I drove over to Charlie’s Truck Stop this past week to fill up with gas and to pick up a package of Jake’s fine Barbecue. Jake makes the best Barbecue around. As I remember, it was Jake getting in touch with me to have a web site designed for selling his Barbecue world wide that gave me a reason to begin writing about Charlie’s Truck Stop and the characters who drop by. I never dreamed I would continue so long with tales about them, but there continues to be something interesting at Charlie’s every time I stop by and I keep reporting the news.

Jake came bouncing out as is usual when I pull up in front of the gas pumps. His big grin widened when I told him to fill ‘er up. We talked about the continuing rise in the price of gas and Jake said it has come to the point he is plum ashamed to ask some of the folks who live in Soagie to pay the price demanded for gas these days. He knows they can’t afford it, but most of them just don’t have any choice. They have to drive to work and the farmers have to plow their fields. Some people are suggesting it would help if people just decided to cut out driving one day per week. They believe that would drive prices back down. Jake doesn’t believe it. It is not just in the United States that there is increased consumption of gas. Other countries around the world are bringing their own technology up to speed and they are, in consequence, using more oil. The use of oil is up world wide and there is no practical end in sight. Somewhere down the road there is a limit to the oil available in the world. Some day there just won’t be any more to be had at any price. Jake doesn’t know when that day will arrive, but it has to come eventually.

Jake is convinced the increase in the cost of gas is a good thing in the long run. While high gas prices are a temporary hardship for most folks, and a severe hardship for some, high gas prices increase the incentive for an alternate fuel source. Though there are numerous crackpots and would-be saviours out there proclaiming sun power or wind power or corn power will save the day, none of the alternatives Jake has heard of so far look to have any promise of replacing oil in a meaningful way in the long term. But people keep trying and someday, like Thomas Edison with his electric light bulb, someone in some company someplace or maybe a tinkerer in his basement workshop will develop a practical alternative to oil and high gas prices will be something old folks will talk about to their grandchildren.

I followed Jake into the store and paid for the gas, then I told him I wanted some of his Barbecue. Jake hustled off to get me a box. I saw Willard Smith over by the pot belly stove with a cigarette in his mouth. Willard had bragged he was giving up cigarettes several months back, but I guess he decided to change his mind. Willard and Jake had issues back when Jake decided to stop selling tobacco in his store. Willard insisted he could just go someplace else and buy his cigarettes if he liked and Jake had agreed that was certainly the case, but he could no longer buy them in Charlie’s. Jake smoked some years ago himself, but he quit and stayed quit. On the other hand, Jake is not so politically correct he forbids smoking in his store. Jake has heard about second hand smoke and the activists who insist they have the numbers to prove how insidious second hand smoke can be, but Jake believes numbers can be made to prove just about anything the number cruncher wants them to prove. Jake is certain he has seen the claim made someplace that pictures in magazines advertising tobacco can cause cancer in the person looking at the magazine.

Jake believes if you are going to choose to live in a world surrounded by other people, there are certain things you are going to have to learn to accept. One of them is that there are going to be people who will unconsciously or by intent annoy you. They will say things that irritate you and they will do things you will be convinced no sane person would even consider. I cannot, for example, imagine why Willard would begin smoking again after he has gone to the trouble to quit, especially with all the information available along with the personal experience of the bad effect smoking has on the smoker’s health. But the fact is that in a free society some people will make the choice to act the part of a fool. If you remove from people the choice to be an idiot, you remove the choice to be free and you have a regimented society in which everyone is assigned a pre-chosen position and choices are forbidden. In a free society some people will make the choice to be fools, but in a regimented society it is the fools who set the rules.

I walked over to where Willard Smith was talking with the Reverend Johnson. There was the considerable danger, according to certain authorities, I was placing my life at risk by exposing myself to Willard’s second hand smoke, but I place myself at risk of one sort or another every day that passes. I run the risks by walking out into the sun. I am at risk by stopping by the occasional fast food restaurant. I am at risk from any number of pollutants in the air that I cannot identify and am unaware of. I am at risk from civilization from the things I can name and from things I have no knowledge of. I could, of course, make the choice to move as far from civilization as possible and never again have the risk of infection from another person, but unpolluted nature is not risk free. Away from civilization I am still the target of insects who seek me out, some of which come infected with dangerous viruses that could threaten my health. I would not even be free from the threat of lung cancer as researchers believe some natural gasses from the ground may cause cancer. In the end, life is a risk and the rate of death is the same it has been since man first stepped from Eden, one death per person. As most of us prefer the benefits of association with our fellow man, even including the risks that come with association, a little common courtesy for the people we don’t always agree with makes our relationships much more pleasant. Willard stuck out his hand and I took it and smiled.

END