10/27- The Long Haul with Trucker Don

There were many different facets to this ride with Don. The first bit of intrigue would show up that first day.

I had been under the impression that we'd be in St. Louis early in the afternoon after he'd picked me up. We pulled into a Pilot 20 miles east of Kansas City, however, and when we parked he told me we'd be here for most of the day. It turned out Don had been hauling a triple load pulling overtime through the past few days and needed to stop driving to catch up on his hours in his log book. This is the way these guys get things delivered on time is by fudging their books until they get to a point where they can reconcile the made up times.

On hearing this, since it was about 1pm, I started to get nervous about time again. It was Wednesday, and if I wasn't going to be dropped off in St. Louis, just three hours down the road, until tomorrow some time then I may as well get out here and try to press on. I told him as such, and decided to have lunch with him there, then I'll sit out front and hitch. It was a decent sized truck stop, perfectly located for me, and quite busy. I also had Don as a safety net on the random occasion that I couldn't get a ride out of there.

Over lunch Don was a bit sad. We had already grown attached to each other, and I did feel like this was a premature move to be making. Other than that it all made sense. When we finished I thanked him again, we swapped contact info, and I sat out front and he returned to the trucker's lounge.

It was a grey day and cold. So far, since leaving Matt's back in Oregon, I'd had rain predicted for every single day where ever I was and had only had that hour of drizzle back around Florence and the bit of drift snow outside of Denver. The next day Denver had gotten slammed with a huge snow storm, but where I was in Nebraska was blue skies. Anyway, sitting out there at the previously mentioned busy gas station maybe one car came through in an hour. No one was coming and going, the skies were grey, threatening, and cold, and I was starting to wonder if I was getting greedy for miles again. Perhaps this was a time to just relax again, enjoy the rest with Don, and keep on with him until it does feel right to get out. After all, this whole trip was supposed to be about following your gut, right?

An hour after sitting there with nothing but cold and desolation in the lot a lady who worked for the place came around collecting trash. She looked at me huddled up by a pillar with my bag and asked me why I wasn't inside watching the movie with the drivers. It struck a chord with me and I looked back at her and said that sounded like a good idea. So I went back in.

Don was watching TV upstairs in the lounge and I nudged his shoulder letting him know I was back and interested in staying on with him. He was happy about it and we watched TV for a bit before heading across the street to Walmart for a new phone for him. While there I picked up a new journal to write in and he wouldn't let me pay for it. In fact, the rest of the time I traveled with him he wouldn't let me pay for anything.

When we got back to the Pilot we watched Blades of Glory in the lounge then retired to the truck for the night. He let me use his laptop to check my email and I ended up on it until he needed to wake up and get moving around 2am. That put a strange twist on the next day, because when he got up to drive I passed out after a little while and didn't get up until we were past St. Louis.

The deal from the get go had been that he'd either bring me to St. Louis or I'd hang on until he made his drop where he suspected he'd be going to Arkansas after that, and hopefully Texas. In which case he said he'd drop me off in Memphis. I know that seems like some strange geography since I'm heading to the Northeast, but my theory was that Memphis was better than St. Louis because the South is easy to hitch and I could likely fly through to Virginia. Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio looked like more barriers to me. So when I passed out he asked if I wanted out in St. Louis and I told him I'd hang on past the drop.

I woke up as we were just heading south away from St. Louis. As we headed down I started working out my plans again as to where I should get out. I was eyeballing a place called Sikeston, MO which was right by the bridge to Kentucky and right on Don's way. I figured I could sit with him through the load to see where he's going next, although it seemed entirely likely he'd be heading west and he was going through Sikeston to get there, then I'd have him drop me there and I'd try flying through Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, to New York and Mass. They all seemed like easy hitch states.

We hit the drop, and I tucked away in the back of the cab since I wasn't supposed to be there anyway. When he got back in he was chuckling. While winding our way out of that little town to get back on the main road he told me I was going to love his new load. We were off to Binghamton, NY and it needed to be in Friday morning.

Now Don had spent a lot of time telling me he hated the Northeast. Not just because he was a Texan, in fact I think that had little to do with it, but more as a trucker because no loads come out of there. According to him, if you head to the northeast you're probably deadheading out (riding empty) for a few hundred miles, which is costly in gas and time, before you get to another pay load. He took the job because the pay was nice enough to make up for that.

It was later that night, when we parked at a stop near Herculaneum, MO that Don completely whigged out my brain. Somehow Don got into saying that he really didn't like Malls. I couldn't agree more with him, but his reasoning was different than mine. He claimed he could read people and that when he went to crowded places like that it was hard for him because images of what was going on in everyone elses life around him would crowd in his brain.

Of course you can't have a conversation like this and not ask "well, what do you read off of me?", whether you believe him or not. He didn't want to tell me, but when I egged him on he said that, for one thing, I wasn't going to be going to South America when I thought. In fact, he said it wouldn't be for a few more years, his guess was 5 or 6. There were two reasons why, and they both had very short time frames. I've decided, however, that I don't want to write them up right now, because one was really good and one was really bad and I'd rather not put the notion out there in the air which could encourage the manifestation of the negative one.

The main point was that they were very direct, inambigious predictions coming out of nowhere talking about life changing events in my personal life within the next few months. The fact that one of them had a hard end date as to whether or not the prediction would come true or not was good for me, since I try to slump these things off with a grain of salt but in the end I can't help thinking about them. This way, when that time passes and nothing at all happens then I'll know the rest is bullshit.

What I found strange though, was that after he told me this stuff the conversation then changed to something else. About ten minutes later, as part of the new conversation, I made a reference to his ominous predictions. He didn't get it at all. Only ten minutes later he had completely forgotten about what he'd just said to me. When I reminded him, he told me that usually happened. Once he said what ever it was, and the message had been delivered, it completely left his brain. In his words, there was no reason to retain it. He promptly went to bed after that.

The next day was just a drift day. We blew through the midwest and by nightfall were camped out at a truckstop in Pennsylvania about an hour from Binghamton. Everything seemed said and done by then and it would soon be time to get out.