Consciousness train

This consciousness train began with a truck from a concrete service backing onto a job site right next to an identical company truck, both white, both new. I saw them on the way home from the gym.

At the lumberyard where I worked in high school, there were Chevrolet trucks, same year, same flatbed model with dump feature, but one was blue and one was green.

Usually when there are two identical trucks, you still develop a preference for one or the other. But blue or green didn’t make any difference to me.

I believe it was the green truck with which I tried to bring down the telephone service on the south side of Abilene, Texas, late one afternoon. It was a house site, the foundation just poured, and I was delivering the framing lumber – studs, two-by-sixes, etc. – all neatly boomed down on the flatbed.

I drove up the alley and backed onto the lot, which was muddy after an earlier thundershower. I placed the junk-lumber cross pieces on which to dump the load, got back in the cab, pulled the “Dump” lever, and up went the front of the flatbed. When I felt the load slide, I pushed in the lever, slid into first gear, and pulled forward to slip out from under the load.

But I couldn’t pull forward. The wheels spun and spun until I noticed a motion over my head and saw poles swaying for a couple of blocks in either direction. The top of the flatbed was hooked beneath cables overhead.

I had no choice but to risk my life and unboom the load, then back up on it, scattering the neat stacks like pick-up sticks. Then I dropped the bed, pulled out and had to re-stack the entire load. It was after 5, and I had a date. But I wasn’t too mad, because they were telephone cables. If they had been power lines, there would still be crispy wisps of me in the dirt under the lawn where that house now stands.

I had earlier cheated death on an airplane, a DC-3, carrying the high school football team – I was a sophomore fullback – that in November, 1958, missed by 25 feet being in a mid-air collision. Our pilot saw the other guy, cut the power to his engines, stood the DC-3 on its wingtip, and dropped several hundred feet before recovering and flying on.

The airplane in “The High and the Mighty” is a DC-4, the earliest four-engine airliner in the DC line. The movie, from 1954, has just been released in DVD, its first release of any kind by its owner, Batjac, a company partly owned by the late John Wayne, who is one of the stars in the movie. We ordered it from amazon.com and just watched it last night.

Boy, disaster movies sure have changed since the 1950s. The trip in “The High and the Mighty,” from Hawaii to San Francisco, took more than 12 hours, which is about how fast the movie moved. Too many flashbacks and actors chewing the scenery, Phil Harris being the worst.

I misspelled Lucille Ball’s name in a blog yesterday. Left out an l. The consciousness train is now half an hour old. I’d like to say something about how fabulous the human brain has turned out, to enable such interesting trips that start with concrete trucks. But it’s time for lunch.