Sleep Deprived
Working away from home never was an enjoyable way to make a living. But sometimes you have to do whatever is necessary to keep food on the table. When I found out how difficult it was, I had a carpenter friend of mine help me build a little camper on a small two wheeled trailer.
It had a bed, a camp stove, and a small cupboard. I brought food from home each week. Not having a fridge, somethings didn’t keep well. One week, about Tuesday, I fried up some potatoes, putting a couple of eggs in the middle of the spuds and sat down to a delicious “home cooked” meal.
I was never so sick in my life. I have no idea what caused it. It could have been the eggs, the potatoes, the grease in the pan, or my coffee! (Many years later we bought a real motor home. It was self contained with a bathroom, generator, refrigerator, and propane stove. You could park wherever you wanted! – Truly a home on wheels. What an improvement.)
One year when the family took a vacation, my wife and children met me in Wyoming. She had the family car and I drove my old beat up pick-up. When it came time to go home, she and the children took the car back to Northern Montana and a friend and I drove my pick-up to the job. It took all night.
I got to the shop just in time to go to work. The foreman and the crew were already out but he had left me a note. “We serviced your pick-up over the weekend. The key is on the hook in the office, go to site “so and so.”
I took the key and went looking for the pick-up. I walked around the whole building twice. No pick-up. I thought that perhaps they had not yet gotten it back from the shop where it was serviced. However I couldn’t call the foreman because my radio was in the pick-up that had been serviced and was currently lost.
I started around the building a third time, this time taking a slightly different path. All of a sudden I tripped on something and landed flat on my face in the grass. I looked at what I had tripped over. It was a small pipe extending out of the ground about ½”. I realized if I couldn’t raise my feet more than ½” above the ground, I was more tired than I realized.
When I looked up, there was my pick-up right in front of me. I had passed it twice. This had been the third time past this particular point. So I picked myself up and went to work. I drank a lot of coffee that day.
That night I didn’t bother eating. I went straight to bed after I got off work.