I am sitting in the cab of this Kenworth at a rest stop outside of Laramie, watching the snow accumulate on the side mirrors. It is nearly 0200. My grandfather hauled coal in an old Mack during the Depression, and my father drove for forty years after he came home from the Pacific. It was always understood that when I finished my enlistment, I would take my place behind the wheel. I didn't question it then—I was young and the structure of the road felt like a necessary extension of the RIGOR I'd known in the service. Civilian life seemed too chaotic, too loud, but the interior of a truck... that was a controlled environment. But tonight, I find myself looking at my hands on the steering wheel—arthritic, spotted with age—and I am struck by a sudden, sharp sense of ESTRANGEMENT. I wonder if I ever actually wanted this. I was a bright young man once; I had a predilection for history and mathematics. Yet, I fell into this rhythm because it was the path of least resistance. It was a preordained trajectory. My father used to say, "The road is the only thing that won't lie to you," and I took that as gospel. I practiced a sort of self-abnegation, putting my own desires into a deep stasis to fulfill a legacy that, in hindsight, feels more like a sentence than a gift. There is a specific kind of psychological atrophy that occurs when you spend fifty years in a state of transit. You become a ghost in your own life. I remember coming home from a long haul when my daughter was six—she’s fifty now—and she looked at me like I was a stranger who happened to have a key to the front door. I told myself it was for the family. I told myself it was "honest work." But sitting here in the dark, with the heater humming and the smell of stale coffee, I suspect it was just a COWARDICE. I was afraid to find out who I was if I wasn't a driver, if I wasn't a soldier. I chose the predictable solitude of the interstate over the unpredictable intimacy of a real home. It is a strange thing to be seventy-six and realize you have lived your entire existence as a secondary character in someone else's script.