It wasn’t until the
first time I bought fuel the thought really connected. Yea, connected, like a
solid jab by a practiced boxer. I walked out of the truck stop convenience
store into the 50 mph gusts of a quartering headwind with a fresh cup of java
for the next couple of hundred miles and suddenly realized my entire life was
riding rubber into the teeth of a serious windstorm. One overpowering gust, one
swerve, and half a lifetime’s accumulation could be scattered into history. Not
to mention blood and bones on the pavement. Talk about a cold chill!
I wasn’t quite seven the last time I’d felt such a fear. We’d
rolled back into Los Angeles with
everything the family owned in a dual axle U-Haul trailer behind a 1956 Buick
Roadmaster. I remember being terrified
of the huge clunky clamp-on trailer
hitch coming loose, the one riding the solid steel back bumper on that three
ton tank of a land yacht that hauled us around so many years. If it broke we
had nothing. The idea was pretty scary, for a six year old. Walking back to the
truck I realized that present, same as past, it was unnerving to think of what could
happen if something critical failed with everything depending on it.
That thought kind of hung with me, what might happen if
something failed. On that particular day it was a valid thought. Highway 64
west of Alva, Oklahoma turned into an… interesting… drive. I spent several
hours fighting lane changing gusts listening to a big V10 engine hammering it
out to hold 45, 50 miles an hour up and down the hills against a 100 mph live
wind load. The idea of fuel economy was kind of absent, the only consideration
was brute torque up around 4000 rpm where polite goes away to make room for
power. It was a case of kid, either park it or sit up and drive this thing. It pretty well took total concentration, on the
surface levels anyway.
But beneath the focus of keeping things between the lines
and out of the oncoming lane the original realization of having the material
consequences of my life along for the ride lingered and kind of bred into the
fear of something failing, be that failure my judgment or something to do with
the rented beast of burden laboring beneath my throttle foot.
That rather grueling stretch of road is a week deep in
history at this point. What returns when thinking back on the whole affair
isn’t what you might expect, the fatigue and tension and ringing ears, no, that’s
not comes back. What returns is how scary it is to realize in a full and
visceral way that it is you and only you who has absolute and total
responsibility for your life regardless of if your life is locked in a U-Haul
truck or locked within the walls of some mansion. It’s your life, and the winds
of fate and fortune are always going to be blowing.
Your choices are accept you must either park your life along with your dreams
or accept you must sit up and drive
the thing if you want to get to where those dreams have a chance of coming
true. Scary or not though that’s just the way
it is: park it or drive it, kid. It’s your choice.
