When I was in college in Wisconsin a guy from Colorado I worked with on the student-run newspaper once mentioned how he had an uncle who was a long-haul trucker.
“Oh, yeah? Does he like it?” I asked with interest. “The life of the road! The truck stops. The cities of America.” (The sight of Oklahoma City rising like a shining Oz from the vastness of the plains is unforgettable, though I neglected to bring this up.)
“The nation’s incredible agricultural plenitude as you cross Nebraska,” I went on, “and keep on crossing it.” (Wording approximate.)
“The comforting voices on the C.B. as your brothers in trucking arms pass in the night.” (Not unlike that passage in James Salter’s “Burning the Days,” I think it was, in which he describes a reacquaintance with an old pilot friend over the radio as their paths in the sky come briefly near enough for communication.)
No, was my classmate’s response. His uncle was just kind of miserable. “Reedy,” was the word I applied from his telling, rail thin from all the pills and caffeine. And thus the innocent romantic is once again brought up short in his illusions.
This came to mind on a last-minute, seat-of-the-pants trip down South to Myrtle Beach, leaving at 4 a.m. and intent on making same-day 7 p.m. competition at the N.C.A.A. Division III national championships. A long, punishing, nearly nonstop haul, trucker-style, with a jackknifed tractor-trailer on the way costing us a precious hour, a missed exit wasting another nail-biting half-hour, and all in a 2013 Subaru Forester, which as some of you may know means before that model got nice, a bottlecap on wheels, its wimpy four cylinders perhaps sipping gas but in a quirk of Japanese engineering inhaling and blowing out gobs of synthetic oil — nine quarts of the stuff down and back.
All absolutely worth it, of course, as a parental unit and track-and-field enthusiast, as a lifelong fan of hominy grits, as an admirer of palmettos and Spanish moss and mockingbirds and little bright green lizards.
And once you get past the oceanfront hotels mountainous in the ongoing Las Vegas-ification of everywhere, beyond the boardwalk made of recycled milk bottles, you see they’ve even managed to preserve some dunes dotted with flowering beach grass. Seaside, all is not lost.