Easy Ridin'

 I tire quickly of The Interstate Highway System's mad rush. Concieved and built by Eisenhower to allow citizens to dodge the Soviet's atomic missiles, but I find myself instead dodging big-bellied transport junkies hopped up on white cross and greasy coffee, piloting diesel-belching juggernauts, hell bent for leather, taking perverse pleasure in pitching the little single axle tin can into a shimmying near-death wobble. They pass at seventy-five mph on a noxious, heavy metal hamster wheel, and I’m briefly sucked into the vortex for a few moments then spewed from its terrible, turbulent slipstream like the unwanted detritus of post-modern material hunger.
 Oh, woe is me, for I am but a simple traveler seeking only peace and the ice-free road less travelled. I jumped off of I-65, battered but not beaten, and headed southwest out of Nashville.

Found sanctuary this day, temperatures finally cracked the freezing mark and smooth sailing on dry pavement. Off the Superslab and on to The Historic Natchez Trace Parkway. Got on at the northern terminus. No commercial vehicles, no strip malls, no billboards hawking firecrackers, truckstop trinkets and Interstate XXX Adult Bookstores.
 Just 444 miles of rolling hills with panoramic vistas. The traffic in January is near nil, just me, with Sputnik as my chief navigator, always ever-vigilant for the occasional cyclist, or the few occasional like-minded soul seeking solitude. Small bands of crows, dark and raucous, flit across the sky scanning the road’s edge for fresh carrion and stale French fries. The salt-encrusted microtruck’s radio plays some forgotten song, Jimmy Morison riding on the storm.

Icicles hang from the rock walls like the beards of a hundred granite-faced sorcerers, peering down with a billion years of compressed sediment and infinite wisdom, passing judgment on the passing motorists, condemning them to a journey fraught with bloated bladders, jostling mini-vans and truck stops filled with aging lot lizards.

Ram Tough

I've been watching, with fascination, as this truck is being slowly overtaken by weeds and mulberry bushes over several years. I'm sure it will eventually be swallowed up completely by Nature, rust, Big Gub'ment or Fiat, whichever comes first.


The Chrysler Corporation has been bailed out more than a leaky row boat in a thunderstorm.

Truckin'

If I had a truck like this I'd be the Mack Daddy of Jerkwater Junction, Indiana. I'd head into town, pick up the hotties and take them to the Dairy Queen for all-you-can-eat chili dogs and  banana splits. We'd get all fucked up on cheap whiskey and Xanax and I'd show them the scars from my bone marrow transplant then impress them with stimulating conversation and tales of my misspent youth.
 Most of the chicks in town are on public assistance and meth, so they can stay up much later than I can, 'cause I have to work in the morning. I'd fall asleep and they'd rifle through my pockets for cash and prizes.
But, It's all good. I'd stumble out of the trailer in the morning, fire up the dually and head to work hung over and broke, but none the worse for wear.

But alas, I haven't got a cool ride like the one pictured above, so it'll be another dull and uneventful Friday night.

Traction

Not sure, but I think this is an REO Speedwagon, and one would have to have enormous upper body strength to steer this behemoth, as the truck was designed well before power steering was a twinkle in some engineer's eye.
If I owned this beast I'd get drunk and run over wildlife with it. On my way home from the tavern I'd make crop circle doughnuts and shit in the fertile fields and green pastures of my bucolic, rural neighborhood.
Then I'd get home and throw up into a plastic trash can.

Ole Mossy

Organic camouflage.