember the blue house.”
I turned right at the blue house onto a wide dirt road that narrowed as it entered the dense north florida pine and palmetto forest. The road, or lane, wound into the forest and than opened to a vast meadow filled with pallets stacked with bags and swathed in plastic. At my end of the field was a house trailer that looked bad even by trailer standards. A man motioned me off the even more rickety scale and into the office. I was sweating again.
Everyone in the office was smoking. A big black guy filled out my bills. A skinny old white woman seemed interested in talking. She explained the cypress mulch industry.
My truck was loaded and I threw straps over it and weighed out, it was over so they took off a pallet and I weighed again. This time it was all good. I was given the bills and I headed out. The load as headed to a Home Depot in Covington, Louisiana. That would mean a drive all the way out the panhandle and skirting the gulf coast. The heat would not relent soon. Nor for that matter would florida. Coming from southern Florida up to St. Augustine and then west out the panhandle is almost 700 miles of florida. If you were to drive from Key West all the way to Pensacola on the western tip of the panhandle that would be 835 miles. You can’t outdo that much intrastate travel unless you’re in Texas. From San Diego to the Oregon border on I-5 in California is only 735 miles. (I don’t think Alaska even has 800 miles of road (at least not paved) The point is Florida is big.
Driving through the gulf coast is eerie. It was eerie even before Katrina. There are tall bridges that rise above some of the bayous and present the landscape. A sea of grey green trees, a sea of grey blue sky. Awash in the middle of nowhere, ready to be swept out to sea.
Covington is on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. A huge oval where the land gave in to the sea. A forklift took the mulch off my trailer. I had another load, this one picked up in Port Allen, west of Baton Rouge.
The load was scaffolding that was being rented to a oil refinery in Kansas. The man there was pissed, not at me, he assured me, but at Melton, who had promised someone would be there at 8am. It was 1:30 and they were supposed to close before lunch on Fridays. I liked the idea of closing before lunch on Fridays. That must be the French influence. Lassiez le bon temps roulez.