Give Me The Highway

After being complemented for brevity in my first post, let me embark on a bit of a ramble and see where it takes me. My brother knows why I 'borrowed' his song title as my blog name. For everyone else, I have spent the better part of the last 25 years tramping back and forth across the country working on power line construction. It's taken my from California to New Hampshire and from Alaska to Texas with stops all along the way. And as I sit here in my Wisconsin log cabin tonight, my wife and I are preparing to move yet again, this time to Nebraska. Deep down, I think I was stolen from Gypsies as a baby and have never been able to shake the wanderlust inherent in my people. To quote my brother's song:

Give me the highway, don't let my feet settle down,
I tried it a long time ago, but it didn't work out.
I'm just a daydreamer hoping that dreams never end,
And they never will just as long as I'm travelin' about.

So there it is, I'm just a daydreamer who loves traveling across the country, seeing what's around the next bend or over the next hill. I have seen sights that have taken my breath away. I've met some truly extrodinary people. I've had my share of ups and downs, like all of us have, and as a result I've undergone quite a transformation over the years. For more years than I care to admit, I partied like there was no tomorrow, thought only of myself and managed to make a mess of pretty much everything I touched. Then almost 14 years ago I 'hit my bottom' and finally got honest with myself. I've been clean and sober since SuperBowl Sunday in 1994.

Why the long ramble? Partly to explain the header of my site, trudging the happy road of destiny is right out of the Big Book. And I do feel a sense of responsibility to be there if someone else reaches out for help the way I did almost 14 years ago. If there hadn't been someone there for me my chances of being here today would most certainly be somewhere between slim and none. So I am there whenever someone else reaches out. And I say all this because yesterday I learned that one of the men I have been working with for the last 3 years died in a one car crash that was alcohol related. He had had DUI problems in his past and I tried to share my own struggles with him in an effort to show him there was another way. Obviously I was not able to reach him. And he was not the first. Over the years I have seen several close friends succumb to the desease of alcoholism. It is a cold, hard fact of life that people die from this desease. I wish I could have reached my friend before this week. I couldn't and more's the pity.

But I'm still a dreamer. I dream that one day we will all be able to grasp just how precious life is and how quickly it can end. In the blink of an eye, in a single beat of the heart. Maybe, just maybe if we could all wrap our minds around how precious the gift of life is and make that a priority in our lives we could see how much we have in common instead of how much we differ. Who knows, maybe then we could even learn to have civil discourse over our differences of opinion on politics, religion and life styles instead of the intolerance, name calling and hyperbole that characterize so much of public and private debate these days.