Time to think is a gift....

Driving through southern Utah and northern New Mexico, and i feel like i'm driving through one of my Louis L'Amour novels, expecting to see Apaches on the rimrock above the highway, imagining my truck is a horse underneath me.

Feels like my name ought to be Shane or Blackie....

I absolutely love the Southwest.  The rock spires, the plateaus, the brusque hills, the dry, sparse foliage.... The ruggedness, the bleakness, the barrenness....  The smell of the heat.... The reds, greens, browns, golds and blacks.....    It's just a special, beautiful place.  It's awesome to realize that the rock formations haven't changed much in thousands of years, and the indians who inhabited the land before the white man arrived saw the exact same views as i am seeing, albeit without the "improvements" that have sprung up in the last couple hundred years.  It's a simple place that demands little to enjoy it.  It's on days like this that i especially appreciate my new career choice.  Oregon is beautiful, but it's easy to forget that there are many equally beautiful places that are so different.  And there are worse vantage points for viewing the world than through the cab of a truck.

It's also on days like this that i get sad.  Seeing so many families on the road for the holiday weekend is hard. Knowing that my extended family is getting together today for our usual Fourth of July family reunion makes absence difficult.

The fact that i've eaten nothing but peanut butter sandwiches, budget-brand granola bars and water for the past three days doesn't make it easier...lol.  It is remarkable how many meals you can cover with a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a plastic knife.  If you don't mind the monotony, that is.

After this trip i'll be headed east through San Antonio and then Baton Rouge for a delivery in Louisiana.  It's a run for Walmart, and i feel a little pressure.  Walmart is CR England's biggest customer and there is an expectation for absolute 100% on-time delivery.  If a load is 30 seconds late, it's late.  And that means Walmart doesn't have to pay for the shipping.  That gets my bosses a little annoyed.

Oh, the picture at left is Charley at the Ogden, UT Pictsweet plant -- our first load together: frozen vegetables bound for Los Lunas, New Mexico.

I noticed a strange thing yesterday while driving: seems all of my dreams and goals have disappeared.  I don't say that in a "poor me" sort of way, but in a matter-of-fact, "huh,-what-do-you-know" sort of way.  Driving through Moab, UT got me thinking about it, since Tracey and i once vacationed there prior to having kids.  I started thinking about vacations and future plans and realized that i don't have any motivation for a vacation, and certainly don't have any future plans.  The future is the next mile of asphalt, and nothing more.  I think losing Nicole just sort of took all of wind out of my sails and has left me not caring a whole lot about "next chapters".  It's just me and this truck.  And somehow i think it was good for me.  Not how it came about, but in terms of the result.  For some reason, it feels as if things were headed here for a very, very long time....

Thankfully i still have the kids to think about and be part of, or i would be entirely disconnected from my previous life.  As if it were two completely different people.  Actually, it feels that way a lot of the time, kids notwithstanding.  Almost seems as if things past were one long dream sequence in my awkward life.

If it sounds like i'm crying the blues, i'm not.  I'm happy doing what i'm doing right now.  And frankly, i don't have a lot of choices, so it's good to have found something that i can enjoy for the time being.  I'm just experiencing a fairly frank realization that my life has changed immeasurably from a year ago, in ways that i could never have imagined.  And i'm hoping that it all works out in a constructive way.

Seems like a good time to say something profound, like "cherish what you have because it could all be gone in a moment."  Or, "you never know where you're going to be in a year."  But those chestnuts somehow just sound pathetic coming from someone who shot himself in the foot.

Actually, the better lesson for me has been "be true to yourself".  I think i wasted a lot of years walking around in skin that didn't fit.  And even though i was relatively successful for a season, it inevitably came crashing down because it wasn't based on anything but a series of accidents and a lack of passion to do something else.  One should do what one loves to do.  Not what one HAS to do....

I'm really not sure what the future is going to hold.  All i know is i have to get to Walmart on time.  I guess that's all i need to  know right now....

Stay safe....

KWA