(Continued from Page 13) sweltry heat while he applied a coat and let it dry, applied a coat and let it dry…I don’t think he charged much. Years later his fix finally gave out and it started spurting gas every time I went to fill up, but I found that if I just stuck the nozzle in at a very precise angle and held it there the problem was avoided. I let it slide like that for months before gas started pouring out the bottom too, when at last I took it in for proper repair before I could get blown up. Then there was the time the transmission nearly went out on me in Tennessee. Nearly. I was halfway through the longest solo road-trip I’d ever taken—one entire glorious month with my dog around the Deep South, camping and having adventures and trusting in the kindness of strangers— when suddenly the noise I’d been ignoring for months got crucial. The only gear I could drive properly in was fourth, but I managed to limp into Atoka, Tennessee where I stayed with Donna Huffman’s mom (Donna being the founder and then-editor of this magazine.) Miss Dot was kind enough to put me up for a week while they installed a rebuilt transmission, and the time we spent together made a lovely chapter in my book. That was the thing about this truck: it never left me high and dry. I’ve been as far north in it as Charlottesville, VA, as far west as Lafayette, LA, as far south as Crystal River, FL. Everything I did was with cash, a road atlas and my wits
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Outside a barbershop in the Memphis hood about me. There was just nothing better than backing into a weedy pullout on a dirt forest road somewhere and setting up shop for the night, completely undetected (or at least assumed to be a man) as I settled down to rest under the shell. Next morning I’d wake up to the birdies chirping, make tea with my camp stove on the tailgate, soak up some sunlight while poring over maps of the day’s hike. When I felt good and ready I’d pull away and never look back. The first time I slept in the cab was because they got me drunk at Pepper’s Porch, back when it was still a good-time down-home place where people threw horseshoes and treated you like an old friend. I got off my shift as a security officer feelin’ like bein’ bad, so I pulled into Pepper’s and spent the evening drinkin’ beer and takin’ shots on an empty stomach in their screen-porch bar. By the time they started grilling steak and offering strips of it for free, it was too little too late—I went out to my truck and threw up all over the inside of the door before passing out on the bench. Yet strange to say it was not an altogether unpleasant night! The balmy heat and moonlight in wisps of Spanish moss; the way no one cared how I slept it off under live oaks in the gravel parking lot; the simplicity of being just a few miles from home, and the independence of choosing to wait it out all curled up in dreamlike agony until the wee hours when I awoke ready to roll. I don’t drink at all anymore and I’m glad; but I actually have some neat memories from when I did. That was the first time I slept in the cab but not the last. I did it again in North Carolina’s Nantahala National Forest when it was dumping rain and I couldn’t find anywhere to camp. And again in Florida’s Ocala National Forest after a long ordeal involving a flat tire, blistery hike, and subsequent misadventure with two knuckleheads from upstate New York who picked me up and ensnared me in a long evening of going around eating seafood at bars before finally giving me a lift back to the truck and doing a bad patch-job on the tire—after that I was too tired to pitch a tent, so I just slept on the bench seat with my coat for a pillow. This was never comfortable, but always made me feel adventurous. There were many brushes with the law in that truck; but those have been written about and I won’t fall to rehashing here—suffice it to say profiling happens. There were also