A Cursing Contest

Playing with the Big Kids

We have an old dog of a trailer--16 feet long, built on the frame of what might otherwise have become a stock trailer, so a good part of the cargo box is ahead of the axles.  It trails like a dream, and is easy to back up.  We have moved to Tucson twice before, using that trailer.

When heavily loaded, as it often is, the weight on the hitch lowers the back of the pickup enough so that, at night, people think I have my lights on high beam.  Oncoming vehicles blink their lights at me, and I blink back, really blinding them for a moment, just to demonstrate that my lights are on dim, and we pass in the night, mutually cursing at each other.  It makes moving a cursing contest.

We have just returned from taking a second load of our lives to Tucson, and what we hope will be the third and last load will leave in about a month.

There are modest alternative routes from the Twin Cities to Tucson.  The mindless one is to drive south on I-35, a mile from our home, and go south to Oklahoma City, them turn west to Albuquerque, from where we turn south to I-10, which goes through Tucson about two miles from our next home.  Or, as an alternative, one can drive toward Oklahoma City as far as Wichita, Kansas, and then west through the Land of Oz (Liberal, Kansas:  "Toto, we aren't in Kansas, anymore!) but, of course, that is precisely where Liberal, Kansas is, and once in Liberal, even the drive across the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma seem like a promising escape, on the way to Tucumcari, and then Albuquerque.

Driving to Oklahoma City in the summer is an exercise in tornado watching, so sometimes--as we did this time--we take I-35 to Des Moines, Iowa, and then turn west toward Colorado.  We trundled across Nebraska, amazed that the Platte River was deep enough to drift off anywhere, but it does, "an inch deep and a mile wide".  It is a civilized, god-fearing, radio-religious trek.  My good lord, how people do carry on about the world being best understood as Moses and Micah and the guy who ate mushrooms and wrote the book of Revelation explained it!

On the way down, we drove to Brush, Colorado--named by a keen observer--and then south all the way to . . . well, I don't know where; Trinidad, maybe, or Raton, or Sante Fe, or maybe all of them.  On the way back, we stayed on I-25, past Sante Fe, and see-sawed our way north, before going back to Brush, and them home.

All of the routes are about 1800 miles long, but they seem longer, especially on highway 71 south of Brush, where we seem to have driven all day, and saw two cows, a house, and a weedwhacker of windmills, generating electricity for those two cows--the house did not yet have electricity.

We arrived home yesterday, we think it was, and we do truly believe that the earth might have reversed its polarity, but we cannot be sure.  Experience tells us that by tomorrow we will be our normal, confused selves again, and that we should organize ourselves for what we hope will be the final load.  Mari is packing boxes.  I am arming myself with night-driving invectives.