Driving for Dough

Driving a dump truck for my landscaping job this spring was a special kind of heaven. Guiding that monster down the highway and over curving county roads with just an inch of margin on either side, two narrow inches I kept in check through the rear views. Is that a paradox? You keep from mauling any mailboxes in front of you by watching how close you just came to obstacles and the painted side lines behind you. You keep yourself safe in the onrushing future by constantly looking behind you at the path you’ve already taken, until retrospection becomes second nature and you feel the dimensions of the great beast like it’s your own body.

Lord knows I’m opposed to a fossil fuel-based society. And American drivers in particular elicit a special rancor deep in my heart.

And yet, it’s probably no surprise that of the dozens of wild, mundane, illegal, strange, improbable, and boring jobs I’ve held in my life, several have been driving jobs. In the tumult of childhood, cars often brought some form of solace or escape. Always unhealthy, but you take what you can get.

I grew up in Virginia, and my dad’s family was from Michigan. Once every summer or winter, he’d get home from work, pack up the station wagon, and drive through the night, twelve hours, with a stop in Breezewood for gas and a stop in northwest Ohio for pancakes. I always got the chocolate chip. Those were the days of paper maps and stopping occasionally to ask for directions. He didn’t need to, though. Once he’d driven somewhere, years later he could find his way again. (He lost that ability once he started using a navigation app.)

I guess that was his form of caretaking, one of the only ways he knew how: driving us safely through the night as we slept. My older brother got the front seat so I would stretch out in the back, watching the highway signs, the clouds underlit by the neon eternity of gas stations or the diffuse orange of nearby towns, holding my peace and keeping the silence until I was eventually asleep and not just pretending.

One summer, a couple years after “It” happened, the huge violence that started years of war that ended our family, he decided he needed to take us out west. He had two