What I learned from my Dad: human geography and a few other things

I took this photo in the fall of 2012. My Mom would
point out that the picture would be better had my Dad
posed on driver's side of the truck
but at the moment at hand,
the sun favored the passenger side vantage point. 

My Dad is 71 years old and he still criss-crosses the country in his 2001 Freightliner Classic on a regular basis, most recently from Washington to Florida and back. His 18-wheel semi has a 550 Caterpillar engine and 1850 pounds of torque and over a million miles on the odometer. (Over his lifetime, my dad has logged over four million miles. Safely.)

“If you can eat it, live in it, wear it, drive it, I have hauled it," said my dad, when I asked for a few examples of his cargo. In the last couple of years its been mostly windows, watermelons, cardboard, and dried potatoes.

He’s been a truck driver since 1956, starting when he was 14 years old. My mom says he looked like Elvis when they got married in their late teens but these days he wears denim jeans, western shirts, and cowboy boots. In recent years he’s taken to hand crafting bolo-ties with interesting stones and colorful gems, giving an extra flair to his cowboy style which he can pull off better than anyone east of the Mississippi and west of Graceland.

 Even now, as a rugged septatarian, my dad is on the road for three or four weeks at a time. That’s pretty much how I remember it from childhood. When I was a kid my mother got me a toy map, a wooden puzzle cut out in the shape of the United States, each state a puzzle piece. Evidently I must have played with that puzzle a lot because I memorized U.S. geography backwards and forwards. At age five or six my mother used to quiz me orally with such questions as, “Which states surround Kentucky.” (Or Delaware or Wyoming or New Mexico.) I took those questions very seriously and always knew the exact answers, carefully thinking and deliberately listing off each adjacent state without even looking at the puzzle, at least according to my memory. It’s probably a tribute to the value of experiential learning, but I also wonder if it was rooted in the notion that all those places were in a way an extension of my home, or perhaps a connection to my Dad. Every time he called back to the house from the road, over some crackly telephone line (of course there were no cell phones, email, skype, or text), he announced a new state from where he based. I could easily associate his location with a specific puzzle piece which I’m sure was my mother’s plan all along.

This was my idea of fun as a kid: a map puzzle.

As a result, those wooden game pieces seem to have translated to my interest in maps and globes and continents and oceans. I’m curious about people and places and cultures. A self-proclaimed National Geographic nerd, I’m always amazed at those pull out maps focusing on a desert, a mountain range, or a political region. It’s like I can feel the people who live there just by looking at the birds-eye rendering of their locale. I imagine the food they eat, the songs they sing, the friendships they form.

My mother prides the fact that my Dad has managed to be home on each Christmas and for each date my three brothers and I were born. Independent truck drivers generally do not have paid vacation or family leave, plus a commute home is often 1000 miles long and entails finding a paying load to cover expenses. It’s no small task to wrap a rigorous and wildly unpredictable payload schedule around, say, the birth of a baby. But he did four times.

About five years ago my husband, Bob, experienced acute liver failure. I was the one who became distant because my coping mechanism was to turn reclusive as Bob teeter-tottered between life and death, back and forth, in our living room. His illness brought much immediate suffering and I was wholly exhausted from attempting to alleviate Bob’s severe itching, anorexia, and depression. Many people tried to help but I didn’t answer the telephone or the front door, incapacitated by the trauma of it all. I was 45 years old and it was the first time I had received a hand written card from my dad. My adult conversations with him had tended to focus on my car’s oil change frequency or present mileage. The front of the card depicted a steam engine train forging through the mountains in the night, guided by a single strong headlight. The uneven, large cursive words proved to me that my dad wrote the note himself; my mom didn’t do it on his behalf. I had never before imagined my Dad as one to quote from the Bible yet this is what he wrote with a blue pen on the inside of the blank card: 

Though you have made me see troubles, many and bitter;

You will restore my life again; from the depths of the earth you will again bring me up.
Psalm 71:20 And so he will. Dad

This year Father’s Day feels like a two-fer. I give thanks to my dad for teaching me human geography, for showing me what hard work looks like, for writing, and for the awesome collection of bolo ties he has shared with me. And I give thanks to my mom for buying me the simple little puzzle that helped me make sense of distance, time travel, and the world. 

Four million miles and still trucking!

Happy Father’s Day to all, where ever you are, whoever you love.

With love from yours truly,
Natural Born Bleeding Heart

I'm very honored that a portion of this post will appear this weekend on the Father's Day edition of Living Lutheran, with posts from amazing colleague writers. Please check it out!