The Road Behind Me — No. 05 Reading Science Fiction at 2 AM in a Kansas Truck Stop

The lot is quiet.

Not silent — truck stops are never fully silent.

But the kind of quiet that exists after midnight when the traffic has thinned and the other drivers have gone to sleep and the hum of engines and the distant light from the fuel canopy is all that's left.

Honey is curled up.

The book is open.

The world has contracted to the size of a cab.

These are some of my favorite hours.

Why Science Fiction

I've been reading science fiction my whole life.

Not as an escape — or not only that.

Science fiction asks the biggest questions in the most concrete ways.

What does it mean to be human? What do we owe each other? What happens to society when the rules change?

Those aren't abstract questions to me.

They're the questions a long solitary job gives you a lot of time to sit with.

A good science fiction novel is the best thinking partner I've found for the big stuff.

It puts you inside a world different enough from your own that you can see your own world more clearly.

I've done a lot of my clearest thinking inside other people's imagined universes.

What Deep Reading Requires

You can't read deeply when you're partially somewhere else.

You need the kind of quiet that lets you actually inhabit a book.

Not skim it. Not consume it. Live in it for a while.

That kind of reading requires what most people don't have enough of:

Uninterrupted time.

Nobody needing anything from you.

A world that has temporarily stopped demanding your attention.

A truck stop at 2 AM delivers all three.

There is nowhere else I need to be.

There is nothing that requires me right now.

The run is done or resting.

The world is asleep.

I can read.

What It Looks Like

Interior light low.

Honey a warm weight nearby.

Coffee if I made it, water if I didn't.

Outside: the orange-lit lot, a few other trucks, the highway in the distance.

And the book.

Something with a long arc. Something that rewards staying with it.

The kind of story that feels like it was written by someone who has also spent a lot of time alone thinking about big things.

Hours pass.

I don't notice.

That's how I know it's a good one.

Why I'm Telling You This

Not because it's dramatic.

Because it's true.

The life of an OTR driver looks a lot of ways from the outside.

Hard. Lonely. Relentless.

And it is those things.

But it's also 2 AM in a quiet Kansas truck stop with a good book and a sleeping dog and a kind of peace that took years to find.

Both versions are real.

The full picture includes this one.

I wouldn't trade those hours for anything.

One Safe Mile  —  Renae Savage

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