The Long Way Home 10.18.24
It's funny how our sense of smell evokes powerful and nostalgic memories. The scent of a particular cologne or the aroma of a familiar dish can instantly transport us back to a specific time and place. When our son warms up his RAM before going to work in the morning, a whiff of its diesel exhaust takes me back to my teen years when I began working for a trucking company in Roseville. My first duty every morning was to complete a trailer inventory. As a dozen or more trucks idled in the yard, the sweet rumble of well-tuned engines and the smell of diesel exhaust wafted over me as I strode along the fence, from trailer to trailer, making sure the ones that were supposed to be empty were actually empty. As a naive suburban youth wandering the ground zero of my freight career, I was fond of the smell of diesel and wondered as I moved from trailer to trailer where all this equipment was going that day. Half a century later, I’ve done and seen almost everything in the trucking busines