In my mid-thirties, in the middle of a promising career in Texas, and in the middle of a horrible, violent marriage, I was struck with a major depression that wracked my body with transient aches and parked my brain in neutral. I couldn’t think, I could barely carry on a conversation, and my body could not find a comfortable place of rest.
Sitting made my back ache. Walking made my legs hurt. Sleeping was fitful and, when I awoke, I was in pain.
I could, however, smoke cigarettes and stare at trees and watch Quincy reruns.
So I ran for the hills, or tried to, anyway.
It was February when I packed my creaky truck with everything I might need for a life in the woods and hit the highway, headed for the mountains of Arkansas in the middle of the night with the wind howling.
I wasn’t forty miles across the state line before a tire blew out and I was sitting on the side of Highway 40, wondering in my mental fog why any of this had to be this way.
Standing there on the road shoulder that cold night, as the traffic whipped past, I saw the miscellany that littered the gravel alongside the road. An old hubcap. Old diapers. Beer cans. Coke cans. A child’s dirty yellow t-shirt. One worn out tennis shoe.
