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.