Working the graveyard with the folks who don’t sleep.

*^*Early Morning Pilot

My evening takes a turn for the worse after leaving Walgreen’s. Unlike the graveyard shift workers I have had the pleasure of meeting this evening, I find it near impossible to get my job done when my mind keeps wandering back to the comfortable cotton sheets on my bed.

I strike out for the Pilot Travel Center, an all-night gas station, restaurant and convenience store on the east side of Salinas, but end up lost due to some road construction. Eventually, I realize the only sane route to the Pilot involves driving my car over a median in the middle of the street.

When I arrive at the Pilot, John Lennon’s version of “Stand By Me” blares over the speakers above the gas pumps. Inside, at 4:13am, the massive Food Mart is a beehive of activity: a Frito Lay distributor hurriedly re-stocks an aisle of potato chips; Jose, a Pilot employee, wipes down seven tube-shaped coffee pots that sit side by side on a counter like pistons; in the adjoining Subway restaurant, Luis Hernandez cleans an already immaculate workstation.

Despite the late hour, everyone is so busy that they can only speak to me for a few seconds. “What do you do here so late?” I ask Jose, who declines to give his last name.

“Cleaning, sweeping, stocking, many, many things,” he says, before walking away to finish some other duties.