Eminent Domain

 

As much as I was against the construction of a new terrain highway across Southwestern Indiana I have to admit that after delivering a load in Evansville at 5:00 PM, their time, it sure is nice being able to jump on a super highway and cruise back to the yard. The same was true during our recent trip to Texas. We drove straight through on the return. I shudder to think of those last 100 miles over small highways, tired and stiff. And in the morning on my way to work it's grand to have no stoplights to contend with.

It's a pleasant ride too. Well, in town there's the stress of traffic and merging vehicles (I've got some words on that), but the segment from Bloomington to US 231 is gorgeous. The hills of Southern Indiana clothed in trees and spotted with barns and houses. In one stretch of about five miles there is nothing visible except forest; not a road, not a building of any kind, not even a telephone pole or communication tower. It's beautiful, exhilarating, until you remember that this isn't a picture show, that where you are driving, that very spot was until recently forest too. The two sides were one uninterrupted wild space. Do we even know the consequences of disrupting that contiguity, with so little of our forest land left?

The break is a quarter of a mile wide, bulldozed and steamrolled; take off the hilltops and fill in the valleys. When the road was under construction, the trees removed but the grading not yet started, I couldn't see it. Where IN 45 crossed the barren place the hills to the west were too jumbled. How, I wondered, could a highway be put there? They did it, of course. All that is left of that complex geography is the butt ends of the hills leaning back at a lazy angle from the right of way; one big hump on one side, three smaller ones on the other.

Yup, they had fun with their heavy equipment. I sometimes wonder if that wasn't the point, for them. Harmony Road crosses the highway over a bridge that's a hundred feet high, if it's an inch (actual height: 92 feet). The highway climbs toward it, levels off, declines a little before passing under then begins to climb again. I'm not an engineer, have no idea what exigency may have dictated the shape of the present road, but couldn't they have kept a smooth arc, perhaps at a slightly steeper grade, and built a smaller bridge? Maybe they were just playing around with our tax dollars. One thing's for certain: I don't want to be on that overpass during an earthquake.

Nor is it a smooth ride. In this day in age you'd think they'd know how to make the road surface meet the level of the bridges. Apparently not. There was a jarring bump at each crossing, sometimes so severe that it could cause vehicle damage. Over time they've mitigated this effect either by adding pavement, shaving pavement off or both. These efforts have had varying degrees of success. There's one crossing that I still brace myself for to this day.

Oh, I could go on and on, landslides on the shoulder, collapsed coal mine underneath the road, but I fear that I'm merely bitching again. One last consequence of the highway that I want to mention though; what it has taken from me, personally. It's amazing, really, how much industry there is in the Southern Indiana hills: Quarries, stone mills, saw mills, manufacturing of wood products, the Amish and their enterprising endeavors. I spend a lot of time in some beautiful and remote areas. I'd need to get to them via small Indiana highways, winding through the hills. When I was an over the road driver I hated the small highways, they were so much slower and harder to negotiate while I got paid the same as if I'd breezed in on the freeway. Now I get paid by the hour and it's the interstates that I hate, all that jockeying for position among the big trucks and the four wheelers whipping in and out. On the small highways I get to see the countryside, intimate with the passing year. It was on one such small highway that I had my peak experience. Now, however, I just jump on I 69 for the majority of those trips.

 

Love in the Time of Covid 19

 

Howdy ho you random reader. I'm sure that I have no dedicated following anymore, after my long absences. Blogging used to be my lifeline to sanity, when I was an over the road trucker. I had designed my own webpage back then, as my ISP only offered unstructured space as a home page. It was entitled The Reluctant Trucker. I only became a driver because I needed a job, not for any romantic notion of the open road. When I came in off the road I changed my ISP but didn't like the format of the pre-structured homepage that Comcast offered, so I came over here to blogspot. I was still driving a truck, but instead of moving randomly around the Lower 48 and Canada I reported each day to the same location; my recurring nightmare.

I'm pretty much down with it now, it's not such a nightmare anymore, going into work. There are still aspects of the job that are hellish, to be sure, but overall it's not bad, even sometimes enjoyable. I've got to keep my guard up though, it is precisely when a driver gets comfortable behind the wheel that he is most at risk. We all know that the nightmare could return in less than a second.

So, I find myself with some time on my hands, what with Indiana's stay at home order. I've often contemplated checking in here, but the times I do have grown farther and farther apart, and yet the site remains; so here I am. What, working from home? Not possible, I'm a truck driver, remember? In fact transportation is considered essential and my company is still operating. With Indiana's lax restrictions most businesses other than restaurants are still open too, business as usual. After all, they are each essential unto themselves, right? There's plenty of work for me to do.

No, my isolation is voluntary. I was wondering what the stay at home order was going to mean for my job when I was handed a sheet of paper declaring that I was part of the "Essential Team" of Stone Belt Freight Lines; a development I met with mixed emotions. On the one hand I can little afford to be out of work, on the other I doubt that public health officials are trashing the world economy for nothing, shouldn't we all be doing our part? Still conflicted the day before the stay at home order was to start I was sitting in a line of trucks waiting to be loaded. I had my window down playing solitaire when a guy jumps up onto the step of my truck. He didn't actually put his head through the window, thank goodness, but was well within the six feet of social distancing. He said, "Sorry it's taking so long but we've got four loaders out sick."

Great, so what the f**k are you breathing on me for? I was pissed. I called my boss and told him what had just happened and went on record that I thought what we were doing, continuing to operate as if nothing was out of the ordinary, was wrong. He said that if I didn't want to do it I didn't have to, I could just leave, hang up my keys and let them know when I was ready to come back to work. Taken aback I told him I'd complete this load, delivering to Indianapolis in the morning, and then let him know my decision. I knew I could just quit, I didn't expect to be given a choice in the matter. Could I afford not to take work that was available? Not easily. Was it the right thing to do. Almost certainly, with the only caveat that if too few of us sacrificed would it make a difference? A lame excuse at best.

I probably would have made the same decision in the end, even without this incident. Despite the fact that I rarely get sick and haven't, knock on wood, had the flu in over twenty years the risk remains to be an unwitting carrier with no sign of the illness. And, being a driver the potential is there to not only spread the disease within a community, but to transport it between communities. If what I were doing was essential I'd be all in. I'd be the man for the job. Like I say I don't usually get sick. The work ethic at my company is that when you're sick you work through it. I've been in a room full of sick people without the protection of a flu shot and came out unscathed. On the other hand if I did contract the disease I'm pretty healthy, I'd most likely survive it. But I don't feel that what I do is really essential. I can't in good conscience take the risk to others more vulnerable and the public health system's capacity.

So here I am with a little time on my hands. There's plenty to do around the house, to be sure, but I've been wanting to check in here. I promise that before this is over I'll come back with some more updates on my life and work.