been where you’re goin’ and you got more to go than you been
My first ship out was a tramp diesel anchored off Cork. The chief said they’d been floating for two months waiting for work. We went South, tacked to port to duck under Portugal and found a pier in Tunisia where a hill of yellow-cake phosphoric acid was waiting to be craned into the hold. I was a salt water trucker.
Salt water trucker? The truck was a ship. The highway an ocean. Cork was a rest stop. Salt was rust, rust was a cancer, the rest is another story.
This story is now about a tramp Chevrolet, port of call SF CA. “Hauler!”, it says in paint across the metal hull.
I’m no boat – don’t get me wrong. The chief in my memory had some dirty pride when he called his ship a tramp and being I was young I didn’t recognize it, but I knew to remember it.
I’m not afraid to find my bread in the street. The calendar on the wall is an empty collection of boxes but there is no worry. A tramp doesn’t want to know ahead of time. Were those boxes to fill up with obligations there would not be the calm horizon of the open ocean, my mind would be plotting paths through the dangers of a twisting city.
Again, I’m no longer at sea. I know this. My little truck and I have a city, but we have none of the structure a city appears to be built on – office space, meeting rooms, time cards, we drift among this, acting out bit parts the well defined roles of corporate culture can’t improvise on.
My truck is my boat if I have to talk metaphorically. The streets are rivers. I fish rather than grow crops. I need the movement farming won’t allow.
If this country falls apart because people want riches more than parity, I’ll drag a blanket as I walk the potholed streets looking for what someone else may need more than I.