Rain, Rain, Go Away

 

Thunderheads on the horizon, alive with flickering lightning like pregnant alien abdomens from late night science fiction. It's a good thing that I left early that morning, for no special reason, because halfway around I 465 it began to deluge and traffic slowed to a crawl. “We'll come out of it,” I thought; “We're just expecting isolated thunderstorms. Traffic will improve once I hit I 70.”

Well, yes, it did, but the rain continued to fall like it was trying to float Noah's ark. I was heading east, trying to outrun the storm. It rained heavily all the way from Indianapolis to Richmond, for about seventy miles. Isolated my eye, that storm had to be massive; it couldn't have been moving that fast. I had it floored, running 65 mph, when I could. I made it to my stop just on time.

That storm was on Tuesday. I've had a bunch of adventures this week. Monday was a particularly hard day. I'd done my usual Sunday laundry ritual and was just about to leave the bar when a surprise band started playing. It was Rooster McCabe out of Minneapolis. They were good. I couldn't leave. It was the summer solstice. A whole tribe of young hippies in tie die took the dance floor. I thought maybe they'd come with the band, but no, they just appeared. A friend said he thought he was having a flashback. I danced, if you want to call it that.

I don't know what time it was I finally flopped into bed. I didn't bother to set the alarm, but of course I always wake up. I drug my sorry ass to work and all went well. I drove very carefully; there was no getting in a hurry that day.

Three times this week I had to use all of my driving skills. Twice simply because the places that I delivered to required it, not being built to accommodate a truck my size. Like having to do a blind side back from off of a busy four lane street in Dayton, Ohio. I was shaking by the time I'd safely accomplished that. The other one is too complicate to explain, but there's no real problem going in, it's backing out again that's tricky. And then there was a construction zone in downtown Peru, Indiana that wasn't wide enough for my rig. “Relax people, I'll be out of your way as soon as I can. Does it look like I'm having fun here? Do you want to try this?” I ended up having to take a detour through a residential area, trimming the trees as I went.

Most interesting, though, I went off the beaten track again to deliver some refrigerators to Amish or Mennonites in Illinois, “The first left over the Kaskaskia River.” The area wasn't nearly as intensely populated by them as it was up in Shipshewana. I only saw one buggy. This time I asked more questions though. These places are factories. They buy the refrigerators and convert them to propane. I asked what they did with the compressors, once they'd been removed. “We usually buy them hollow. These have compressors so we'll probably end up tossing them.” A very disappointing answer, I thought.