When? seems to be the key question of these last couple of
weeks. Not so much Why? or How? Perhaps a
close second is Where? and Who? but When? really
seems to be weighing on most people's minds. When will it peak? When will it
hit my area? When will it be over?
The answers are at best projections
of mathematical models and inferences from what has come before; flopping the
past over to reveal the future.
In my last distro of this blogpost on
Facebook, I promised to write a prose-poem thanking all of the grocery clerks
and truck drivers and mailmen and so on, out there keeping society running. But
I can't keep that promise. I tried it out, got about five or six or seven
paragraphs into it, and stopped. The whole thing felt forced and flat. So I
gave up on it and wrote this instead:
__________________________
The highway stretches into the
distance. It's unnerving how empty it is. He's never seen things like this
before, but Umberto—"Bad Bert" by his call name—keeps on driving his
rig down the lane. He's hauling a Costco order of dry goods and there may have
been a time, several weeks ago when news of the pandemic or epidemic or
whatever they're calling it nowadays, when he was worried about being mobbed by
panic-stricken suburbanites at the offloading dock, or robbed by opportunists,
or himself afflicted with the coronavirus and it debilitating him to the point
to where he couldn't work anymore. Because no one but him could handle his rig.
He's heading to St. Louis on I-70
and he flashes a "thank you" with his brakelights at the Master
Bastard he passes on his right, hauling what looks to be a heavy load of cold
storage. It was lonely out here on the road before the crisis but it's even lonelier
now. He's stopped listening to the news radio. He prefers the long hours of
silence and the steady, monotonous throttle of his Peterbilt; his fingers
hooked on the wheel; his eyes checking the camera video of his blind
spots.
He wonders if Darlene will still be
working at Sky High Pie in Illinois. He once drove over eight-hundred miles on
a midnight run across five states with nothing but Darlene’s corn muffins to
survive on. But on this run he's still got hours to burn before he finds out
whether she's been taken sick, too, or if they've finally closed down Sky High
Pie under the Governor's orders.
But the orders for deliveries have
kept coming in and there's even talk of this curve flattening finally after so
many false starts and missteps and wishful thinking. In fact, people haven't
been so crazy. They've been downright generous to Bad Bert. People have even
gone out of their way to honk their horn or wave or paste a hastily drawn
"Thank you" in their car windows as they pass him by. He's even seen
a few signs on the roadways that people have put together, all on their own,
saying: "If the trucks stop, America stops" or "Keep on
Truckin" or "God's speed, trucking man."
And he's seen one other
thing...
He saw it first as a bumper sticker,
then in a shop window, then someone had painted one on a military transport
delivering emergency ventilators, then posted a pic of it on Facebook. A sign
of perseverance, a ray of hope. It's a dove carrying a roll of toilet paper in
its feet. Silliest thing. But it signifies something, he's sure of it. A turn
of the tide, maybe. The eye of the storm passing by.
Bert checks his gas, glances at the
clock. He passes the 421.0 mile marker. He's confident now that he'll make his
delivery on-time.
___________________
I guess I'm not much of a journalist
or an editorialist or a poet. I write stories. And like any writer in these
times all you can do is write and tell that story as it comes to you. That's
how they work. You wake up in the middle of the night or you're driving home
from work, and it hits you, and you know it's a story that has to be told, that
demands to be told, that it is your sole responsibility to tell. Because ain't
no one else gonna tell it. Only you can.
And that's the news from up on the
mountain this week.