Fifteen Miles Outside Billings

I want to write this down while it still feels the way it feels. I drive long-haul. Have for eleven years. Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas mostly, sometimes down into Colorado and Utah. It is a solitary job and I do not mind that. I have always been a person who does better alone than with people, and driving gives me time to think, or not think, which is sometimes better. Last February I was coming into Billings on I-90 around 3 in the morning. Straight empty highway, no other traffic, temperature maybe eight degrees outside. I had been on the road for nine hours and I was tired but not dangerously so. I had my music off because sometimes silence is what you want. About fifteen miles outside of town I started crying. Not sad crying. Not pain. Something else entirely. Just tears coming, and underneath them this feeling that I can only describe as being thanked. Not by a person. By something that knew me and was grateful I existed. I know how that sounds. I drove with one hand and let it happen and it lasted maybe five minutes and then it was over. I have never told anyone this because I do not have the kind of friendships where you say something like that. My ex-wife would have said I was overtired. Maybe I was. But I have been overtired plenty of times in eleven years and nothing like that has happened before or since. I am not a church person. I was raised Baptist and left it at seventeen and have not been back. But whatever happened on that highway was not nothing. Something knew I was there. Something was glad about it. That is the best I can do.