I like to imagine America like through the eyes of an old Depression-era hobo… “so’s long as yer not crossin’ a border, yer home.” I like bumming around where I feel at home. I liked hitchhiking during my Kerouac On the Road days. I liked working as an over-the-road trucker. I like to drive.

Culley Jane and I are planning a trip to the west coast to visit her family and old friends in San Francisco, Oregon and Washington. We could fly. But I like to drive.

Over the years, I’ve won a few awards for a few things, but the award I’m most proud of is the one I got from the American Trucking Association for a Million Miles of Accident-Free Driving. Jimmy Chietzu taught me how to do it.

Jimmy lived in a cabin in the woods on a Potawatomi reservation in northern Wisconsin. On weekends after his workweek, he’d stock up and drink bottles of whiskey and not leave his cabin until it was time to go back to work on Monday.

He was never late.

He’d been a sniper in Vietnam.

After the war, he went back to the reservation and got a job at a nearby trucking company. He was comfortable with his new life, hauling paper rolls from the northern mills to giant printing operations throughout the Midwest. As long as he picked up and delivered his loads on time, nobody bothered him and he could be alone with the sounds of traffic and the muffled roar of a Detroit Diesel under the hood.

Jimmy Chietzu became a legend in the world of northern drivers. He took runs other wouldn’t dare. They said he could feel the pavement through a foot of snow; that he could smell the presence of danger before it jumped out at him into the headlights’ glare.

By the time I decided to become an over-the-road trucker, Jimmy was an instructor at the trucking company that gave me my first job.

He showed me where to insert the key to start the engine. How to double clutch. He was next to me in the passenger seat the first time I took a big rig out on the road. “Don’t hit anything,” he said. “Remember this… you don’t have to.”

He was with me the first nerve-wracking time I drove through Chicago. Once Chicago was in the rear-view mirror, on the other side of Gary, Indiana, I looked at him and said: “You were right! I don’t have to hit anything.”

And that’s how I got my Million Mile Safe Driving Award from the American Trucking Association.

Drinking my morning coffee out on our backyard patio, to the west I can see the first range of mountains we’ll have to cross on the trail to San Francisco.

Fighter jets from the nearby Air Force Academy and Space Command scream overhead.

We don't have to do it, you know.