chuckles in the night

It's the middle of the night usually when it happens. I awake for no reason...3am or thereabouts....and I am wide awake. I don't usually know what to do with this. WHY is the first question out of my mouth about anything, so after I have tried to analyse WHY I would be waking up....stress?....too much caffeine?....foot pain?..., whatever, I lie there and do what I do best: think. "To think is to work" for the INTP, so I am not sure why I feel like working that time of day, but I do. But it's a different kind of work and I have less control over what floats by on the monitor. Lately, funny things have been appearing...things that literally make me laugh outloud.

Out of nowhere...bing...! A night I spent in the Gobi desert in the cab of a Russian lorry. Lying end to end like sardines with Elaine, a (thankfully) very thin team member of mine, sharing our impromptu bed. We hadn't expected to be out all night with our vodka drunk driver. We had hoped to make it to the capital of the Middle Gobi province. But somewhere between UB (Ulanbaatar) and the middle of the Gobi, the vodka had it's way...and the bat out hell lorry, screaming across the desert (no roads...just "ways" and ruts and ditches) almost bought it. It was around 2am. That's when I was banged out of the bone jarring, head bobbing slumber I was in when I realised I was airborne and the banging sound was my head hitting the metal ceiling of the truck's cab. We were hauling commodities for the UN and I suppose the prospect of dying under a tonne of rice or milk powder and not getting paid sobered our driver enough to say, Enough.

It's damn cold in the Gobi in springtime, and we froze our asses off, to be straight about it. No sleep for the weary. An unexpected stop means no sleeping bag, no blankies, no thermos of hot tea. No cosy, cosy. Why do I do this job, I wondered to myself that night, exasperated and tired already by all the bureaucratic tedium we had had to wait on to finally get this little mission underway. But inside, secretly, I was chuckling. Chuckling when our driver gave us the heads up that he was "going to check on the horses" : a gesture rather, meaning....he tugged at the corner of his eye with his index finger, made donkey ears behind his head with two fingers on each hand, and then promptly staggered to one of the back tires and peed on it. At last, Mongolian I could understand. And chuckling that this HAD to be one of the best places in the world to spend the night, and in such company. And then, sunrise on the Gobi. Between the cold, the sunrise, and my own quick trip to the back tire, I was breathless, too. Another chuckle.

Not unexpectedly, the remainder of the trip played out similarly, complete with a meeting with the Governer of the whole province, on just one hour's sleep (which is the one hour I got on the concrete floor of our "hotel"). I surely impressed in my dust covered clothes, hiking boots, and matted hair. And on it all went.....

And still goes. You know, some people talk of waking up to nightmares or bad dreams, but I'll be content if this is the sort of thing that keeps peeking its head out, from under the covers, to surprise me. No amount of world-weariness or personal confusion can take away the good and outright fun of those moments. I am blessed. Truly.