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It didn’t help my mental preparation for the day that I was with two guys that I had never worked with. Derrick was house-shopping with his wife, so he had taken the day off, but he had already achieved his rite of passage as a mover. The summer before my arrival, he had completed a twenty-four-hour move—a full day, literally. The lady he moved had started crying, telling him that she absolutely had to be out of the house before the next morning, no other option, so they had worked straight through the night until 8:30 the following day. Now, it was my turn.

The first truckload was a cinch. We took mostly boxes from the garage and the lawn furniture and headed over to Mizz Sully’s new place—five minutes away—where most of the boxes went into the garage and the lawn furniture went around back. No stairs on the first trip. The ensuing loads weren’t going to be as easy, though. On the way back to load up the second round, we rode in silence. We couldn’t believe what we were facing, that we had just only begun. Most of the rest of her stuff was heavy, and we were not excited about it.

But, then something crazy happened. Almost miraculously, we got in “the zone.” All three of us, at the same time, five minutes into the second load. It was as if all of our minds telepathically connected and said, “Welp, this crap ain’t gonna move itself, fellas. Might as well get going.”

We got into a mode where we wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop. We were moving independently of our own objective thought. It was as if our bodies were there, moving, but our minds were elsewhere, lost. We knew what we had to do and we did it—subconsciously, for the rest of the day. From noon until 3:30 A.M., we moved Mizz Sully’s belongings with only one short break for dinner. I was so out of it by 3:30 that I was still ready to go back for more. My body had been shut down for hours, numbed to the effects of heaving furniture, and I knew that I wouldn’t feel it until the next day. I knew about “the zone” from playing sports, and Derrick and I had even gotten into “the zone” on moves before but on a much smaller scale. We would be carrying so many pieces at such a fast pace that an hour or two would become a free flow of energy, a free flow of boxes and wood and appliances. But the eighteen-and-a-half-hour move was a different level, the longest job of my moving career. And I was very grateful that I had that experience. Every move I did after that was a picnic, a walk in the park compared to that move. Every time I would be struggling to fight through a move that I just didn’t want to be on, I would just think back to Mizz Sully’s house. “Could be worse.” It was similar to moving when it rained: rainy days sucked, but they made us appreciate the sunny days even more; bad tips made us appreciate the good ones; carrying a piano or a Trinitron TV made everything else appear feather-light. The gratification from completing Mizz Sully’s move would last a long time. Derrick had been telling me about his twenty-four-hour move for quite some time—how he had taken only one fifteen-minute break, napping on the bathroom sink, and how he had to call a few of his friends at midnight to replace the other guys on the move—but I didn’t really appreciate the full effect of his stories until I had one of my own to tell.

By the time the three of us got back to the shop after 4:00 A.M. and hobbled home by 4:30, we only got a couple hours of sleep before it was time to go back to do it all over again. At least I didn’t have to warm up the truck the next morning.

I got sick in February. Really sick. Looking for a cultural experience without going abroad, I had eaten five ninety-nine-cent tacos from one of the van-restaurants on the side of the road on Rivers Avenue, and the ingredients evidently hadn’t met many of the same health regulations that a normal restaurant would. My whole body hurt for a week straight, but mostly my entrails were turning somersaults. It was the biggest setback of my entire journey, only because it lasted