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Show RTVER particularly truck drivers. Truckers are doing time on the cross. One night at two in the morning I got let out next to the city sewer works in Chicago. It was on one of the main highways going south out of the city and a continual parade of diesels streamed past, going so fast that they couldn't have stopped for me if they'd wanted to. I walked for miles in the slipstream of the passing trucks and finally staggered into Gary, Injulia. I climbed off the interstate and went to sleep in some weeds behind a stand of suburban homes. In the morning a siren on the highway woke me up: I thought they were after me. I climbed back up to the road where two drunk factory workers gave me a ride to a rest stop that was crowded with trucks. I walked over to the onramp and started to hitch in the shade of a big diesel. I could see the driver hunched over his steering wheel, motionless as a dead man. After about fifteen minutes he stirred and woke up. Without opening his eyes he pulled a cigarette out of a pack and lit it. Then he pried open a pill bottle and downed a handful of tablets. He was gone without looking down at me. Another trucker gave me a lift not long after, but the romance of the road was beginning to fade. After many rides with drunks, preachers, salesmen, and truckers I reached Madison County and Rosie. I fell in love with the rugged, dirt-poor mountains of North Carolina on first sight. Madison County backs up against the Appalachian Ridge and lies midway between the two highest mountains in the East. Bad roads had isolated the county from development and the economy was based on Burley tobacco that was farmed exactly as it was by slaves in 1640. The county had been rapidly depopulating since 1940. Most young people (and some said all the smart people) had moved to the factories of the North, leaving behind the old -132- |