A feeling of Kinsmanship

The massive quantities of fluid (primarily Guinness) therapy seemed to have worked and I woke up yesterday with my cold mostly gone. Just as Victor and I were about to pull out of the truckstop where we'd spent the night, a young man bearing a striking resemblance to my uncle Phil, only 45 years younger and a foot shorter, walked up to our truck.

Turns out he's another C.R.England student driver, about a month ahead of me in the training program. He told us he thought his trainer may have abandoned him and the truck!

(As bizarre as that sounds, it happens more often than I would have believed. The "phase-2" trainers are truck leasees, out of school only a few months themselves. Apparently some of them realize too soon that trucking and training other truckers isn't what they really want to do and they simply walk away from the truck and the student when the pressure gets too high and they come to that realization.)

After about an hour of communicating with England corporate back in Salt Lake, we figured it all out and were allowed to give the kid - I'll call him Arthur to protect his identity - a ride back to Spanish Fork. What was interesting was my gut reaction to seeing this kid. It was some visceral, genetic empathy because he looked so much like someone of my 'clan' (for better or worse).

I mentioned the feeling to Victor and he knew exactly what I meant. Victor is a pretty typical American in that he has little insight into his geneology but knows he's a blend of African, Cajun, French and other European genetic pools (his family is from the New Orleans area). But he says when he sees people that resemble his family, he feels that same kinsmanship.

Soon enough we're underway, make our delivery in Lone Tree, CO, and I take the wheel driving back to Spanish Fork, eight hours away with Victor in the sleeper and Arthur riding shotgun. He's only 23 and from Brigham City, Utah, about an hour's drive north of Salt Lake. A mostly rural, entirely Mormon community until Morton-Thiokol, makers of the Space Shuttle solid rocket booster engines located their manufacturing and assembly plant there in the '70s (and then moved it somewhere closer to Cape Canaveral in the '90s if I remember correctly.)

From living in Salt Lake from '81 through '96, I got a very good understanding of the Mormon religion and culture having lived and worked with many Mormons for those years. Like most religions, there are devout followers and not-so-devout followers. Not-so-devout Mormons are called "Jack-Mormons". I'd known plenty over the years - just like the rest of us "gentiles" (the Mormon term for non-Mormons) - drinkers, smokers and fornicators. What I found out from Arthur last night was that there are grades of "Jacks". He doesn't drink or smoke, or even drink coffee, but he's trying damn hard to fornicate. For the next four hours (most of it in the daylight as we had an early departure from Lone Tree which allowed me to see more of the spectacular mountains I'd been previously driving through in the dark). . .

. . . Arthur was on the phone trying to arrange for one of the many young women he knew to make the two hour drive down from Brigham City to Spanish Fork at midnight to pick him up.

He said, try as he might, most of the girls he knew would sooner or later hand him "the friend card" when he'd try to get too close. So he has lots of girl-friends but not a "girlfriend" since he broke up with his last in December because she was freaking out all the time. He said "a girlfriend would be nice, but a nice girlfriend would be better" and it seemed to him that now that he was no longer in Brigham City all the time, more of those girls left at home were interested in him. Go figure. He says it's because many of them would love to have a man providing a paycheck, but not home to spend it! A twenty three year old single person in Brigham City has slid well down the bell-curve of normality for such a rural Mormon community. Most kids are paired up, married, with a rug-rat on the floor and another on the way by that age.

I listened to one side of his phone conversations with other friends about the relationships of his entire circle of friends for hours. Very amusing and made me glad I'm no longer in my twenties (more specifically dating girls in their twenties) and especially not in Mormon country.

We dropped Arthur off at the distrubution center and one of his women arrived minutes later to pick him up. I climbed into the sleeper, Victor dropped off the trailer and picked up a new one and I woke up eight hours later in Denver. Driving back to Spanish Fork in the next hour or so. I think we're off to Idaho for our Friday run about twelve hours from now.