Ideas from the Road

 Some people have deep, profound shower thoughts.  I come up with stuff like this while driving to and from work:

Let me set the scene.

 

It’s somewhere around the early middle of the night, one of those nights that’s vague and little more than can be described in retrospect as “dark”.  The only thing that sets this moment in time apart from any other much like it in any other aspect is the way things seem to suddenly appear on the edges of one’s vision and then vanish just as suddenly.  It’s the kind of night with a general feeling of “things are abroad out here”; the kind of night in which just about anything might happen.

 

Into this night of maybes, a wanderer of similar aspect steps out from the edge of a nameless town, out into the vastness of the same kind of landscape that gets classified as “middle of nowhere” no matter what it looks like or where it is.

 

As could be expected, something does indeed loom up out of the darkness after a time – something large and weighty and yet seemingly one with the void it just appeared from.  It passes, then eases to a stop.  The passenger-side door opens as the wanderer on the side of the highway catches up to it.  If words are exchanged, they certainly can’t be heard by anyone aside from the individuals involved in the exchange, but the end result is clear enough.  Being either trusting or supremely naive, our intrepid adventurer climbs up (and up, and up…) into the cab of the rolling steel beast.

 

Of the driver, there isn’t much to say.  He has no specific appearance, and much like the night outside there’s very little to set him apart from the multitudes of humanity encountered along the road.  He is, however, a man of many thoughts, and engages his passenger in a lengthy conversation chock full of deep existential and philosophical content.

 

Perhaps because of the nature of the company he’s in, our wanderer is later never very sure where exactly this interlude takes place.  On the one hand, he’s quite positive he’s in a surprisingly comfortable seat, barrelling down the highway in the cab of a massive semi-truck which while it looks as modern as can be, also carries about it the weight of infinite years; a latter-day dinosaur that groans and hisses at rest like the steam-engines of yore.

On the other hand, he can also remember vaguely the sounds of livestock from the trailer…and the resinous smell of fresh-cut logs and the rattle of wood and chain…and the all-encompassing muted chatter of a crowd of people behind and drifting down from the upper deck above…and the happy laughter of youngsters rustling about in the hay behind him, in the bed of the ancient farm truck.  At one point he’s sure he’s bouncing along behind the buckboard of a Conestoga wagon.  It’s the semi he steps down out of, however, in the next nameless town down the road.

 

 

Meanwhile, ten years have passed.

 

 

 

In trying to relate his tale, the only sure detail the traveller can recall, and which he repeats over and over to reassure himself, is the name on the side of the truck’s cab.

“Flying Dutchman”