Subes for life!

You have to know the Truth: Living on the road is not always billion dollar views and Instagram-worthy picturesque camping spots and tanned twenty-somethings frolicking on the beach with a $25 drink in hand.*

Sometimes, it’s saltines for dinner and peeing in the woods and sleeping at a truck stop next to a busy highway in the middle of nowhere on the way to somewhere better.

And that, my friends, is how I ended up at a TA truck stop one night last week. As I always do, I dropped my shoes outside the rig and slid them under the running board for safekeeping while I snoozed. But the next morning, the shoes were gone when I awoke. Not a sound, not a whisper, not a thank you note left — they up and walked away! Doing what shoes do best, I suppose. While I lay there pondering my next move and enjoying the sunrise, a long shadow and silhouette of someone walking across the vacant lot appeared, coming closer. But instead of turning into the truck stop, she came up to the car, dropped something next to my side door, turned around, and quickly walked away retracing her steps back from whence she came.

I looked out, and you already guessed it: My shoes! She returned them. They must have walked off and she found them and was being a good samaritan by returning them to their rightful place in the world. That, or she was a meth-head living behind the Motel 6 parking lot and thought she’d scored some free $120 Merrill approach shoes in like-new condition. But … wrong size? color clashed with her wardrobe? not enough arch support? No idea. She returned them with the aplomb of a newspaper delivery — drop and go — heels still pushed in the way I left them, but facing the wrong direction and akimbo on the pavement. Even if I hadn’t witnessed the drop-off, I would have noticed something was up. Those pesky peregrinating shoes can’t fool me!

I rummaged around and found my backup pair and put those on. The meth shoes coated in meth germs from the meth encampment were duly donated to the local homeless guy. So, if you see a super sketchy crazy dude with wild hair and torn clothes and expensive trail shoes at the Petro truck stop in Santa Nella, now you know part of the story how he ended up that way.

* Or, if it is, please explain so I can do it that way instead of having these horrid transit days….