text: The car hums to life at the push of a button and slips out of the garage into a wet night. The garage door closes behind it as I drive through the apartment complex and onto one of the side roads. It was near midnight, and a storm was moving east. I turned east, knowing the roads I would take well. It was the first time in a long time, nearly a year since I had made one of these drives. Family was staying in my small apartment and the needs of work required me to stay up all night, something I couldn’t do without disturbing my guests. The air was still warm and sticky, but the air conditioning was kicking in as I stopped at a light on one of the main roads. I waited for it to change, then I took to the side roads to slip around the side of the town. Illumination from street lamps drifted lazily through the sunroof and windows of my economy grocery-getter as I rejoined a road I had taken and a hundred dozen times before. This junction didn’t mean much. I was still in the town and it was only natural that I had been down this road before. I stayed silent as my radio played off my aging ipod quietly. I didn’t look at the speedometer as I let the car cruise at a natural place. For a time, my mind was blank of all except for the task of driving. This was my meditation. A reset. A few moments alone where I could gather my thoughts and reflect on myself in inner peace. It wasn’t that my family or even my life was stressing me out, life was good compared to twelve months ago. A man simply needs a little time to himself to be alone. I made another turn at another light, clipping through on a yellow to turn onto the highway heading east. Nights like this always took me back in time, but the nostalgia hadn’t hit me yet. I was still on the well-known roads of my home town and not yet to my destination. I crossed the Little Muddy and turned my head to the left to see the twinkling of the town lights before I passed the Haliburton and Red River yards and crossed the bridge over the train tack. As the car climbed the hill out of the town and the buildings grew further apart, I couldn’t help thinking back to how many times I had to take this road, not for indulgence, but for obligation. I pushed those thoughts out of my head. The location and timing weren’t correct. For now, I focussed on the road and the increasing rain as I caught up to the storm. I did my best to focus only on the road and the radio as I drove down the highway. It wouldn’t be much longer now. I passed county road eleven and thought back even further to hot summer days years before when I had worked for the county. I was close now. The only hint that I had reached my destination was a black oil pad and the light of a farm-house porch a quarter mile down a dirt road. I glanced at the clock on the dashboard as I continued down the highway. It was twelve-thirty now, and I felt comfortable. I may have been in my near-silent economy car, but now I could remember back three years to my first real oilfield job, running the eight twenty-one route. I could almost hear the exhaust roar of my old and beaten work truck. I could feel its uncomfortable seats, and I could feel that old feeling of having completed my middle run and being on the return leg to the P-Evitt disposal. I had run that route a hundred dozen times in the year that I was assigned to it. It was my safe space. Six disposals across twenty or so county roads and a highway. Six sites I was responsible for, that gave me pride and built up the career I still had. I fancied I could feel the ruts worn into the tarmac from my work truck as my car glided through the sheets of rain, creating a mirror sheen on the two-year-old blacktop. I relaxed as I followed the road, letting the memories of those times wash over me. I passed by a crossroad, and remembered the half dozen times I had taken it to avoid potholes and road work, thinking of the Bowling for Soup song that always seemed to play when I did my mid run down it. But on I drove. I passed a farmhouse and its barn, ringed by trees with the highway running through its yard. I flipped on my turn signal and trundled onto highway forty-two, the lights of a disposal I knew nothing about filling my rearview as I dropped down the first hill towards the cooly. The car flowed down into the dip and dropped on for endless hours, or so it seemed. I had been down this road two, it was the way from the P-Paulson and P-Evans to the P-Thomas. Part of the old route. I skipped a song on my ipod to one that I would have heard on this road. I couldn’t help but think back. My old company truck was at the apartment, registered in my wife’s name and retired to the leisure of being a daily driver, no longer seeing the miles or the dirt roads or the rushes to various emergencies. A fitting life for a loyal companion. A truck I loved as if I had bought it new and put all of its hundred sixty thousand miles on it. The truck was gone from the company, I was gone from the company, my best friend was gone from them as well, and none of us had run the route in years. How things change. The car rose up the other side of the valley and the lights of the Pankowski came into sight. It wasn’t one of my disposals, and I remember when they installed it, it wasn’t even managed by the company that contracted my employer, but my employer did have workers on it. I never met them, never spoke to them, but was under the impression that my P-Thomas handled overflow from the Pankowski when it was down, and that was quite often. It took everything in me not to turn left at the Pankowski and cruise down county road fifteen to the lease road leading to P-Thomas. But, I was in my Hyundai and not in my company truck, and I was not with Celestial Oil Services anymore, and I was not on the eight twenty-one anymore, though part of me always would be. I traveled another mile up the road and pulled into a field access and stopped the car. The clouds of the storm lingered and the night was black, but from my perch on the top of the hill, I could see for miles, across a plane and down to the lake, including the distorted light of the P-Thomas. Though the night was black, the plane twinkled with manmade constellations, oil flares and site lights lit up the ground as beautiful as any star-speckled sky. I was never an astronomer, I could only name three constellations, but below me was a cosmos I had sailed through and knew like my own backyard. For one night, for a few hours, once more, I was king of my domain, a monarch ruling six saltwater disposals over twenty miles of road, lord of changing filters, duke of sending reports, baron of cleaning triplex pumps. Home at last. From my ethereal memory built castle of a company truck, I saw inverted stars, the same I had sailed for endless aeons as a god.