Providential Deliverance

I re-emerge, the interstates of this nation having spat me out in New England, after many hours behind the wheel of a graceless truck whose cab housed bugbit travelers, courtesy of that raunchy Clovis motel, drugged, maudlin cats, and surprisingly gamesome rats.

I managed to avoid the sort of nutritionless roadside fare that atrophies truckers, turning them into chainsmoking effigies fashioned, as it seems, from a potato and toothpicks. There were fireworks (Viva la revolucion!), days of constipation, nerves frazzled and pinched, near-misses and hard-brakes, and, finally, the gray-brown shores of Rhode Island, where I, pilgrim from the shiny post-industrial West to the post-agrarian East, will soon settle into a new routine, a new groove -- a happier life (God willing) than I knew in that festering vale of dust and tears.