The Texas Tao:
The Wit & Wisdom of Texas Truckers
Introduction, Part III
by Hardy Metcalf, Ph.D.
3.Driving Conditions: Road Reality in the Outback
As all but the most severely loft-bound know, modern American, which is to say world,
reality is road reality. Whatever we do here in the city is grounded out there, on the
road. We forget this central truth at our own risk, as witness certain of the peculiar
meanders to be observed over the years in the various fields of American, which is to say
world, endeavor. No matter how far we go, how deep we think, how high we fly, we would do
well to remember that, while Neil Armstrong stepped onto and then walked about on the
moon, we had a car ready to go and got it up there as quickly as possible. Please recall
that no one thought it at all unusual, this compelling urge to drive on the lunar surface.
Indeed, no matter how cold and inhospitable that body turned out to be (not unlike certain
parts of Utah), our terrestrial hearts were warmed and our driven souls reassured by the
sight of American boys putt-putting about among the craters in their sporty little LEM.
Q.E.D.
Similarly, wondrous China will not be truly "open" until Hertz and Avis are
there in force. Mystery becomes reality and reality mystery only to the quadradial
consciousness.
Mindful of this truth, I have, here as in my practice, when the chips are down, abjured
all but the insights of the Interstates. Away with Freud, out with Reich, down with Laing,
alas. Even as I am repeatedly drawn to the, if I may, loftier effusions of non-traffic
shrinkdom--as may be found in certain of Freud's later footnotes and Jung's jollier
appendices, I have on every page here, when existential push comes to metaphysical shove,
relied on the greater wisdom of my fellow drivers, as gleaned over years of travel and
countless nights of electromagnetic eavesdropping.
I hardly need point out my indebtedness to the inventors and purveyors of the citizen's
band radio, which added more than one new dimension to the road experience. What I have
heard and taped on the road--reproduced here--only confirms, in language of both greater
color and fewer syllables, the ideas which share the page with the voices of the night on
the interstate highway system.
One of the great American fallacies, indeed one of the great fallacies of world
middle-class reality, which is to say, history, is the belief that business is life. The
road at night reveals otherwise. Remote diddling by vast and devious political powers and
strangling machinations by vast multi-national mega-business structures of the day vanish,
except when brute anger at various diurnal inanities produces some choice four-letter-word
value judgments on this politician or that commercial institution. In their place appear
sentient beings on the move who trade comments as new as they are old, often responding to
the most trenchant observation with the only reply that means a great deal as one very
tired millennium breathes its last: "I heard that."
America is not unlike all large societies in its readiness to pigeonhole and stereotype
minorities. Which we did quickly soon after the citizen's band subculture appeared. In a
spate of mostly ill-conceived movies and TV shows, toupee-wearing rednecks mingled with
slightly worn but not unattractive youngish females to outwit and elude the dullardly
forces of law and order by means of CB communication. To this day, those, in the national
consciousness, are the CB'ers. The stereotype exists, but it is only a tiny minority
within the minority. To be sure, that smaller part of the large group tends to be voluble,
and profane. They know a lot of dirty jokes. But other voices mingle, and some nights this
or that Interstate resonates with thoughts of a complexity and a subtlety and, verily, an
unvarnished populist subversion beyond the most frightened nightmares of the recent string
of American would-be tyrants. We are here in a world beyond rich men's PACs, retrograde
women's spleen, and fearful Christians' tantrums, a world of obscenely brisk hope, honest
musing, and endless chortles. De Tocqueville, wherever you are, read, and smile. America
lives still on the Interstates.
What on first hearing seems a uniquely Texas and American voice, on repeated exposure
loses its provincial edge and sounds more and more universally human. One imagines that,
allowing for certain cultural and technological shifts, Marco Polo must have overheard
much the same type of existential meanderings around many a Gobi campfire on his long trek
across Asia. And who knows what voices now fill the night on the highways of China?
Until encountering citizen's band reality, my practice in all its phases--walk-in,
phone-in, write-in--was intensely urban. As you saw in the letters, I deal day in, day out
with the city problems of city people. Beyond the city limits, out on the Texas highways,
one enters a wholly different world, with its own logic and rules and mores. The longer I
was immersed in it, the more loath I became to intervene. One wanted only to listen to
this outpouring of nocturnal souls, and, having feasted, then to share these wonders of
the outback roads. I became on those vast lonely stretches of interstate less a traffic
shrink and more an automotive anthropologist, a simple collector of night voices.
The reader should be aware that most of these mobile commentators are truckers, some
moving about near a given location, others en route from one coast to the other. Yet other
of the voices belong to latter-day camp followers, the "commercial ladies," as
the truckers call them. Also audible is the small, but significant because they are so
loud, group of home-bound CB'ers. These people have "base stations" in their
houses and frequently transmit at power-levels far above the legal limit. Some, with
several thousand watts, can be heard all over North America when atmospheric conditions
are right. The comments of these persons are usually of little interest, focused as they
are on technical radio matters. A few, who rise above that level, occur in these
pages--"Mud Flap" in particular, who night after night is a source of what
academicians call ethnic humor. A dirty joke by any other name...
Since, in some ways, geography is destiny, I have included a bit of information about each
of the areas where a particular sequence of voices was heard. Occasionally an explanatory
note seemed call for when this or that speaker makes an unusually obscure reference. The
reader who is curious about the people behind the "handles" will find as much
biographical information as I was able to glean at the end of the book; considering how
voluble these persons are on the air, one is surprised to find that when it comes to
giving facts about themselves they are surprisingly tight-lipped.
One of my unsolved mysteries is the traveler whose nom de interstate is
"Novalis." I was never able to locate him. For all I know, he may have a
10,000-watt base station in Pago Pago. Only late in preparation of this work did I
discovered that his rather stilted nocturnal contributions are not in fact his own but are
the thoughts of an obscure German writer, Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801).
Hardenberg, who wrote under the pen-name "Novalis," upon his early death left
behind a room full of scraps of paper covered with his jottings on every conceivable
subject. It turns out, our CB Novalis was reading translations --apparently his own--of
these "fragments." (Very little of Novalis has got into English.) Though
uncertain about including non-original thoughts, I decided a bit of weird 200-year-old
German spice was just what the soup needed.
Upon final reflection, I realized that what we have here is a verbal portrait of the
unself-conscious heart of a continent which in a thousand ways tacitly acknowledges, with
Myra Breckinridge, one of the oldest truths: "Nothing is what it seems, and what
nothing seems is false." That paradox, to the best of my knowledge, found its first
statement three thousand years ago on another continent. What I heard from the truckers
was, though less poetic and certainly more obscene than that ancient writing, only an
unconscious, updated, intricately embroidered version of the oldest book in the world, the
Tao Te Ching.
Aldous Huxley called this generous if paradoxical view of the universe which slowly
unfolded before my ears the "perennial philosophy," because it has appeared and
re-appeared in all ages and in all places where culture matures. It should be no
surprise--though of course it is--to find it amidst the weeds and wildflowers of the Texas
highways. What started as an exercise in curious anthropology, led me all over the state,
and finally to an old cemetery on a cliff overlooking Buffalo Bayou in Houston where a
certain unexpected pattern in this tapestry of voices finally became visible. What was to
do but call the whole collection of irrepressible night voices "The Texas Tao"?
END OF INTRODUCTION |