My father spent 36 years, most of his adult life, working for the same company, Kennecott Utah Copper. From my vantage point up here in the 21st century, where my current job is about to become the longest one I’ve ever held at a mere six years in, that’s an almost unimaginable level of job security and stability. Nowadays, it seems like the corporate overlords are determined that everybody ought to be freelancers who can be popped in and out of jobs like disposable electronic components, owing nothing and with nothing owed to them. It didn’t used to be that way. There used to be more of a reciprocal relationship between employee and employer, and a lot more loyalty from both sides of the equation. There was an understanding that if you were good at your job, and you liked it well enough, you were going to be there for the long haul.

Still, even in those days before the world moved on, no working person was ever 100% secure. When the price of copper tumbled in the early 1980s, Kennecott responded by shutting down its Bingham Canyon copper mine — one of the largest open-pit mining operations in the world — for two years. A couple thousand workers, including my father, were laid off. Fortunately, he was far more resourceful than I imagine I would be under the circumstances. He could and would do just about anything to earn a buck, and because of this, our little family made it through those two years without too much pain. They were lean years, to be sure, but they were never truly bad. Not for us, anyhow.

Of all the myriad odd jobs he did to hold things together, the most memorable was his gig as a long-haul truck driver, ferrying massive wooden roof trusses across the western states. The trusses were built in our little rural home town and were destined for new LDS church houses that were springing up in California, Idaho, and Wyoming at the time. And the reason I so clearly remember Dad doing this particular job is because I got to ride along with him on the truck a few times. I don’t remember for sure if these trips coincided with summer break, or if Dad just took me out of school when I wanted to go, but those were magical experiences for me. I was around 12 or 13, and even though Smokey and the Bandit and the CB radio craze were long over by then, I still found the whole idea amazingly cool: traveling with my dad in a truck (not a full-blown 18-wheeler, but still bigger than all the traffic around us), a couple of manly men with the wide-open landscape unrolling in front of us and who knew what around the next bend.

Dad and I had a number of adventures on those trips. There was, for example, the time our underpowered, overburdened, should’ve-been-retired-ages-ago wreck of a truck lost its brakes on the way down Donner Pass. (For my east-coast readers who might not know of it, Donner is in the Sierra Nevada mountains west of Reno, and it’s one of the steepest mountain passes in the whole country. Not a good place to be if you’re having trouble slowing your vehicle, believe me!) Weirdly, though, whenever I think of those trips now, I almost always think first of a very different incident.

Again, some of the details have grown dim. It seems like we’d stopped for the night someplace — St. George, Utah, or some waystation in the middle of Nevada — but it could’ve just as easily been one of the mornings we left home. We were up very early, before the sun, and we stopped into a convenience store to lay in a few supplies. Dad grabbed a little jug of orange juice for me — an on-the-road treat, delicious, real OJ, not Tang! — and a jumbo coffee for him, along with a box of those raspberry-filled, sugar-powdered donuts for the both of us. The clerk was a young man, college age, perhaps, working solo and taking his own sweet time with the transaction. He just kept talking about inconsequential things as Dad tried to excuse us and get back out to our waiting truck and payload. When we finally made our escape and were walking back across the parking lot, with a cool breeze that smelled of gasoline and dew tugging at our hair, Dad remarked that the kid must not see many people on this shift and gets lonely. I was still thinking about that assessment as we clambered into the truck and Dad got the engine rumbling. He revved it a bit, then started cranking the truck’s nose around to point at the highway, and I happened to glance back toward the store.

It was still very dark out, and there were no other cars moving, nothing to light up the area except the store’s interior overheads washing through the front windows and the illuminated banner-style sign above the door. The store appeared to be the only object in the infinite cosmos, a hospitable outpost in the middle of quite literally nothing. As I watched, the clerk stepped outside, seeming like the solitary inhabitant of all that emptiness. I remember feeling sad at the idea of him being all on his own like that. But then something caught his attention, and he knelt and held out one hand. I saw a smallish shape emerge from beneath a pile of bundled packets of firewood for sale, a bedraggled-looking gray cat. The cat hesitated, studying the clerk, then cautiously approached, paused another moment, and then, just as Dad turned our truck onto the road and the store swung out of my line of sight, I saw it nuzzle the young man’s fingertips.

I really don’t wonder what became of that clerk and cat. I imagine the sun rose, the kid’s relief showed up, and he went out to whatever life awaited him and turned out just fine. As for the cat, well, who knows… it’s no doubt long dead by now regardless of what happened to it. But I find I do remember that melancholy little scene fairly often, usually when it’s late at night — as it is now — and I’m starting to think about the open road, with all the promises and disappointments it embodies. The American mythology, Kerouac’s seductive road, along which you might reinvent yourself or find your true self. Or you might find nothing more than a lonely young man and a stray cat each hoping for a little company beneath the unearthly glare of a florescent light…