Diesel—Truckers-Truckers-Truckers . . .

(Posted a day after it was written.)

I have a reading at the Indianapolis library on East St. Clair Street tonight. I’m sitting in this library right now and it is by far the nicest library I’ve seen during my travels so far. It’s a nice mix of old and new. An ultra modern glass and metal addition is attached to the back of the original stone library.

This library even has robots that little kids can play with—the future is here TODAY!

Driving for long hours has somehow become very gratifying. When my Garmin tells me I don’t have to turn for over a couple hundred miles, I sit back, sip my coffee, and feel as though I’m really doing work, son. I don’t know why I feel this way. In reality, all I’m doing is driving a ridiculous and expensive route through a ridiculously long and lengthy trip, but somehow, driving is rewarding—like the longer the leg, the more I feel I’m actually accomplishing and experiencing. I can’t really explain this phenomenon more than this at the moment. I can, however, say that I would probably feel differently if it weren’t for my mp3 player. I listen to the radio as I’m approaching cities, just to get a feel for the places I’m entering, but for the most part I don’t bother searching through stations. Driving as far as I am, the radio stations come into and go out of range rapidly. Besides, I’m pretty picky about what I listen to.

I also have some books on mp3. I’ve been listening to Roots on and off throughout the trip. It’s thirty hours long and it’s one of those books that I’ve always been interested in but probably never would’ve gotten around to reading. I’m about a third of the way through it at this point.

When I pull into truck stops (like Pilot for ten different varieties of hot dogs on rollers) I almost feel like I’m one of the guys—but I never make eye contact with the truckers. Before the end of this trip I’ll work up the courage to take a shower at one of these places—just so I can say I did it. I might postpone this until I get to Whately, MA, though. The diner there is pretty superb and there are at least twenty songs I really like in the jukebox.

I camped in Kentucky for the second night last night. The campground itself was very beautiful and had herds of bison on the grounds. I would’ve used one of their pictures for the heading of this blog entry but none of them got close enough for me to take a very good picture. When I walked up the trail to see them, no other humans were around. I sat behind a fence watching them from a distance for about twenty minutes. I’m not sure that any of them even noticed me. I think I went at a bad time of day. The sun was directly overhead and none of the bison seemed interested in moving or acknowledging my presence.

At around 8:30 p.m. I drove to the nearest sports bar. I left my fanny pack in the van and walked inside to find the bar completely empty except for the bartender.

The place was dimly lit, with a pool table, four dart boards, and a bunch of televisions. After scanning all of the televisions, I went up to the bar and asked the bartender if she’d be putting on the Celtics game at nine. She looked up the channel in the paper and put it on the main large screen behind the bar.

She asked, “Celtics—that’s basketball, right?”

I nodded.

Then she asked where they were from.

I told her they were from the same place as me, Boston (I've given up saying that I come from a city 20 minutes south of Boston). Then I asked her why she worked in a sports bar if she didn’t like sports, and she said, “Oh, I like sports.”

As the players took the floor she asked me what was at stake. I told her if the Celtics won the game then they won the whole thing.

She asked me where I was staying in the area. I told her Big Bone Lick State Park and she asked, “Isn’t that the funniest name for a park ever?” I told her yes, so far, and then I told her about my trip and handed her one of the DMR postcards that I generally carry with me.

Then she said, “You know how the park is on Beaver Road?”

I told her I did know this.

And she said, “The convenience store on that road used to be called Beaver Lick, but it’s got a different name now.”

At this point two couples came in together. One of the men ordered four drinks and four shots for the group of them. After taking the shots he ordered some “pigskins.” The bartender didn’t know what this was, so the man explained that pork rinds are called pigskins in Indiana.

Five minutes later the cook brought out the order of fried pork rinds. I’d never seen them freshly prepared; I’ve only seen them in the bag.

Another man walked in and sat down next to me at the bar. He told me about his son who has done two tours in Iraq and is now back in the states. The son recently made Major, so, according to the father, it’s unlikely he’ll have to do another tour in Iraq unless he wants to. The bar we were sitting in sponsored his son’s unit. Pictures of him and his men covered one of the walls near the entrance.

The man told me how he’d visited the Wall in Washington D.C. (even though he was stationed in Germany during Vietnam) and asked if I’d ever been. I told him a little about my trip, but said, no, I hadn’t seen the Wall. He urged me to go and said it would change my life. When I mentioned my father he told me I should bring my father if I ever have the money. I told him we’d gone to see the Moving Wall years earlier, but the man kind of dismissed this as insignificant. He went into great detail describing how the wall begins short then gets taller and then tapers off again at the other end. This represents the early years when the casualties were low, the middle years when the casualties reached their peak, and the last years of the war when the American casualties began declining to zero.

He went on to tell me more about his son’s experiences. The man told me that his son didn’t like to talk about the things he’d seen and done over there. But at one point, after his first tour, his son told him that he’d seen too many body parts for one lifetime.

The man blamed the fact that soldiers were doing so many tours on President Clinton’s decision to downsize the army. He told me that his son had changed as a result of Iraq. He was different when he came back from his first tour. I told him that my mother is a nurse at the VA.

We got off the war topics and talked about the basketball game for a while. He bought me a beer.

After four or five beers, the man left and two other people sat next to me at the bar. They were soon joined by two more. All four men were from the area.

We watched the game while they all complained about the carrying, dunking, and traveling that referees allow in pro-basketball (another man said these same things to me at my campground this morning, and I think it’s odd how often I’ve heard these same sentiments during my trip).

The bartender told the others at the bar that she was going to leave the game on the big screen because I’d been there first. I would’ve been just as happy watching it on a smaller screen but I didn’t say anything.

The men asked me where I was from. I told them I was from Boston and went to UMass, Amherst. One of them mentioned that he went to Xavier (a rival Atlantic 10 school). I asked if he’d played any sports. He said no. I told him I was on the track team and that I wasn’t very good compared to the other athletes.

Then they started talking about the Olympics.

All the men belonged to a gun club that was open 24 hours and had beer machines like soda machines instead of bars and bartenders.

One of them told me they were writing a letter to the Olympic people to complain about how they never show the rifle events on television. “Why do they show the track events?” one of the men asked me. “Why don’t they show the rifle events?”

I answered that it was the same reason they allowed the dunk in the NBA, because that’s what viewers want to see.

He asked, “Who wants to watch sprinters?” I told him that I wanted to watch sprinters.

Then I made the mistake of saying something that revealed my assumptions regarding the four men sitting next to me. “You know, a white man won the 400 meters in the last Olympics. He was the first white American man to win a sprint since the sixties I think.”

This was a very stupid and ignorant thing to say—and I’m not talking about the fact that it could’ve gotten me in some trouble in a dark Kentucky bar located in the middle of nowhere.

The man who’d been badmouthing track just stared at me.

The two guys sitting next to me began talking about their business plans. The guy two seats from mine started saying things like, “I just got this inspiration, you know? I don’t know where it came from. And yeah, I’d be happy earning $100,000 a year, but why not make more?”

He proceeded to detail his idea to the guy sitting in between us. He drew a picture on a napkin to illustrate what he was talking about. When he pushed the napkin over I snuck a peak at it. It was a picture of a shirt, a sports jersey, with the words Cleveland Steamers written across the chest. Then he said, “Who wouldn’t buy a shirt like that? It’s hilarious. And I’ve got other ideas; that’s just one.

At this point, his friend, the man sitting in between us kind of lost interest in the business proposal. I guess he wasn’t impressed with his friend’s crude t-shirt designs.

Later on, when it became clear that the Celtics were going to win the championship, the man behind the t-shirt business plan started ranting about how much he hated Boston. He went on and on about how this was going to give people from Boston another excuse to be jerks (he used another word that I won't write here), how he hated all Boston teams, and how he hated Boston in general. The man in between us told him to shut up a couple times (after all, he’d never even been to Boston), but this didn’t stop him.

I sipped my O’Doul’s and kept my eyes glued on the screen as the game came to an end. I wouldn’t have taken my eyes off that screen if the t-shirt guy had flicked the tip of my nose. Every single man in that bar was born less than twenty miles from where we sat.

The guy next to me told me he was from Indiana and was rooting for Boston. He knew Larry Bird’s family. His father pitched on a softball team with Larry Bird’s brother, who was also a pitcher. Larry Bird’s brother was so tall and his arms were so long that when he released the ball his pitching hand was almost brushing the batter’s elbow.

Just before Pierce was named MVP, the two guys next to me left. A woman down the bar from me got my attention and told me that the man who knew Larry Bird had once been on Jerry Springer. His wife had asked him to be on the show without telling him beforehand what she was going to reveal. Before the taping, the show’s producers got him all drunk on free, expensive booze and he ended up making an ass of himself on television. I guess since then he isn’t so interested in petty squabbles and fights.

I left to go back to my tent after all the interviews and awards were over, happy that the Celtics had won, but kind of sad that they and the fans began their celebration (Gatorade pouring, hugging, “Hey hey hey, goodbye”) with three minutes left in the game.