 |
| Malone, New York |
|
Nestled upstate in North Country is the tiny little town of
Malone, New York.
The passing scenery in December is of scraggly trunk trees
whose leafless branches are reflected in the evening’s ponds, while white birch
bark reflects like white gold in the searching headlights of a
cigarette-smoke-filled Oldsmobile that I ride in with my Uncle and Aunt. We
keep our eyes tagged to the roadsides for the black-and-wild turkey buzzards so
prominent to the isolated land. From the airport in Vermont, we go south across
the bridge into New York State, taking Interstate 187 over Lake Champlain where
the Loch Ness Monster is said to reside.
By 4:30 it is dusk and by 5 it is dark. The temperature is
38 degrees. After a short stop to visit family in Plattsburgh, we head in the
light rain to our destination of Malone. My Uncle begins to speak of his truck
driving days.
“We really pushed it, ten years ago,” Donnie says. “Once you
got to the Missouri flat roads, past Illinois, you’s could make better time.
But with the New York speed limits and the winding roads, it’s more diff’cult.
I used to make California to the North in three days.”
Though retired, he has trucked for some 30 years, and life
on the road wasn’t easy. The lifestyle was hard on his health. In Maryland, my
Aunt explained, Donnie had trouble.
“Yeh’, I lifted up a trailer tire and thought I’d pulled a
muscle,” Donnie explained matter-of-fact like, his voice gravely as he stubbed
out a cigarette in his portable dashboard-ashtray next to his CB radio. “Then I
got sweaty and hot. And walkin’ around, I couldn’t get frum’ one place to
‘nother.”
When his boss called, Donnie told him he wasn’t going to
make the run. He’d never done that before, so his boss knew something was
wrong.
Donnie wanted to lie down. Go to sleep, he had said. But the
pain was too much. He didn’t want to go to the hospital, either, and by the
time he finally acquiesced the bottom part of his heart had been so damaged
that it was dead.
“They lost me twice. I had two cardiac arrests. If I’d died,
I woulda’ died,” Donnie said, matter-of-fact, because he like many truck
drivers do not have health insurance and never did.
I looked to the left as we drove. Caution Plow Trucks, the passing sign
read. Shortly after, we passed over the Chateaugay River; and soon we were in
Malone.
In North Country the air gathers and curls and tucks and
turns, and pulls together like the ocean current. Then, it releases a powerful
gust of bone-cold air after a brief and slightly warmer stillness and quiet. I
listen to this wind from the second story narrow, slant-ceiling room of the
old, yellow-painted, newly wallpapered house on South Pearl St. that I remember
so well from childhood. And this is where I began and ended each of my days in
Malone.
|
