03/02/2021
Four years ago I pedaled to Texas from Savannah Georgia. It was March 1st, 2017 when I wrote this down in a tent at a rest stop in Iowa City, TX on my way to New Mexico.
"Truck drivers and musicians have little in common. The concrete term “truck driver” is offset by the nebulousness of the word “musician”.
I may have met some musicians along the way but I’ve surely met some truck drivers. At every rest stop; at the mini-marts with East Indians flatly observing interactions between people, here and there, truck drivers have accompanied me or I should say, I’ve accompanied them drafting the vortex of the 18-wheeler cutting air resistance for me.
“Hey, man! Want a cold water?” A large bearded, mid-forties man handed me a bottle of water.
“Thanks! How you doing?” I was sitting in a rest stop just a bit outside Iowa Park, Texas and hanging an extra day just outside of Wichita Falls to get a zero degree sleeping bag for New Mexico, which gets down in the teens in temperature at night and in the thirties in the day.
He asked where I was going and I said north on Texas 287 to Amarillo and then across to Albuquerque. He went to his truck and high on the cockpit was his wife.
“She rides with me every time I go to New Mexico. She loves the red rocks,” he said and she looked down and smiled. “So do I,” I said and smiled back.
We talked a bit about really not too much. Truck drivers don’t even talk about trucks. They don’t talk about the loads they carry — they are like the cyclist and talk about the road and what you can see from it.
I’ve always thought that the cowboy, the lone man and a horse on the open plains, was a transcendentalist. I’m pretty sure that few cowboys read Emerson, knew about John Muir and the American philosophy that American philosophers don’t claim as a philosophy because transcendentalism is not systemized and mostly grew from two Unitarian ministers.
How could a cowboy hate where he was? Drawn to the natural world like the English poet William Wordsworth, like the passive Ralph Waldo Emerson who saw nature almost through a glass window and in his head, like Henry David Thoreau in his bare-boned Walden Pond structure on Emerson’s property and mostly like John Muir who climbed a tall conifer in Yosemite, hanging onto the thin part of the trunk to feel its bending during a Sierra storm, the cowboy experienced nature like the first president of the Sierra Club, Muir.
There are the truck drivers that are like the cowboy. Herding a load of Chinese crap for Walmart is the modern day amalgam of cattle. Of course there are still cattle tending cowboys but now the cattle go in 18-wheelers and the “cowboy” wears a Mack truck cap instead of a Stetson.
It’s strange to lose my commonality with “musicians”, quoted because a guy who wields the tuba of R&R, the bass guitar, talks gear endlessly and this band and that band, hardly leaving an alcohol infested nightclub with the requisite weekend Harley riders wearing light-duty denim jackets with bad-ass patches of deadly affiliations but “born to be mild” on the weekdays attending false teeth manufacturing — the bassist is not a musician to me but a haberdasher of dandy fashion and that horrible concept of lifestyle that animates the American Army to bring “freedom” to some Middle-Eastern country. This may be complicated to parse out, but I am convinced of military motivations being materialistic and lifestyle purveyors with electric stringed instruments as tribal shaman first regardless of how great they wield the instruments.
Some of my musician friends are musicians but those who are actually musician are plugged into the larger world culture because that’s where a composer combs the soil for ideas and material. But rarely do we talk about music — we talk about humanity and music is square in the humanities and lifestyle is squarely in pop-culture and transient like the cyclist and truck driver.
The truck driver, on the other hand, doesn’t talk about the world cultures but will bring his wife to lavish in the red, tan, pink and orange sediments of what is New Mexico, the land of enchantment. I saw two women truck drivers with their little dogs at the truck stop, didn’t talk to them but understood that they were cowgirls, wanders like the cyclist through the beautiful countryside of the north Texas plains.
My first meal of the month was at Rafter J Texas BBQ & Cajun Eats where I met some beautiful women that served me and wondered about the cyclist. I had mentioned to one that I had my bike dashed by Texas’ Finest Storm. She was on the phone, calling a man who does bicycle repair.
He came in, said he was told my bike was damaged but it was little. This is for Mike Burke — toenails. I had a fried shrimp and crawfish sandwich with Tchoupitoulas Gumbo. It was great! Made some new friends. Raise some hell in your tribute bands!"
