On Driving

I see these places on the blacktops where somebody does repeated burnouts. I'm not talking about being stressed out at a job. I'm talking about some kid ruining tires. It seems awfully wasteful. My dad would have kicked me out of the house if he knew I had done that, even if I bought my own tires.

Driving should be a serious affair. Tons of steel can be a pretty dangerous weapon. It's weird to think it's safer to fly than stay on the ground but statistics say so. On our recent trip to South Carolina I looked out the window at the wing and was just as amazed as ever that air under that thing will lift tons of stuff into the air.

Pilots are rigorously trained and we trust them without question. Coach John Madden didn't. I wonder what he would think of the drivers we see on the roads. We were north of Hampton behind a guy doing about 45 miles per hour and Dawn said, “look out” as I tried to pass. I saw we weren't at a driveway so I passed anyway. I looked right as I passed and there he was with a phone in front of his face. He made a left turn without a signal. Wow. I could hardly believe it. Isn't that illegal? You know I have no love for the police state but there are records of all phone usage. What if any accident involved a look into those records?

Cars equal freedom. If there are no jobs, you can drive to find one. If your spouse is abusive, you can leave. Roads are what a carbon pipeline isn't, an essential part of our existence. I-35 is our connection to our son and his family in southern Iowa. It's a pretty relaxing drive compared to where I learned to drive in LA.

Instead of wrecking cars or tires I like to hypermile. Hypermiling is the practice of getting around on as little fuel as possible. Iowa is hypermiling heaven, flat and uncrowded. We can do wide sweeping turns, practically coast to a stop, and accelerate in a way that irritates obnoxious tailgaters. It helps to have a diesel car because diesel has 30% more energy than gas.

On the way to or from Karl's in southern Iowa, we tried to fuel up at Williams. What used to be an old- fashioned truckstop there named Boondocks, became Jay Bros. They had the cheapest diesel fuel around. The previous owner had neglected to maintain anything and they were doing business much like we did in our later years of farming, getting by with outdated and run down equipment.

The help was really interesting. I had to go in to get the credit card receipt. One person was about 6' 5'' and had glitter on (trying not to offend) “their” eyelids, a very nice and jolly person. The other person of note, besides the South Asians who had a stake in the place, was a little guy with a gray beard and long hair. We got to talking about Covid and lockdowns. He said he finally got his dad into a nursing home and went to see him. He said that he told him, “Well dad, here I am visiting you in here just like when you came to visit me in prison.”

The last time I was at Jay Bros. there was a lady there who said she had bought the place. She said she was going to “stick it to” the Flying J across the interstate. Now she's gone. Who knows what really happened there but with the bankruptcy scams (all bankruptcies are scams), and private equity buyouts and so forth, the financial system is so complex that anyone who isn't a lawyer or an accountant is paying, one way or another.

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