My Life on the Road (21 page)

Part of traveling over years means coming back to the same place and knowing it for the first time. I had learned my best political lesson in college—I just didn’t know it yet.

I took a course in geology because I thought it was the easiest way of fulfilling a science requirement. One day the professor took us out into the Connecticut River Valley to show us the “meander curves” of an old-age river.

I was paying no attention because I had walked up a dirt path and found a big turtle, a giant mud turtle about two feet across, on the muddy embankment of an asphalt road. I was sure it was going to crawl onto the road and be crushed by a car.

So with a lot of difficulty, I picked up this huge snapping turtle and slowly carried it down the road to the river.

Just as I had slipped it into the water and was watching it swim away, my geology professor came up behind me.

“You know,” he said quietly, “that turtle has probably spent a month crawling up the dirt path to lay its eggs in the mud on the side of the road—you have just put it back in the river.”

I felt terrible. I couldn’t believe what I had done, but it was too late.

It took me many more years to realize this parable had taught me the first rule of organizing.

Always ask the turtle.

In 1963, a time of controversy over civil rights and Vietnam,
political
scared network executives, and
satire
still evoked George S. Kaufman’s show business adage “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” Though
TW3
would eventually become the parent of the much sillier
Laugh-In,
then of such true heirs as
Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,
and
The Colbert Report,
the continuity acceptance department, otherwise known as the censors, was in a snit of nervousness. Because the show really was live, if anyone departed from the script, the only remedy was to bleep a word or pull the plug completely. Censors also once tried to convince us that the Fairness Doctrine of the Federal Communications Commission required writing a prowar joke for every antiwar joke. Fortunately, they couldn’t think of a prowar joke either.

But limits lead to invention. My favorite skit got past “the suits,” as we mercilessly called all network executives, by hiring a juggler to toss huge butcher knives into the air and keep them circling overhead while the audience barely breathed. After what seemed an eternity, a stagehand appeared with a vaudeville-type placard:
THE NUCLEAR ARMS RACE
.

Thanks to Surrealism in Everyday Life, I could comment on such events as the high-rise bordellos being subsidized by the government of Holland. All I had to do was comb through the newspapers of the world every Saturday morning—while also watching
Soul Train,
thus learning new disco moves at the same time—and search for the sort of events about which one says, “You can’t make this stuff up!”

I was the
only
“girl writer,” probably because the power to make people laugh is also a power, so women have been kept out of comedy. Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule. Later, when Tina Fey was head writer and star of
Saturday Night Live,
she could still say, “Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.”

TW3
was fun. It was pioneering. It couldn’t last. But what did last was Surrealism in Everyday Life as a category in my mind. Never again would I be able to confront the unimaginable without imagining an award for it.

When I began to travel as an organizer and was plunged into irrational juxtapositions on the road, I finally understood why laughter is a mark of wanderers, from the holy fools of Old Russia to the roadies of rock music. It’s the surprise, the unexpected, the out of control. It turns out that laughter is the only free emotion—the only one that can’t be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we’re in love because, if we’re kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an
aha!
It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third, when we suddenly see a new reality. Einstein said he had to be very careful while shaving, because when he had an idea, he laughed—and he cut himself. Laughter is an orgasm of the mind.

On the road, moments of surrealism may come and go in a second:
I’m looking out the scenic window of a train speeding through miles of empty moonlit desert—when acres of neatly arranged abandoned refrigerators flash by.
They may also last for hours:
I’m returning tired to a sterile hotel lobby, and am invited into a reunion of the last living members of a Negro baseball league, whose stories take me into another world.
Since learning causes our brains to grow new synapses, I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise.

It’s 1997, toward the end of my third decade traveling as an organizer, and I’m speaking at a campus near Boston. The postlecture discussion has lasted until midnight, the last plane to New York is long gone, and I must get home so I can leave on another trip in the morning. Fortunately, kindhearted students come to my rescue with a local car service, and even steal a pillow from a dorm so I can sleep all the way home.

But once on the road, I’m still wide awake with postlecture adrenaline. Also the driver, a cheerful white guy in his fifties, wants to talk. As we make our way through a blinding rainstorm, he explains that we’re safe because he used to be a cross-country trucker driving in all kinds of weather. He pulled down $200,000 a year, and owned his own rig, but quit because he was a stranger to his wife and grandkids. Now that he owns this local car service, he has a family again—but still, he misses, really misses, his old cross-country life.

“What do you miss?” I ask, imagining he’ll say speed, going it alone, adrenaline, danger—everything I remember from the classic movie
They Drive by Night.

“I miss the community,” he says. Since this isn’t at all what I expected, I ask him to explain. He says civilians just don’t understand, and asks if I want to see for myself.

We turn off the turnpike onto a service road. Near three gas pumps, I see several parked trucks, their huge shapes outlined by multicolored safety lights that shine through the black rain like Christmas. Behind them is a windowless shack that’s dark except for a couple of neon beer signs.

Opening the door is like throwing a switch. We’re plunged into bright lights, laughter, music, the smell of fresh bread, and an energy level more like noon than two a.m. At the counter, we are served coffee in mugs as heavy as dumbbells plus slabs of a pie that must have been big enough for ten-and-twenty blackbirds. My driver and the waitress exchange news about who’s still working, who’s still married, who jackknifed a semi on black ice, and who was driving a rig that got blown over in a tornado. At least, I think that’s what they’re saying. Words like
anteater,
which is a kind of rig, and
bear,
which means a law enforcement officer, need translation.

A bearded driver in cowboy boots sits down next to me. He orders lemon meringue pie, a side of chocolate ice cream, a pot of tea, and a can of motor oil. The waitress slides each item down the Formica counter to exactly the right spot in front of him, all with the skill of a great pool player. I compliment her. From there we get to talking about women truck drivers. She says there are a few more these days. Fleet owners have begun to hire them because they listen to their trainers and have better safety records. Still, women get ribbed and talked dirty to on CB radio. She respects them for hanging in there, and even driving eighteen-wheelers. What started as husband-and-wife teams, the pioneers of job sharing—one sleeping in the back of the cab while the other drove—has now become a crack in the glass ceiling of jobs with good pay.

Over by the booths, one older white guy and two young black men are feeding coins into an old-fashioned jukebox and arguing about the relative merits of rappers versus classics like Stevie Wonder and Sam Cooke. They seem to agree that Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia” is the truckers’ anthem, and play it three times straight.

“Just wait,” my driver says. “The next place has
real
truckers’ music.”

Back on the shining highway, he explains that truck stops aren’t chains of sameness like McDonald’s; they’re more like idiosyncratic relatives. Each one offers down-home food, talk, music, and timelessness, plus trucker necessities, from motor oil to mosquito spray, all sold over the counter.

When we turn off again and head into another warm, tacky, welcoming world, the jukebox features such songs as “Girl on the Billboard,” “A Tombstone Every Mile,” and “18 Wheels and a Dozen Roses,” the last being the ode of a trucker coming home to his wife. Truckers are such constant listeners that they dictate pop music hits. Also, Nashville produces specialty truckers’ songs as a profitable category. Who knew?

At our third stop, I sit next to a truck-driving wife. She started teaming up with her husband as a defensive measure. “Pimps work the truck stops,” she explains. “They drop off girls to work the cabs as they pull up, then take them to the next stop. I know because I had a niece who got caught up with drugs, and her pimp beat her to death for trying to get out. I used to hate the girls. Now I hate the pimps.” She says truckers tend to be family men—executives are probably more likely to be johns—and she’s proud that husband-and-wife teams have a better safety record than men driving alone.

At a fourth stop, there is a twenty-four-hour poker game. At a fifth, there is what seems to be a permanent floating argument about cross-country trucking and whether it can flex enough political muscle to make better safety laws.
1
In this way, we hit every major truck stop between Boston and New York.

I’ve spent most of my life on the road, yet I’d never seen this world that wakes when others sleep. My driver tells me it’s global. He’s met immigrant truckers looking for work who have driven English lorries, and everywhere from Eritrea’s mountainous roads to the crowded streets of India, where trucks are painted with flowers and gods and goddesses, an art form that drivers carried photos of, right along with photos of their families.

Back in our shared cocoon in the rain, we’re quiet. The rhythm of our windshield wipers merges in my head with Brook Benton’s sensuous baritone:

It’s a rainy night in Georgia

and it looks like

it’s rainin’

all over the world.

I see Manhattan lights reflecting into the night sky, but I’ve lost all sense of time. This could go on forever. I realize I’ve been swimming in the shallows, and am only now discovering the deeps where the great whales meet.