Read an Excerpt
Surely everyone knows that a fishing story grows each time it’s told. A minnow morphs into a largemouth bass after just a few beers in a bar full of new faces. You might have heard some awfully tall yarns spun by drivers, maybe at a truck stop lunch counter while you sopped up your eggs with toast and bacon. There’s the one driver who stopped along the highway to help a little old lady fix a flat tire. The third time he tells this story, the little old lady becomes a buxom blonde twenty-one-year-old. Perhaps by the fifth retelling, she takes him up on his offer for a ride.
I don’t have many tall tales to offer—the stories in this book truly happened to me or to truckers I know. Some names have been changed in a good-faith effort to protect the identities of the boneheaded, dim-witted, and off-kilter, or because I don’t want my ass whipped for telling the truth about those of you who might prefer to remain anonymous.
I’ve been part of the trucking world for sixty years, and I’m damn proud of it. I was born into a trucking family, and as soon as I could talk, I was pestering my dad to ride in his truck. Each time I asked, he would tell me that I could ride with him when I was old enough to climb into the truck without any help. I must have been five or six years old when I climbed onto the running board, the side step, and crawled up into his Mack B61. I’d known the smell of diesel since I was three or four, but the diesel smell from the B61 was unique, and awesome. In later years I would come to associate the smell with a flash of lightning—fierce, quick, and powerful. It burns the nostrils, leaves the tongue bristling, and makes your arm hair stand up. For me the smell conjures feelings of power and brings an adrenaline high. It’s a symbol of a journey about to be undertaken.
Several years ago, I was privileged to be the guest speaker at a dinner for the Maryland Motor Truck Associations’s annual Truck Driving Championships awards ceremony. The competition dates to 1955, and competitors are tested on their driving and inspection skills, knowledge, and professionalism. Winners qualify to compete in the American Trucking Associations’s annual National Truck Driving Championships. Anyway, I began my talk by asking how many of the several hundred truckers in attendance had grown up in trucking families, and the majority of the drivers raised their hands. I asked how many of their fathers told them to stay the hell out of the trucking business, like mine did, and damned near every driver’s hand was raised again. The room filled with laughter as we realized that not one of us had taken our dad’s advice.
I am sure my father offered this advice because he knew how aggravating the trucking profession could be. He understood the nature of trucking, that just when you think things are going great, unseen forces always throw the proverbial “wrench”—whether they are flat tires, lights going out, hoses bursting, bad weather, or those cursed weigh stations that all truckers hate. Most truckers have lived at the mercy of these tough breaks and know damned well that these events are going to continue dogging them. Evidently, we are all gluttons for punishment.
So why do we it? Non-trucking folks are always asking why we drive trucks if we complain about it so much, and it’s a fair question, but I say, let ’em scratch their heads and wonder why. You can’t understand trucking until you do it—the views, the lifestyle, the rush. Vacationers and businesspeople see some of the great US and Canadian landscapes while traveling, but only truck drivers get to enjoy the grandeur from high up in their cabs. While crossing bridges, the tall concrete walls and Jersey barriers prevent four-wheelers from having marvelous views of the lakes, rivers, or gorges they’re crossing. Truckers can watch the shifting landscape from their thrones.
Try to imagine the view a truck driver gets while driving across Staten Island at daybreak as he crests a rise in the highway. The sun, in all its enormity and fire, perched dead center between the two supports of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. I’ve seen views like you wouldn’t believe while topping the hill on I-70 West in Hancock, Maryland, about a mile before the intersection of I-68. Just after midnight, halogen highway lights glitter off the bare limbs of appletrees. It’s poetry, really. The whole orchard covered in sleet and freezing rain. An ice forest, etched forever in the mind. The road bears a certain beauty, sometimes most evident in the quiet hours and remote stretches that truckers are privy to every ride. Long hauls might inhere long nights and early mornings, but they also inhere access to a seldom-witnessed world.
Truck drivers also have bragging rights from having learned to persevere through rides that would paralyze other drivers. Imagine coming down Jellico Mountain, north of Knoxville, Tennessee, in a freezing fog so thick you can’t see anything ahead but a very faint ticker of white lines on the road. You can’t see what’s behind you, and you have your four-ways flashing to warn drivers approaching the rear of your truck. You can’t even pull over on the shoulder—you can’t even see the shoulder—but even if you could, you fear another truck will think you’re still traveling and hit you from behind. What thoughts race through your mind when you finally emerge from the fog at the bottom of the mountain, when you turn and see the four-inch-long horizontal icicles sticking straight back from your side-view mirrors? You wipe the sweat from your brow. You might even have to change into a new pair of pants. Maybe you add one last verse to the litany of prayers you offered the whole way down the mountain. (Truckers probably pray more in their cabs than in church.) But you survived, and you will next time too.
One of the first things a new truck driver learns, the lesson that’s most important, is how to navigate around some of the, shall we say, less experienced, four-wheel drivers we all know and love. Most drivers of four-wheel vehicles don’t think they’re doing anything wrong when they pull in front of a big truck just moments before traffic comes to a screeching halt. Perhaps they’re unaware that they did something wrong, perhaps they’re inconsiderate or blinded by road rage, but the action is careless and dangerous, and we see more of this behavior every day. Many four-wheel drivers seem to not notice trucks, acting as if four-wheelers are the only ones on the highway. I don’t think they realize when they piss off a truck driver, and I think they’d be aghast to know that truckers have several near misses because of their shoddy driving. Take my word for it when I say that it’s the four-wheelers causing mayhem on the road. Truck drivers are paid professionals, while many car drivers still need a hell of a lot more practice. Until all four-wheel drivers become proficient at driving, which we doubt will ever happen, truck drivers will always be the more responsible ones—ever mindful of that carload of kids who have the misfortune of having their mother behind the wheel.
Once, while traveling one of Ohio’s secondary roads to pick up a load, I arrived at an accident scene just after a trucker saved the lives of a carload of kids. Ohio state police had stopped traffic at the intersection, and curiosity drove me to get out of my truck to inquire what happened. The mother had run a red light, and rather than wiping out the small vehicle, the trucker had somehow kept control of his flatbed load of steel and steered to the right of the car. When I got there, the rig—what you may call a tractor trailer, a semitrailer, or a semitruck—looked like the driver had driven straight into a muddy cornfield for about one hundred yards. Many instances like this cause truck drivers to lose control of their vehicles and the rig jackknifes, with its trailer facing one way and its tractor another, like a pocket knife. The tires were almost completely buried, and the bottom of the flatbed was sitting on top the mud. As I drove past the scene, the woman and kids were laughing, crying, and hugging the truck driver who’d saved their lives. There is no telling how many wreckers—or tow trucks—it took to pull that rig out of the mud.
Truckers develop thicker skin every time they experience a narrow escape, including the damned near incidents they are thankful to have survived. I know I’ve had my share of them. But we do our best, and while I realize most people don’t know a thing about trucks, other than that they haul your goods around and, if—or when—you notice them, likely scare the hell out of you because they’re so big, you should know that no truck driver heads out on the road thinking, Let’s go out and terrorize the four-wheelers today!—even if it does have a nice ring to it. No, each truck driver hits the road with the same goals as you: to reach their destination safely and then return home to their family. I will say it again—truck drivers are the professionals of the highways. While you drive to work, a trucker’s drive is his work and we’re not slacking off behind the wheel, we’re putting the time in and getting the job done.
And we have to. America depends on truckers for nearly everything. We rely on them to haul our food to our local grocery stores. Our favorite snacks and beverages, and indeed everything that sustains us, doesn’t simply materialize out of thin air on shelves and in freezers. And those packages filled with new clothes, housewares, and books that appear on our doorsteps with such convenience? Truck drivers ensure their swift arrival. The home you just moved into-and Truckers hauled the beams and bricks. The brand-new washer dryer? The stainless steel refrigerator? You guessed it. Truckers carry the foundations of our infrastructure, too—hauling the supplies that comprise roads, bridges, hospitals, and more. To borrow a couple of the fine, apropos lines of the American Trucking Association, “Without trucks, America stops,” and “If you got it, a truck brought it.”
In the pages that follow I’m going to offer a peek into our world. There might be wonkiness, swearing, and a good bit of grease, but you’ll get a behind-the-scenes view of how truckers are the bedrock of America, and do a damned fine job of keeping our country humming right along. By telling these stories, I am neither traveling down new highways, nor am I breaking new ground. Every trucker has also traveled these same roads, and each remembers their own special stories. Our stories touch every emotion from belly laughs to tearjerkers, and I’m sure other truckers think of theirs often, as I do mine. The fondest memories that comprise this book—whether hilarious, heartbreaking, or just plain stupid—are threads that, together, weave a tapestry of the American trucking culture.
