Not a Governor. Image via Wikipedia

I’ve taken the high road by forcing myself to watch Sean Hannity show after President Obama’s State of the Union Address.

Actually, I started with Fox, couldn’t deal with it, switched to MSNBC, realized I couldn’t deal with it either, and figured that I could at least learn something about the GOP party line by switching back to Fox. So I did. Just in time for a Sarah Palin guest spot.

Hannity’s show is difficult to watch for a lot of reasons. So is any interview by anyone with Sarah Palin. The two of them together are almost unbearable as  one struggles — usually in vain — to find something that feels unscripted amid the softball questions and reciprocal stroking.

But what really got me was the fact that within the span of a few short minutes, I heard Hannity address Sarah Palin as “governor” at least three times. Not a flub, not a one-time gaffe — three times. Had I tuned in earlier in the interview, I’m sure I would have heard it more times than three.

Let’s get something straight. That’s to say, let’s underscore the obvious: Sarah Palin is not a governor. She’s not even a “governor” in ironi-quotes, which is what one might have called her during and after the 2008 presidential campaign. In fact, she doesn’t hold any form of public office whatsoever. The governorship she used to have was  abandoned before she finished her term. Experts are still deciphering her Twitter tweets to figure out exactly why she left.

You had to feel sorry for the next guest, Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, who is actually a really real governor and commanded much less respect from Hannity, who couldn’t refrain from interrupting him every 30 seconds.

Still watching. I’ll post a clip once it goes up online.

UPDATE:

I understand full well the standard etiquette with addressing former high office holders. I know that former presidents are still called “Mr. President.” I know it’s common to do the same for former governors.

It doesn’t change the fact that when Palin abandoned her office — an office she was trusted by the people of Alaska to serve to completion — she lost a lot of respect in my book. To have abandoned her post after two and-a-half years in favor of ultimately becoming an author and a  paid talking head for Fox News is deplorable.

My point is largely rhetorical, though I admit it could have been better written: it has nothing to do with whether or not I agree with her politics. It’s the principal of the thing. Finish your term and I’ll call you governor. Finish your term and wait the two years required by the Alaska state Ethics Act before you start profiting from things like book deals and speaking engagements — then I’ll call you governor.

Quit your post half-way through and jump right into profit punditry, and ”Ms. Palin” is all you’ve earned.

Sailor's turn to drive.

If I can do one good thing in my life — make one truly valuable contribution to humanity — it will be to have a child and teach little Austine or Austin Jr. to never, ever sit in the left lane. The left lane is for passing.

Superstition is the crutch of the atheist, especially the uncertain one, and I find myself knocking on wood every time I talk or even think too loudly about my truck. I turned over 150,000 as I pulled into Casper, Wyoming, last week to visit my wonderful aunt Karen, Uncle Herb and their beautiful kids. When your a man of my disposition, every milestone is a cause for worry. But since then, it still runs like a prince.

A rear-wheel-drive, four-cylinder truck — light as it is in the back end — is quite possibly the worst thing I could have taken through snow storms I encountered in the Montana Rockies and north Yellowstone. Near white-out conditions in both made the driving slow, and quick accumulation made the rear wheels of my truck spin nearly every time I accelerated.

In Yellowstone, I followed a caravan to a viewpoint that wasn’t a viewpoint, only to get stuck in the snow. The friendly people around me helped me get my truck out. Like an idiot, but one who was thoroughly enchanted with the world, if only for a moment, I continued my journey deeper into yellowstone, pushed my truck to its limits as it struggled up a snow-slick hill.

No dice. Not enough momentum, and my truck couldn’t make it up the hill. Behind me, a UPS truck skidded off the road. A park ranger shook his head when I told him I didn’t have four-wheel drive.

“You better turn around and go back the way you came,” he said. “This storm’s only going to to get worse the further you go east. It isn’t going to get better.”

He said he wasn’t sure I’d make up the hills I needed to surmount on my way back either. But I didn’t have much choice. I drove as fast as I could on the snow to keep the momentum going, but as slowly as I had to to keep from sliding off the road.

Sailor was deeply concerned. So was I. We still had enough time to stop and marvel at some bison, some elk.

Seattle and Portland are great towns. Thank you to my friends Anne Catherine and Allison who put me up and put up with me.

A few days back, I turned my wheels toward home, and the trip has assumed a different tone since. Until you run out of room, the West seems infinite. Something about reaching the Pacific and turning around gives one pause. I had a moment, in Wyoming I believe, when I was driving and everything felt familiar. Like I was on any other drive home from across town. This big, wide-open hulk of a country felt small for the first time. It was a feeling that passed as quickly as it came, as vague and unconscious as a spell of deja vu.

Of course I am sad. And the various mountaintop confrontations with mortality that I envisioned in the wake of my uncle’s suicide, I seem to have mostly deferred to another time. Like my fight with cigarettes, like not having run for two months, I told myself I would turn over a new leaf and face reality on the road. Now I tell myself I will turn over a new leaf and face reality when I get home. The hydra-like specter haunts me now, much more than when I first embarked, while there was still so much West to be won. The old, familiar East beckons me back, reminds me that a man can only escape so much before he’s lost himself completely.

That’s not me. I’m gonna keep choosing life over death, hope over fear. My identity, mutable as it feels these days, lies somewhere beneath the ashes and the soot I left behind — the ashes and the soot to which I return. I don’t mean Indiana. Indiana is just a place. There is an idea of place, of where one has been, that is much bigger. That is what has burned. The last two years of my life, at least. Gone.

Trite images of the phoenix come to mind. I’ll have to do some research and find something else that rises from the ashes. I’d like to employ it here. It’s where the hope comes in.

Next stop Kansas.

Dream Truck. Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

A lot of people don’t know this about me, but I was a trucker for a summer. It was longer ago than I’d like to admit — over twelve years ago, the summer after I graduated high school. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

I wasn’t supposed to drive the 18-wheeler. I had no training, and had only possessed a regular drivers license for two years. I was with Mike, a friend of my father’s, who was an independent pulling for Mayflower, the moving company, and was only supposed to ride shotgun as a steady “lumper.” We would show up at a household, with all the stuff already packed into boxes, and the lumper’s job was to carry all the stuff out to the truck. A solo  driver just picks up his lumpers at a the local depot when he gets into town. I was there as a sort of perma-lumper, traveling town-to-town with the driver.

I’ve done a lot of physical jobs. Construction, remodeling, landscaping, corn-picking (that’s right). Lumping was the hardest work I’ve ever done.

Howbeit, O reader, that one day, just a few weeks into my summer, the driver, who was trying to do some paperwork whilst driving, turned to me and said:

“Austin, I’m getting pretty goddamn tired and I need to do a bunch of paperwork. You’re going to have to drive.”

I laughed at first. Then I stopped.

“I’m not driving,” I said.

He shook his head.

“Yeah, sorry,” he said. “We have to make good time on this next run and we don’t have time to stop. I can barely keep my eyes open.”

Again, I explained that I still wasn’t driving. Again, he explained that I was.

Mike was no ordinary trucker. He was class president at his small Catholic high school. He went on to Notre Dame, where he got an accounting degree. Over time, he started shaving his head into a mohawk and riding a motorcycle to work. He was Mike, the motorcycle-riding-mohawk-wearing accountant.

Eventually he said screw it and decided to start driving a truck. He was the kind of guy who would eat  mushrooms and run off into the mountains to bathe in a hot spring. He had asthma. He refused to have a CB in his truck because he had nothing to say to anyone but his friends. He was thin, wore his hair in a long ponytail, and only went to Flying J truck stops because they almost always had a good salad bar (they still do — I’m sitting beside one now) and clean showers.

He is easily one of the most charismatic people I know. I hadn’t seen him in years when I saw him last month at my uncle’s funeral. I told him next time he needed a lumper to call me. I hope he knows I was serious.

When I think of his laugh, I think of a viking at banquet table in Valhalla — entire leg of lamb in one fist, an iron mug of beer in the other, drunk as hell, a high-breasted, pig-tailed viking woman on his lap, the blood from some mythical beast splattered all over his tunic. His laugh was always the same — drunk, sober, morning, night.

And that summer it was often at my expense. Like when I told him I wasn’t going to drive that truck. And like the time a half-hour later when I almost crashed it.

For those of you haven’t driven a semi-truck, there are a few things you have to know: the few things I learned, incidentally, in the two minutes before I first drove one. First, many trucks have an unsynchronized manual transmission with a double-clutch system.  It’s complicated, so follow the links if you’re interested. Second, a truck has three brakes — a standard pedal brake for the tractor; a set of air brakes for the trailer, which is controlled with a lever mounted to the steering column; and what’s called a jake brake. Even if you don’t know what a jake brake is, you’ve heard them a million times. It’s that really, really loud sound an 18-wheeler makes sometimes when it’s going down a really steep hill, which is basically the sound of a diesel engine using its own compression against itself.

That meant two things. The double clutch meant we weren’t going to stop to switch drivers because I didn’t know how to use it. Instead, Mike was going to lean his seat back so I could climb in behind him and take the wheel — at which point he would climb out the driver’s seat and crawl over to the passenger seat as we coasted down the interstate.

The three brake system meant I was about to freak out and almost crash the truck.

When you’re driving a truck, you can’t see out the back. You have to rely strictly on your mirrors. Passing is a huge ordeal for the novice, because you have to correctly judge when the end of your really, really long trailer has passed the front bumper of the car you’re passing. You also have to make sure there’s no one in the way of that really, really long trailer on your left when you first go to pass.

If this sounds obvious, it isn’t when you’re first driving a truck.

About as soon as I got comfortable keeping the big thing between the yellow lines, I found myself bearing down fast on a maroon mini-van. My first instinct was to check my blind spot and pass. Not so fast, because maybe thirty feet back, on my left was a car.

I considered myself a pretty good driver, even then. I’d clocked a lot of miles on a lot of road trips by the time I was 18. But when it occurred to me that I couldn’t pass, and that I had to hit the brakes or I would literally smash into the back of this mini-van, I panicked. The following thoughts went through my head in about one second.

“Three brakes!”

“Oh, fuck, which one first?”

“Too late, I’m pulling this thing onto the shoulder.”

So my instinct was to pull an 18-wheel truck, full of cargo and going 60 miles-an-hour, onto the shoulder of the freeway. As I hurtled and bounced past the minivan on the right, I caught a quick glimpse of the minivan on my left. Unsurprisingly, the entire family inside stared up at me in wide-eyed horror.

Mike was laughing his ass off.

Relax and step on the foot brake, he said. I did, and the minivan moved past us, and we got back on the road.

After that first incident, everything was pretty smooth. I ended up driving the truck a lot — maybe about a third of the time. I slept at a lot of truck stops (which I still do today), went out West for the first time, and wrote about it all in some notebooks that I later lost and would give anything to have back.

Along the way, I learned some things about the trucker code, things I still use today. You can use them, too. Even if you don’t use them, it pays to be aware of them:

1. If a truck passes you in the night, flip your headlights off and on a few times once he’s safely past you. In the dark, it’s difficult to tell when the end of that long trailer has cleared your front bumper.
2. If a trucker gives makes room for you to squeeze in somewhere, give him a wave of thanks. Truckers do this by flipping their tail lights off and on a few times. They’ll do it to you, too, if you follow rule number one. Try it sometime.
3. A truck rides pretty high, which means excellent views down low-cut tops. Trucker code in no way obliges you to comment to or honk at the object of your leering. But it might oblige you to comment to your driving buddy.
4. Switch to the left lane if passing a truck pulled over to the shoulder. Most shoulders are pretty narrow, and trucks are pretty wide, so it’s dangerous to pull over and get out if you’re a trucker.
5. Blown-out truck tires in the road are called “alligators.”
6. Highway patrolmen are called “smokeys.” If they’re using their radar guns, you call them “smokeys with ears on.”
7. Truckers do say things like “10-4″ and “what’s your 20?” Misuse them at your peril.
8. For reasons I still don’t understand, confederate flags and Native American dream catchers are not mutually exclusive symbols.
9. If you can plug it in at your home, some trucker is going to have it in his truck. This includes refrigerators, microwaves, TVs, DVD players, laptops and sex toys.
10. Give trucks a wide berth. Those things are hard to stop. And for all you know the trucker behind you could be on day three with no sleep, could be watching a movie, or could be having sex with a something plugged into his cigarette lighter. Or he could be could be some 18-year-old who isn’t licensed and isn’t familiar with the braking system.

I’m in Idaho now, having spent several days with friends in Seattle and Portland. Like Tristram Shandy, who can’t quite seem to tell the story of his own life, I keep trying to write about the places I’ve seen and find more pleasure in the divergences. More to come soon.

Badlands, bad ass dog.

Sailor seems to have heard the call of the wild. Or something like that.

For as long as I’ve known Sailor — about four years, and since she was eight weeks old — she has always been a dog who devours whatever food is placed in front of her. I’ve known other dogs, like my sister’s, who graze the food bowl throughout the day, particularly when the humans in the house are eating. They are casual, social eaters.

Sailor was never like that, ever. Until now.

Lately, I’ll go into a truck stop to, say, grab a bite to eat, and leave her in the truck with a bowl of food. I’ll come back an hour later and she hasn’t eaten. At first, I suspected she wasn’t feeling well. But she eats as soon as I’m nearby, and eats with gusto.

Veterinarians, dog psychologists, trainers, et al. can feel free to chime in on this one. But I’ve heard that, in the wild, dogs prefer not to eat unless other members of the pack are around to stand guard. A dog (wolf, hyena, dingo, coyote) is vulnerable while it eats because it’s attention is focused on its food, not on potential threats.

My theory is that with all the traveling, all the new smells, and the sight of all these wild animals, such as those we’ve seen in the Black Hills, the Badlands and Yellowstone, something instinctual has kicked in with her.As long as I’m watching her, she eats. If I walk away with my back to her, she stops. But if I turn to look at her, even from 30 yards away, she’ll resume.

She doesn’t know what to make of the bison, the elk, the deer. So she barks at them. Amidst a Yellowstone snow storm, in which my truck got briefly stuck, I slowed down to photograph a horned bison by the side of the road. She started barking and the Bison, who’d been ignoring us til then, turned and stared us down.

How to apologize to him for all the senseless slaughter of his kind back when the West was being won? How to let him know I came in peace? That I wasn’t like these dudes, from back in 1870:

Pile of bison skulls in 1870. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

No matter. I stepped on the gas. Last thing I needed was a pissed-off Bison to charge my little short-bed truck.

I also think Sailor and I — with our snowy hikes in in the Black Hills, in the rocky, sage-covered terrain outside Yellowstone, in the pine forests along the Coeur D’Alene river in northern Idaho — have become more of a unit somehow. Exploring together, vulnerable together, surviving together, as it were. By now, we’ve spent four or five nights sleeping in the back of my pick-up truck together, all of them in freezing temperatures, at least two in subzero temps (maybe three — last night in Ellensberg, Wash. was damned cold). She crawls inside my sleeping bag and we keep each other warm. We’re frightened by the same noises in the night.

Meanwhile, my beard and my hair keep getting longer:

My beard: more 15-year-old-jihadist than Grizzly Adams, but I'm working on it.

I think we’re becoming a wild pack of dogs.

I have never been as cold as I was in South Dakota.

I’m serious. Not ever. Single-digit highs dropped well below zero come evening.  Winds howled across the prairies like they were driven by valkyries. On Saturday morning, in Sioux Falls, SD, the temperature gets as low as 30 below, without the wind chill factor.

I pull over to the side of the road, probably around 11 pm. It’s dark as hell, we’re in the middle of nowhere, about 30 miles east of the Badlands, and the moon has waned ever so slightly from the fullness of a few days ago. It’s too difficult to get a sense of the land from inside the truck. The shape of the land on either side of me is lost in its contrast with the headlights in front of me. I want to get outside and stare into the vast darkness of those dark, rolling plains. I wanna know what they’re about.

My dog, Sailor, who loves to be outside — particularly when she’s been cooped up in a truck all day — pees, then immmediately whines to get back in the car. I usually have to coax her back in, but not this time. It’s too brutal.

I’ve several times experienced the sensation of the moisture freezing in my nose. But, until the other night, I had never I actually felt the natural moisture in my face begin to freeze. I let Sailor back in the car and turn on the heat, then cross the road and wander briefly in the dark down a gravel road, until the hum from my truck’s motor is lost beneath the roar of the wind hitting my face. I want to hear what this kind of nature sounds like, and nothing else. My eyes tear up from the force of the cold wind. All I can hear is the wind, and the sky is as clear as I’ve ever seen a sky, the moon as bright and lonely.

At some point, as I’m driving, I witness a million faint pinpricks of light suspended in the blanching cone of my headlamps. I turn my head to make sure I’m not seeing stars, because that’s what it looks like. It isn’t snow. It certainly isn’t rain. It’s as though the air itself has crystalized.

Tonight I was told that one can actually witness the remaining moisture in the air freezing right where it floats. I can’t confirm this with hard science yet. But it sounds like what I saw.

But back to that night: It’s late, and I’m trying to save money, so I decide tonight’s the night Sailor and I are going to have our first go at sleeping under the camper shell in the bed of the truck. I’m fully clothed — jeans, long-johns, thick socks, t-shirt, wool sweater, hoodie, stocking cap. I arrange the truck bed so that we are lying atop a yoga mat and Sailor’s cushy dog bed. On top of that, an open sleeping bag. On top of that, a second sleeping bag, zipped-up over my head, with one warm dog curled up inside at my feet. The first sleeping bag folds over the one I’m zipped into. Not the most comfortable arrangement, but believe it or not, we manage to get warm.

The next day, it’s the Badlands, and Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” on repeat. Blanketed as they are in snow, the Badlands don’t feel nearly as desolate as I was expecting. I have some pretty introspective moments all the same, and spend almost a full day there, instead of the half-day I’d planned. Sailor and I stumble upon a small group of deer, almost close enough to touch. They are beautiful, silent and woolly. Sailor doesn’t know what to make of them, so she barks and scares them off.

I also spot some kind of wild, spotted snow cat. By the next day, I’ll have seen (and almost run over) so many deer that those first ones we saw lose a bit of their luster.

I bought a book about Crazy Horse today, because I’ve been thinking a lot about him. About the ghost dances of the Sioux. About how the first “subversive” history book I ever read was “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” and how, at 16, I set it down swearing I would never celebrate another Fourth of July again — an oath I’ve broken roughly 15 times since. (Why is it still so difficult — yet so entirely American — to know how to feel about America?)

After my uncle died, I concocted an image of what he must have looked like that became so vivid in my mind that I can close my eyes and see it immediately. As I have mentioned before, he was dead for a week in the house next door to my apartment before my father discovered him and came bursting through my door. The casket at his funeral was closed.

I realize that the image in my mind very much resembles the images so indelibly pressed into my brain by  “Wounded Knee” at that young age — the grainy, sepia images of those frozen bodies, wracked with rigor mortise, sitting up and wide-eyed in the snow, fingers curled. I realize those are the images from which my imagination has borrowed most heavily and I don’t know how to erase them. I actually realized this in a half-formed sort of way before I left on this trip, but the realization has since matured. My only hope is that writing about it somehow helps.

Here in the Badlands, just north of Wounded Knee, I wonder what a spirit really is, and lament humankind’s loss of imagination — the kind of imagination that gave genders to rivers , fable-origins to mountains, divinity to the wind.

The wind has calmed. Despite the interdictions, I stray from the designated trails a few times, only briefly, and am amazed at how fragile the Badland rock is. For a landscape as black and gothic as it is from a distance — it’s thousands of ornate, needle-point peaks and jagged shadows resembling nothing so much as the cathedral at Cologne, or Chartres — it is astonishingly soft underfoot.

More to come later. Some hard-earned (but happy) advice in the meantime: If a bunch of dudes at a bar in the Black Hills challenge you to a game of beer pong, the answer is always yes.