I want to start this by saying how much I miss truck stops. I mean, real truck stops, pulling into a gravel parking lot at 4am off a two-lane blacktop in the middle of a cold Wyoming night chicken-fried steak with cathead biscuits and rocketfuel coffee while Merle Haggard plays on the pushbutton jukebox truckstops. When I was a kid my dad drove truck in the winter, when farm work was slow, and I can still remember driving all night , listening to Red Simpson and Jerry Reed and a whole lotta Waylon while the CB chattered away the miles. Truckstops were an island of light in a long dark night, the only place to get coffee after 10pm in the days before 7-11s and fastfood, a place where you could see your eggs being cracked onto the flattop grill by a cook who either looked like a Methodist grandma or an ex-con, sometimes both. Anywhere we stopped, my dad invariably knew someone. Didnt matter where, we could walk in the door anywhere between West Texas and West Virginia and someone would say Howdy Pete. Years later when I was running the roads alone, truckstops were a refuge from the blue highways, a place that always felt worn and comfortable, warm in frozen Dakota nights and cool on brutal desert days. If only I could capture that feeling, distill it to an essense, and put it on a plate.........
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 10:51:00 +0000
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