in search of the absurd: fiction & nonfiction

Got Your Back Door -- by Joanne Merriam (1/28/08)

 

We leave Halifax on the last day of summer. Drew is delivering a load of polymer to Texas and me to my boyfriend, Alan, in Tennessee.

"Vacuum gauge looks good. I don't think we'll have to scale this at all," Drew says as we leave with a new trailer attached. "Now if we can just get out of here without tearing the tires all to hell."

I ask him if he'd call what we're leaving behind a depot or a lot or what - I want to learn the correct trucker lingo - and he says, "How
about a shit-hole parking lot? Dirt shit-hole parking lot."

The ride is very bouncy, as ruts in the road radiate through the tires and directly, it seems, into my spinal cord. "If you stay on for eight seconds you win a prize," Drew says as we go over a particularly bumpy section of road. I'm too busy looking out the window to complain.

Seeing everything from this high up makes the familiar road seem new. I see trees, farms with giant silver silos, a crow perching on a telephone wire, haybales dotting a field, Queen Anne's lace dotting the verge, and a six-foot Tim Horton's drive-thru sign. The trees are just beginning to turn, and several of them splay a single, startling red branch against the ubiquitous green.

We play hopscotch with a wine-colored Monte Carlo from Moncton to Petitcodiac, and when Drew warns the trucks in the oncoming traffic about the police cars behind us, they return the favor. I start to feel as though I'm in a movie. Drew says he's never seen Smokey and the Bandit. Through the side mirrors, I can see reflections in the paint of the cab and trailer. The windows reflect the road on the
driver's side of the truck, producing a ghost road next to us which wavers as we bounce. The reflections overlay to create a collage
that's confusing to the eye.

By the time we reach St. Andrews, the windshield is liberally splattered with the remains of insects which got in our way. I tell Drew about a book I'd seen once called something like  ‘The Windshield Guide to Bugs’ and can't remember if it's entomology or etymology—one's bugs and one's words, but I can't recall which is which.

Going through customs into Calais, Maine takes three and a half hours.  A customs agent who must be at least 6'8" thinks I'm lying about my intentions to return to Canada, since I have neither an office job nor a lease. Apparently, wanting to spend Christmas with your family and friends is insufficient. He argues that anybody would spend $180 for a return ticket on Greyhound to offer as proof of their intention to return - Alan later points out that anybody who was lying would claim to be leaving in a week or two, not in two and a half months, and I wish I had thought of that argument at the time. The tall man has me remove all of my stuff from the truck and goes through it on the table by the side of the road, flipping through my diary and being very suspicious about my breadmaker ("What is this?" he says. "A breadmaker," I reply. "Why do you have it?" he asks. "To make bread," I say). He takes Drew to one side to verify my story, and when he asks what would compel me to return to Canada, Drew says, "Well, free health care, for one."

Finally he decides that he'll let me through if I can demonstrate that I have enough money to live on while in the U.S. I have to walk back through Canada Customs to go to a Canadian bank machine, because American ATMs won't show my balance. The first machine I come to is the Credit Union's, and since it's a Sunday, they're closed. The second is Scotiabank's, and it's out of service. I start to cry, convinced now that I am never going to get to see Alan, but the Royal Bank ATM down the street gives up my balance without a whimper.

On my return to the U.S., I see a river otter corkscrewing back and forth across the border, its long, brown, streamlined body making
surprisingly little disturbance to the surface of the St. Croix River. The water looks like oil, black with the shadow of the bridge. The
otter pauses to look at me without enthusiasm, apparently deciding I'm no threat before going back to the necessary work of grabbing its tail.

I show the customs agent my bank slip, and he decides that I'm free to go. "Thank you for treating me like a Mexican," I think, but I only say the first two words, not pushing my luck. An hour away from the border we realize that if the customs agent had even once thought to ask us the other's last name we'd have been finished. Having met through a mutual acquaintance, we each thought the other's surname was You Know, Elizabeth's Friend.

All I experience of Maine from the highway is trees and broadcast gangster rap. We push on into Massachusetts where, on our way through Worcester, we see a van with a mattress strapped to the top in such a way as to turn it into a sail at seventy-five mph. No part of the mattress is touching the van, and I can see entire cars through the gap. Drew drops back, and then realizes that if it were to come off it would most likely whip into our lane, and tries to pass. The van speeds up, so we drop back again until a toll booth, where presumably the toll booth operator talks to the driver, because he pulls over and tightens the bungee cords holding the mattress on, as though that might help. We leave him far behind, and eventually find a rest area where we can park the truck. I open the valve on my self-inflating mattress and spread it on the floor. We try to watch 'Star Wars', even though we're both tired. The last thing I hear is, "Senator Palpatine," and then I'm out.

Drew shakes me awake eight hours later and, after a quick pee and some cold water on our faces, we're on the road again. "Let's roll," he says, after the last known words of a Flight 93 passenger who led a counterattack against terrorists on September 11, 2001. Drew explains that that's become the new version of, "Keep on trucking," which nobody says anymore.

"Good morning, Great Protector of the Interstate Highway System," he says to the toll booth operator in Sturbridge, MA, making her laugh. Soon we're in Connecticut, which has lots of ferny-looking trees. I can't get over how fluffy the vegetation looks, and Drew laughs at me, telling me to wait until we get even farther south, where "it's so green it'll hurt your eyes." (This turns out to be hyperbole, but I'm still amazed every time I leave my Tennessee apartment to see kudzu-covered trees and vibrant weeping willows, still green even at the beginning of December before I come home.)

I like the way the truckers took out for each other. They leave spaces in traffic for the others to merge into, and warn each other about accidents, lanes ending and police (who they really do call smokey bears), and catch each other up on mutual friends over the CB. They call each other by their trucking company or make of truck, and they say things like, "You're alright there, big truck," or, "Don't worry about it, Mr. Peterbilt. I got your back door."

Around 10:30 a.m. Halifax time we enter New York State and soon can see the Catskill Mountains. We're on their Eastern side and I'm reminded of the foothills of the Rockies. They seem small to me, but they're densely forested and very pretty. I notice that the verges are dotted with what look like violet-coloured daisies. Around 11, we drive over the Hudson River, and by 11:30 we're crossing the Delaware into Pennsylvania, where the verges are filled with faded pink and dark pink flowers which I think might be impatiens of some sort. The map identifies the mountains in the distance as the Appalachians.

We stop in Scranton, where the truck stop serves the most amazing mashed potatoes with skin mashed in, and probably enough butter to stop an ox heart. We're eating with two other Maritimers, Scott and Mr. Volvo. Behind us, framed by the truck stop diner's windows, are the Poconos.

At roughly 4:45 p.m. we enter Maryland. At 4:55 we enter West Virginia. At 5:15 we enter Virginia. The road doesn't mark the borders, except with a single lonely sign, and I continue to watch the trees and fields alternate, and Drew and I continue to tell each other anecdotes from our pasts. We'll be on Highway 81 until Bristol, Tennessee.

We ease into the inside-most of three lanes; parallel to us and two lanes over is another truck. Behind us in the middle lane is a third truck, who signals to us that it's okay to move over with the same light-flick Drew uses to tell trucks they've cleared his front bumper.

Both of us begin to move over, and the truck alongside us veers away again at the same time we do. Over the CB, the other driver demands an explanation, and the joker behind us says he'd just wanted to see if we'd hit each other. "You'd have gotten quite a show," the driver parallel to us says dryly, obviously angry. He makes a space for us and we move over, allowing the idiot behind us to pass and race away.

About twenty minutes down the road we see that he's been pulled over by not one, but two, state trooper cars. We laugh ourselves almost sick.

As we drive south, we see more and more cars with flags on their aerials, and more and more businesses flying them high. The first time I'd travelled to Tennessee, nine months earlier, I'd thought that cars with flags were official cars. I'd only ever seen them during the G7 meeting in Halifax, years before. A black or navy sedan with tinted windows had passed us, flying a miniature American flag, and I had turned to Alan and said, "Who's that?" thinking it might be the governor or a senator or something. He looked at me like I was demented and replied, "How should I know?" By the time I'm travelling with Drew, I'm prepared for the visual onslaught, but even so it's discomfiting.

(Later, after I'd lived in Tennessee for two months, I stopped smirking at the insecurity I had thought under-rode the constant flag-waving, that same smirk we give a balding man resting his aunch on the steering wheel of a very expensive, very fast car. I started to see the beauty of the flag lit from below and snapping in a brisk wind at night, telling the darkness where to go.)

That night we sleep in the parking lot of the Petro in Glade Spring, Virginia. Most of the women have big hair and wear too much akeup, but they couldn't get friendlier. As we had left Truro two days before, I had commented on the wonderful taste of truck-stop lemon meringue pie, but hadn't seen any en route. "Oh well," I think, "I'll just have to make some when I get to Tennessee," but when I mention it to Drew, he says, "This is an emergency!"

On the road, food is close to a religion.

On Tuesday morning, he mentions my craving to the women at the front desk while he pays for his diesel. They pull out a menu, which, just like the Petro in Scranton, Pennsylvania, makes no mention of lemon meringue. They phone their restaurant to see if they have any, and then turn to me. "Do you want a whole pie, or just a slice?" they ask.

In addition to my slice of heavenly, homemade pie, I have the breakfast buffet. Virginians apparently put butter in their oatmeal, When I comment on it to Drew, he just looks at me and says, "This is the South." The bacon and pancakes are wonderful. I call Alan rom a payphone and tell him that I'm half an hour away from Tennessee, and should reach him by 1:30 his time. I hand the phone to Drew, who calls him Johnny Reb and makes sure he knows how to find the Williams truck stop in Lebanon.

We arrive there in good time, and Alan is waiting for me in his little yellow car, a 1991 Geo Storm. I hand down my stuff and Alan stows it in the trunk of his car, and after the three of us have lunch, Drew drives off toward Texas. I get into Alan's car, marvelling at how close to the ground we are, and he drives us to what'll soon feel like home.

Later, I'll forget the feel of breathing salt air, and the startlement of Halifax's noon gun. I'll start to find the scent of Tennessee, with its strange, green heaviness even in December, familiar and right. I'll start to forget the home sky's shade of blue, and replace it with another shade of blue. Later still, I'll come home to Nova Scotia again and remember those things, each with their own little shock of homecoming.