Indiana Dreamin'

 

I used to scream in frustration, “Get me back to the Big Road!” Then just the other day I had to take I-70 from Indianapolis over to Terre Haute and I thought, “What a boring ride, give me the little road any day.” I mean, think about it, I’ve been driving for a local company out of Bloomington. If you’re going to leave from Bloomington to anywhere you have to take small state highways, the four lane to Indy being the exception, everything else winds through the countryside. While I was once placated with the picturesque qualities of Northern Indiana and the Wabash Valley, Southern Indiana can be down right Beautiful. It also helps that I’m being paid by the hour now, and not the mile.

[Process note: It originally took me four paragraphs to say what I just said in half again as many sentences.]

So now I’m supposed to tell you about what it’s like driving a big truck across the small highways of Southern Indiana, but the subject is too big. I’ll have to whittle it down. I mean, the State’s grown exponentially as I discover how much industry there is tucked away in odd corners everywhere. At the same time it has shrunk as I pass signs to places I’ve been from the East, again from the West, then end up returning to from the North or the South. Don’t let me deceive you though; paths cross, but there are few straight lines.

No, there’s too much to tell. I’ll say but one word and can’t begin to address it properly either. The word is Limestone. Hey; I work for Stonebelt Freight Lines right, though stone is only a fraction of what we haul.

Forget the highways. I take off with an eighteen wheeler and travel roads that may or may not have a center line, but there sure ain’t no shoulder. I’ll travel over hill and down dale, through forests and farms. Sometimes vistas will open across the “Little Smokies,” the Karst topography of my region, then suddenly I’ll come upon a desert; a strip mine. They call it a Quarry.

They’ll load me up with near 50,000 lbs of stone and I’m supposed to go back the way that I came, lumbering back to civilization. It’s funny I should use that word; lumbering. This stuff is Deep Indiana. I figure the only way I could get deeper, work wize, would be to go off road and haul Timber.

I doubt that will happen, but still there’s so much more to tell about limestone, and everything else...