My son Adam and I were driving from Thornton, CO back to Bainbridge last week by way of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Eastern Washington, and so naturally my thoughts turned to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes.

The French philosopher Rousseau was a proponent of the idea of the “social contract,” a political theory that argues that individuals consent, directly or indirectly, to surrendering some of their freedoms and submit to government authority in exchange for the protection of their remaining freedoms and/or the maintenance of some form of civility and social order.

The English philosopher Hobbes suggested that without such a social order human life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Never does the benefit of the existence of such a social contract seem more real to me than when driving westerly along I-90 at 80 mph in one lane and passing another vehicle driving easterly at 80 mph along the same highway in an adjacent lane where our two vehicles are separated only by intermittent skinny red rubber stanchions topped by a single small plastic reflector. I don’t know about you, but I’m always praying that the drivers whizzing by have not had a bad day or a sleepless night.

I had flown to Denver days earlier to help Adam pack his earthly belongings and stack them into two 16-foot-long “Pods,” which will be loaded onto trucks and delivered to the new home Adam and his family will be moving into in the next month or so. Adam had asked for my help largely based on a rumor that I am something of an authority on packing and loading furniture, boxes and other household possessions. I know all about that rumor as I started it. And unlike most rumors, there is actually some truth to this one.

For example, when helping people move, I have an uncanny knack for being able to station myself at the lightest end of the heaviest piece of furniture or equipment, and to always figure out how to be the guy who doesn’t have to back down the stairs when carrying beds, dressers or appliances from upstairs rooms — or downstairs for that matter. When faced with a large stack of taped-up boxes, without even touching them I can sense which boxes contain pillows, linens or light and unbreakable items, and which contain heavy books, weights or irreplaceable glassware or family heirlooms.

When stacking irregularly shaped boxes inside a tubular-shaped Pod, I am able to efficiently fill the space as a result of many hours spent practicing on a sophisticated, highly advanced, box-stacking program known as “Tetris,” most of which practice came during slow business days on my work computer.

Meanwhile, I am happy to report that there is abundant evidence of much-needed maintenance and repair of our country’s highways going on along I-90. Work crews were busy everywhere repairing and resurfacing the highway. Driving on stretches of road that had been freshly resurfaced felt like sliding along an oil slick on a downhill bowling alley lane. The men and women working in the mid-summer heat to keep our highways safe and functioning are yet another group of unsung American heroes.

It had been a long time since I had driven across both Wyoming and Montana and across the panhandle of Idaho, and I think the travel was good for Adam and me. It let us leave behind our unrealistic prejudices about other places and the people who live there and develop new, more-realistic prejudices based on their actual deficiencies.

On the day we arrived on BI — tired and a little achy from long hours behind the wheel but full of the joy of returning from a long journey to welcoming family and friends — I ran across the book appropriately titled “Ye Wearie Wayfarer” by Adam Lindsay Gordon.

“Life is mostly froth and bubble. Two things stand like stone; Kindness in another’s troubles and courage in your own.” Amen Brother Gordon. And let me know if you ever need any help moving.

Tom Tyner writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper called “The Latte Guy.”

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