Holy Places, Absent Friends, and Fallen Heroes

Laredo is a holy place on a par with Lourdes, Mecca, and Jerusalem. It is the Vatican of trucking, and truckers the priests. No other place exists and thrives on transportation over roads by men and women in large vehicles like Laredo.

That would make it special enough. But Laredo's trucker chapels hide on every dusty street of this border town, each one holding treasured memories for those who have had their fellowship there.

Tonight, I went to one of the great trucker's chapels and offered a prayer in honor of the friends who were unable to accompany me. To the civilian, the layperson, it's a Whataburger with a somewhat oversize parking lot. To a trucker who knows Laredo, referring to the Mines Road Whataburger guarantees a memory of an adventure which began or ended there.

I remembered my friend Oscar, from Corpus Crispy-the misspelling is intentional, as nearly everyone in Texas says it that way. I haven't seen Oscar in six years, after he told me he had a front row seat to an event that still resonates, while on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Part of me wished he were lying. I hoped he had been telling me a great trucker story. But some part of me knows that he had been very credible, and having been a witness to mass murder probably would have driven me mad with survivor's guilt. We once spent a long night traveling from Laredo to Little Rock.

He was the last person I saw from the first era when I traveled regularly to Laredo. I saw him a couple of months after I ran across my friend Earthquake in a Georgia truck stop. Four years passed before I returned to Laredo, and another year passed before I found Earthquake again.

Earthquake comes from rural Oklahoma, and exhibits the kind of character that the world expects from America. He speaks slowly, but in a crisis he is the kind of person you hope to see walking up dressed in camoflage, because he will be hands to the task until you both come out or die trying.

'Quake isn't much for misbehaving, not because he is unable, but because he can find better things to do that legitimately are not misbehavior.

On a warm night last fall, across the street from the launch pad for our earlier highjinks, I heard his real name on the intercom. Unfortunately, his real name is, well, pretty common. But I followed the name, to see if it was my missing friend. Lucky for me, it was. Otherwise, this story would be very different.

I found 'Quake five years married to the woman he had just married the last time I had seen him, prospering in Oklahoma, and still doing what he ought to be doing. We discussed a few of our mutual friends. He wasn't as close to Oscar as I was, so Oscar remains missing.

Then I told him I had run across our friend Moose at a truck stop in Missouri, but Moose had seemed quite unlike himself when I saw him.

Of course, when I saw Moose at the Mizzurah truck stop, I had three years of believing that he had died. That was a case of mistaken identity. I was quite overjoyed to discover my friend alive and kicking, and I freaked him out a little bit.

At the time there was one other person I could not find, and I feared the worst. I married her 26 months later. She lived in the morning shadow of Manhattan.

To be succinct, 'Quake put me in contact with Moose. Moose and I had shared similar personal setbacks, but we were now in respective places of greater prosperity than we had known during the nine months we worked together, and partied together, years before. We found that the friendship had not atrophied during a long dormancy.

Moose is now in a committed relationship with a lovely lady in Oklahoma, and pointed toward a future that neither one of us dared imagine for its positive possibilities. I will also remind her that February 29 is considered "Sadie Hawkins Day," which is customarily a day when a woman may propose marriage without social exclusion.

As I finished my meal, I considered that while my friends were physically absent, they were as present in the Mines Road Whataburger as the poster offering the limited-time peppercorn ranch burger.

And if being able to connect with a spirit of love and friendship isn't church, y'all, I have no idea what a holy place is supposed to be.