Life in an 18 Wheeler subtitled "My informal introduction to the world of long-haul trucking"

This is going to be an account of Blaine and my vacation to San Francisco in the fall of 1999. Deciding to get out of Dallas for a while before Y2K reduced the city to ruins, Blaine and I planned a vacation around the last Folsom Street Fair of the millenium in San Francisco, California. According to the loose plan (nothing is ever hard planned in the world of trucking – THAT much I already know) we were to pick up a load of freight in Dallas, take it to San Francisco, stay over for the fair, then take another series of loads up and down the west coast. We’d be back in San Fran for the Castro street fair the next weekend, then back to Dallas. Did things work out like that? Did they even come close? No. When did things start to go awry? Well, like a work of macrame art that hangs outside in a hurricane, our "plans" began to unravel before our eyes before we ever left Dallas.

The original (heavily revised) plan was that Blaine would pull into Dallas on Tuesday evening, and after a night of preparation, packing, and relaxation, we’d leave early Wednesday afternoon for the rolling California hills. But things didn’t QUITE work out that way.  I'm writing this diary/diatribe/journal to document what life is like when you give up most of the amenities of home in favor of driving a big rig over America's highways.

The one constant in interstate freight transportation is change. The mantra of our entire vacation became "Don’t Make Plans". I mean, you can MAKE them, just don’t get horribly upset if things don’t work out the way you expect them to. Take, for instance, our departure plans. Calling his dispatcher on Tuesday evening, Blaine found out that yes, there was a load going out in our general direction of travel. But it needed to leave in four hours. Okay, well... Scratch 75% of our plans, throw everything into the back of the Chevy, and RUN! After dumped the dogs off at a friend's, and having a somewhat less than fulfilling workout at the gym, we ate a quickie buffet dinner and ran for the truckyard in Irving.  If I'd known it would be the last decent meal I'd have for two thousand miles, ( I'm calling Golden Corral DECENT?  Ha!) I'd have eaten it more slowly.   [I suspect he now thinks Golden Corral is, in fact, good food. -B]

Unlike most of the non-heterosexual male population, I can pack two weeks of clothing and entertainment into a space of four cubic feet. Unfortunately, there’s not much more spare room than that in the sleeper of the Freightliner. But we did manage to get it all packed in there, and off we went in search of our assigned load – the illustrious Trailer 7926205, headed for Lubbock, Texas.

Most of you haven’t been in a major trucklot. Let me tell you what – it’s freaking HUGE. Hundreds of semi trucks and trailers parked in clusters at seemingly random angles make it easy to get lost inside there, and make it all the easier to hide a single trailer off in a corner somewhere. We spent half an hour driving around looking for trailer 7926205 before finally admitting defeat, picking up the CB, and calling the office. Sure as shooting, the load we had rushed and hurried to pick up was taken by someone else, and trailer 7926205 was headed for Lubbock without us.

SURPRISE!!!

Well, that’s the nature of the game, I guess. Blaine drives the rig back up to the dispatch building and heads back up to the office with the paperwork for our vapor-run in clenched fist. I sit in the truck and contemplate my navel. I use the time productively to wrangle a particularly obnoxious booger out of my left nostril, and wonder how much more navel contemplation will go on in these next 14 days, and I suspect that I honestly don’t want to know the answer to that question. [There wasn't that much navel contemplation....]

Shortly after midnight, Blaine pops an old Hooked on Classics CD into the stereo, and we’re bound for Fort Worth at a blistering speed-limited 63 mph to pick up our errant trailer. [Central Freight Lines, for whom we were hauling that trailer, is an "LTL" carrier. Their operation depends upon getting freight between terminals in something closely resembling "just in the nick of time." Which is confusing when you consider that Swift trucks can't even do the speed limit.... ]

At approximately 12:10, Hooked on Classics reminds me why private gun ownership is a good thing, as I contemplate pulling it from the player and using a few well placed hollow-point .45 slugs to put It out of its misery.  Thankfully, Blaine has no large sentimental attachment to this music, and it never again rears its ugly head on the entire trip.  There is a God. [I do like that CD. I just refrained from playing it because I realize that I'm apparently the only person I know who likes it..... ]

At 2:30 am, I crap out and head for the bunk. I feel guilty about leaving Blaine to fend for himself up front, but he’s done night drives about a billion times, and I’m about to become a raving bitch. Better to have no copilot than a bitchy one. I DO, after all, want to still be bonded to this man when we return in two weeks! I discover that it IS possible to fall asleep rocking along six feet above the pavement at 63 mph with the voices of Haddaway, Madonna, and bleary, lonely truckers on the CB blaring into your ears. It ain’t what you’d call a GOOD sleep, but sleep it was.

Six-Thirty a.m. comes early, and I wake to what must be one of the more wonderful sunrises in my career as Human on Earth. Nothing really spectacular, the sky is clear and bright with a few wispy clouds coming up off the far horizon, but the color is nothing short of magnificent. The day’s sunrise begins as a warming strip on the horizon behind us, and slowly grows to become a flagrant band of brightness and color. Out here in west Texas there aren’t many hills or trees to get in the way, the sun makes no apologies as it bursts over the horizon. Like the obnoxious neighbor you had in college, it comes bursting in without knocking, and says, "Hello!"

So at dawn, our load gets delivered to the tiny little Central lot in Lubbock, and after taking another short nap, we head out to sit at the Rip Griffin’s truckstop to wait for word of our re-assignment. Strolling the aisles inside the Rip Griffin’s convenience store reveals to me the reason why most truckers seem to be either 400 lbs of flab, or they weigh 125 lbs sopping wet. If you don’t like candy bars or potato chips, you can always get a fatty pork or tuna salad sandwich out of the cooler.   If hot food is your choice, you can partake of fried chicken, corn dogs, fried burritos, or tamales. If it can’t either hold its shape in a prepackaged plastic bag or stew under a heatlamp in its own fat, it’s not available. After making the realization that I’d rather drink anti-freeze than eat anything they serve, I cave in to hunger and buy a miniature order of fried chicken bits. Do I peel off the breading and see what I’m actually eating? You must be joking. [I've eaten the same chicken bits. They are indeed chicken. Scary thought.]

As an aside, I mention here that as a trucker, if you want to know if you’re in an official hick town, look at what’s on the front page of the thickest newspaper in the area. If the day’s feature story is accompanied by a photo running four columns wide of a man eating sausage on a stick, and said picture runs ABOVE the fold, you know you’re living in a hick town. Care to guess what was on the front page of the Amarillo newspapers? ‘Nuff said. [So it ain't New York City!]

The dispatcher sends a mesage on the Qualcomm (see below), and we accept a load of corn meal headed from the Azteca mill in Plainview to the Sabritas company in Mexicali, which resides on the California/Mexico border. Hooray! We’ve got a load! So to Plainview we go, where we’re loaded with ground maize (you call it Corn) on its way to be processed into corn chips and tortillas.

I make mention of the Qualcomm unit frequently in this missive, so I should probably explain it.  This is a messaging service that functions as an umbilical cord for truckers across the nation.  The visible parts of the system consist of a typewriter style keypad with  a 4-line LCD text display, and a circular white plastic antenna outside the cab.  Drivers use this to communicate with the world while the're out on the road.  You can send messages back and forth to your dispatcher, or to anyone else who either has a Qualcomm unit in their cab or has a regular e-mail account.  [The Qualcomm unit also reports the truck's position, and logs engine/vehicle data.]

On our way out of town, we hope to swing past Blaine’s old stomping grounds in Canyon. As we drive along the ruler-straight west Texas country road, I’m reminded of just how sophisticated the suspension is in the Freightliner. One would think that such a huge, lumbering machine would bounce all over the road, a hazard to man and livestock alike, but it ain’t so. You’ll never mistake it for the ride of a Buick, but it’s damned smooth, all things considered.   There is a certain sound that the engine makes when it's loafing along at 1200 rpm and the turbocharger's barely spinning that is quite hypnotic. [And people honestly wonder why I like it so much.....]

As we pass near a collection of well maintained buildings just off of the road, Blaine points and says, "There’s Granddaddy’s place". And WHIP! It’s in the rearview mirror. I knock him senseless for not giving me a bit of advance warning, and he promises to do better. Down the road a piece, the house Blaine grew up in went by almost as unseen. He did point it out ahead of time and slow to 30, but it was blocked by trees and we didn’t get to see much more than an old green American-built sedan parked in the driveway of a house almost totally concealed by trees and shrubs.   Later I discover that this is the essence of trucking.  Sure, you can get out and see the country.  But for most of the trip, you don't really have time to see much of anything that's more than 100 yards off of the freeway.  If you see something interesting, you can't just stop and look around like you can in a car.  For one thing, where are you going to park something that's longer than most houses?  And if you do find a place to park, you're normally on such a tight schedule that you can't stop and smell the roses.  You get out, look around, then jump back in the cab and burn miles.  Great way to see the country. 

After just a few days, I totally lose track of what day it is.  Blaine says that's the reason he has to wear his watch 24 hours a day just to tell what day it is.   After our two week trip went by seemingly in four or five days, I can understand how people stay out on the road for weeks or even months at a time.  Faster than you would imagine, you  become numb to the passage of days.

I’ve got to admit, last night I saw one of the most impressive sunsets of my short life. As immodest and brash as the sunrise was, the sunset was lovely and peaceful. Chunky clouds on the horizon partially obscured the sun on its descent to the hills, breaking the warm red fire into two distinct layers, while white, vaporous wisps curled gently around the rest of the azure-blushing-to-fire-red sky. Off to one side, there was first a bright spot, then a brilliant rainbow caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. How anyone could see a sight like this and doubt the brilliance of God is beyond me. Those who seek to break a sight like this into scientific components miss the point entirely. It’s not the physical processes at work in a sunset that makes it beautiful – it’s the fact that we’re built to be stunned and awed by such beauty. We’re imbued with the ability, beyone other animals, of appreciating the wonders that God makes for us.   It's a pity that some people have become so calloused that they can no longer be amazed by such things. [Calloused, no. Jaded, yes. When you grow up with that for 18 years, it becomes commonplace.  And sometimes, to folks like me, it specifically is the physical processes that make things like this happen that show the brilliance of God.]

So. With the beauty of the sunset fresh in our minds and stomachs clamoring for good, solid food, we land for the night at the Petro truckstop in southeast Amarillo. We weigh the truck (heavy on the trailer tandems, but we can crank them back to put more weight on the drive axles – we’ll handle that particular problem in the morning) and head inside for bathrooms, solid food, and showers.

First on the agenda for the evening is a good, hot sitdown meal. Man was not meant to survive by gobbling fast food burgers in the seat of a vehicle, and I’ve always tried to have at least two good seated meals a day, free of work or other stresses. The attitude that food was meant to be enjoyed and not merely endured was programmed into me by my mother, and so far, nothing has come along to convince me otherwise. Once inside the restaurant, Blaine announces, "You can order from the menu if you want, but I’M having the buffet!" Normally, I’m a buffet kind of guy too, but one look at the greasy meats and helpless, limp broccoli tells me that the best chance of getting something edible lies inside the laminated tri-fold menu.

Blaine comes back with a disgusted look on his face, and a smattering of food on his skillet-shaped aluminum plate. The fried chicken doesn’t look all that bad, but I refuse to believe that what is sitting on his plate in a grey-green pile started life out as a fresh sprig of honest-to-God broccoli. Apparently the carrots aren’t bad, but the rest of the "food" is a total loss. My chicken fried chicken isn’t repulsive, and the salad bar was fresh, so it wasn’t a total loss. When Blaine was out making a valiant second attempt at salvaging edible food from the buffet wasteland, I saw a pleasant looking woman walking away from the overwarmed piles of mush, and watched as she quietly thrust a finger into her mouth in the universal gesture of gagging. I caught her eye, and gave her a nodding, "I know, isn’t it awful?" look. She burst out into laughter herself, and quietly said, "I didn’t think anyone was looking!" People in this business, especially the wifes/partners of the drivers, are the salt of the Earth.

Ever have a fantasy about hot truckers in a truckstop shower? Not to burst your bubble, but it ain’t quite like they tell us in the books, where six hot, muscular drivers go at it on the floor. First off, the private rooms aren’t quite large enough for six Mr. America wanna-bes. It’s just large enough for a sink, a shower, a john, and a bench to put your clothes on, and Hot Stuff probably wouldn’t want to writhe around on that tile floor anyway, with mildew and such. The showerhead was an anemic little water-saving job, my toilet rocked back and forth on a broken foundation, threatening to tip me over in the middle of my dump, and the sink barely worked. That said, I couldn’t have cared less. I’d just gotten to the "itchy scalp" stage of my decay, where you feel like a monkey with active head lice, and right then I would have sold Blaine off to white slavers for a garden hose and a bar of soap. My teeth felt like they were wearing little fuzzy coats, and I had the growing suspicion that raising my arms might send women and small children scurrying for cover. It astounds me how much better about one’s position one feels when one is clean!

Exiting the Petro, we took away a couple of pounds of food and left behind a couple of bucks and a lot of dirt. A more than fair trade, I’d say. We settled down in the lower sleeper berth for the first full dose of Vitamin Z since we’d started chasing time twenty four hours earlier. Keeping in mind the fact that Blaine was driving and running errands all day Tuesday, he was awake for almost 48 hours with only minimal nap time. How he does it without degenerating into a growling bear is beyond me. [There's nothing that says I do NOT degenerate into a growling bear. I just realized a long time ago that the rest of the world doesn't give a rat's *** that you're having a bad day.]

The next day saw Blaine and I up and ready to go at 7:30 in the morning. Well, actually that’s not true. I was up and ready at 7:30, he was still exhausted from his overnight run the night before. Considering that he’d not had any good sleep in the past 48 hours, I thought it would be in both of our best interests to let him sleep as long as he could. By 10 am, he was better rested and I had a chance to catch up on this journal. After taking a dump, adjusting the trailer wheels for better weight distribution and cleaning the windows, it was time to hit the road again. On the walkaround that morning, we see a gatorade bottle full of what looks like rancid tea. It’s urine. There’s nothing wrong with taking a whiz in a bottle if you’ve got to go and the nearest rest stop is hours away, but leaving the bottle sitting in the middle of a parking lot is unspeakably crass. At least have the decency to throw it in a dumpster somewhere. Blaine grabs a couple of paper towels and throws it away. [This is a prime example of why no-truck-parking ordinances are everywhere. Need I go further?]

I’m not going to say that Tucumcari New Mexico is a cesspool, because I haven’t seen all of it. In fact, the only part I’ve seen was the Tucumcari Truck Terminal Restaurant, but that was just about bad enough to make up for all the parts of Tucumcari that I haven’t seen yet. Things wouldn’t have been so bad were it not for the constant dinner companions. Flies were omnipresent, but for some reason they stayed off the food. One valuable lesson learned: Blaine clued me in to the secret of enjoying a Truck Stop Chicken Fried Steak. Memorize the words, "Gravy on the side." Normally I’m quite the fan of a good cream gravy, but when it has the stunning flavor of wallpaper paste and the consistency of a body emission, it just ain’t right. But at least in this case it didn’t ruin a good chicken fried steak. The ideal CFS is tender and juicy, with a crispy coating that is absent all traces of excess oil. The meat is soft and flavorful, with an aroma reminiscent of a good steak and potatoes dinner. Fortunately, what I was served in Tucumcari was none of the above, so the cream gravy made little difference. When the only flavor in your meal comes from the salt and pepper you add at the table, that’s pretty sad. But in spite of it all, I enjoyed it, because it helped me understand a little more what it is that Blaine goes through on a daily basis.  No wonder the man eats like an animal when he gets home.   And all this time, I thought it was my cooking... [well, it's some of it.... ;-) ]

We made a fuel stop in the Phoenix, Arizona truckyard, and I got yet another surprise. The Phoenix yard is freakin’ HUGE! I thought that the yard in Irving was big, but it’s nothing compared to this place. The Phoenix location serves as home base and main training grounds for new drivers. [It's also the home yard for Swift Transportation. ] It was also interesting to see row upon row of brand spanking new trucks just waiting to be distributed to the eager hands of their new drivers. Millions of dollars worth of trucks just sitting there for the asking. It’s a far cry from Blaine’s days at Ralph Owens, where it took an act of Congress just to get a new mattress for the bunk. While we were there, we also picked up an old tire for Blaine to drag around (he gets off on behaving like an animal. I get off on it too, so I don’t say anything!) and a new set of vinyl numbers to replace the crooked numbers on the side of his rig.  I’m learning that truckers are a funny lot about this kind of stuff. I strongly suspect that there are many drivers out there who in financially troubled times would forego immunizations for the kids rather than not be able to afford a bottle of windex or chrome polish. In the past few days, I’ve seen some positively skanky guys (sorry fellas, call a spade a spade.) step out of some gorgeous hunks of machinery, trucks so clean that it makes your dinner plates at home look filthy in comparison. These men take incredible pride in their rides. [Sometimes you wonder if the rigs in the Pride-and-Polish competitions actually work and pull freight or if they're merely exercises in obsessive-compulsive cleanliness, six-digit figure accessorizing and custom woodwork...]

By the time we got through farting around, we were both hungry enough to eat an ox, complete with skin and tail, so we wandered over to the Jake Break Cafe to feed our faces. Now, I’ve seen quite a few company diners, but none have been like this. The whole building gave me a feel of complete professionalism and polish that I’ve rarely experienced in the past. The food was good, relatively inexpensive, and there were interesting things to look at.  Like the seemingly brand new Detroit Diesel motor sitting in the middle of the dining area, for all to drool over.

In addition to a great restaurant, the terminal also had free showers, telephones, laundry facilities, a company store, and a place where you could buy some of the bunged-up freight which had been damaged in transit. I think you could very easily live in a place like that. Well, come to think of it, some people may have been doing just that – there was a sign up in the lounge announcing that if your car had been parked for longer than five months, it was going to be towed. I’m sorry, call me a snob, but I’d go through withdrawl if I had to go five months between drives in my bimmer. [O.k. SNOB!!!]

Southern California is a land of interesting contrasts. One minute, you’ll be staring out the window at cropland to your right, and unimproved scrub to your left. The next, you’re staring at sand dunes and land that looks like it couldn’t successfully support the growth of a single cactus, much less the verdant abundance of whatever it is they’re growing there. Witness the miracle of irrigation!

California is widely known as being somewhat unfriendly to truckers. With a fifteen mile per hour speed differential between the cars and the large trucks, it’s tough not to feel like you’re just sitting still as the world passes you by. I can understand their desire for slower speed limits for vehicles weighing in at FORTY TONS, but that doesn’t mean that I like it.  Also, you are limited in what lanes you travel in.  Often on the freeway, you find that you are stuck in the entrance lane of a 70 mph freeway, limited to 55 mph.  Cars either have to accellerate furiously or frantically brake to maneuver around you.  Most don't realize that you have no choice in the matter, and they get rather miffed.  No gunfire is exchanged, but we come close a time or two. [My experience is that 4-wheelers simply don't get it that trucks are often behaving that way because they HAVE to do so. I'd often give certain bodyparts to retroactively reform America's Driver "Education" system....]

Not that the speed limits mean much to us. We normally thumb our noses at speed limits not because we like to flout the law, but because we don’t have a prayer of exceeding them anyway. All Swift trucks are limited to a maximum speed of 63 MPH, and having your eyes 10 feet above the pavement makes the speed seem even less.

Our load of corn flour that we picked up in Amarillo dropped in Mexicali right on schedule, despite our getting a somewhat late start yesterday morning. As I opened the door of the truck to stretch my legs, I was struck full in the face with the rich smell of coastal hay. I’m not sure where it was coming from, but it brought back memories of my childhood, laying back in the hayloft after a recent cut, breathing in the smell of horses and freshly mown sweet grass. I never fail to be amazed at how powerfully memories triggered by the sense of smell can be. Surprisingly, the smell was almost reminiscent of the scent of my mother’s fluffy strawberry icing that saw its way onto birthday cakes since I was VERY small. Don’t laugh! It’s not that her cakes taste like hay, there’s just something of a common element in the smells of her frosting and the southern tip of California, the way the smell of corrugated boxes on a humid day remind me of pepperoni pizza. Maybe I’m just strange, but it still brought back a lot of very pleasant memories.

It was quite a drive between the load we dropped off in Mexicali and our next trailer. Almost twenty feet, as a matter of fact. The trailer we picked up, filled with taco shells destined for delivery to Taco Bell’s across the nation, was in the same yard that we dropped the prior one in. Sometimes, fate works your way! We drop off corn flour, and pick up taco shells. Blaine comments, and I have to agree, that it’s a sad thing when it’s cheaper to truck your raw materials across the border, paying for import/export duties and the services of freight forwarders and brokers, then process your ingredients into foods in Mexico, and pay all the duties and fees to get the food BACK across the border, than it is to pay American workers to do the job at a living wage. Something’s wrong with this picture.

Daybreak in Southern CA saw us awake and already driving, eating our breakfasts of Hostess Donut Gems and Cupcakes (gotta love the creme filling and waxy chocolate frosting!) and coffee along the way. Again the landscape has shifted, going to a white chalky dirt (I refuse to call it ‘soil’) that is only capable of supporting low-lying, scrubby vegetation. The mountains are beautiful, and I’m reminded why I love mountainous terrain so much. I wonder if I only like them so much because I never got to see them while growing up. Do we always find terrain exotic looking when we didn’t grow up with it? As I look to my right, I see the Salton Sea, a landbound body of water which at first, I mistake for a layer of haze on the horizon. According to the map it’s of good size, being almost 30 miles across at its widest spot.

There’s a lot of agriculture in this part of the state. We pass date farms, grape vinyards, and fields and fields of crops that I don’t have a prayer of identifying. I wish that more farmers would put up signs identifying the crops they’re growing. A hundred years ago, I’m sure that everyone on the planet could see a bush or tree, and tell what sort of fruit or vegetable it produced, but no longer. These days, it’s all leafy and green. I dislike ignorance, my own especially.

An hour or two after daybreak, we passed by one of southern California’s wind farms. I’ve always been intrigued by wind-powered electricity generation, and this is a treat for me. I've always been fascinated by windmills like this.  Blaine's seen it a dozen times and is unimpressed.  He stays unimpressed all morning, until he discovers that his wallet and keys are missing. THIS realization wakes him up fully faster than the caffeine in a cup of truckstop joe. We call the fuel center where we were the night before to no avail – it’s not there, and nobody has turned it in. As fast as we can, we cancel all of the credit cards and other pieces of sensitive information that was in there, but we're not quite fast enough. Later, we discover that the person who grabbed the card has made a dozen small purchases on it already. Fortunately, we called in to the bank as soon as we could, and we keep detailed receipts. It should be no problem discerning which charges are valid and which are not when we return to Dallas. But more important than the cards is Blaine’s driver information. His commercial driver’s license, his medical fitness card, and all of the documentation he needs to legally drive a semi-truck are now gone. If we get pulled over by a CHP officer, we’re toast. [And only a trucker can appreciate just how toasted... CHP's fine schedule for truckers is such that I'd have spent the entirety of my next two and a half month's pay on the fines.] So we carefully finish the trip to the Stockton yard late Saturday evening, sweating bullets all the way.  Blaine has his dispatcher fax copies of his professional credentials to us, so at least we can show a CHiPpie something if we're pulled over.

At approximately two p.m. central time, we are forced by hours of service regulations to stop and take an eight hour rest. This means that we can no longer drive during daylight hours, we have to try to sleep during the middle of the day, then work at staying awake while driving in the middle of the night. [** Side note: New regulations try to address this problem by making the duty shift 14 hours, then the rest shift 10 hours. This would allow drivers to set regular sleep hours at times that make the most sense to their bodies, rather than trying to sleep while they’re still screamingly awake. **] We park the rig in a spot at the Unocal 76 Travel Center diner in Santa Nella,  California, and try to sleep as much as we can for the next six hours or so. Prior to getting some shut eye, we use the facilities inside the truckstop.  On our way back to the rig, we watch as the driver of a Starving Students moving truck pops the door to his cab and takes a generous leak on the pavement. Blaine just looked and said, "THIS is why so many cities don’t want truckers anywhere near the public center." [Poor Scooter just about tossed his lunch....][I wasn't THAT bad.]

After getting six hours of less than perfect rest, we eat, go to the bathroom INDOORS, and have some rest. Blaine drives our load towards Stockton as I sleep peacefully in the bunk, unable to keep up with the lack of sleep. When I wake up, I honestly can’t remember what day it is. I think it’s sometime around Thursday, but it might be Friday, too. Who knows, who cares, why bother. [It was Saturday evening, actually. ]

Once unhooked from the trailer, we bobtail the truck out to San Francisco, with me sleeping most of the way. I wake up in time for our passing across the Bay Bridge, and I manage to stay awake until we reach the home of our friends Anthony and Scott. We pull onto their street at the butt-crack of three am, stagger upstairs, and collapse on the couch. By this time, I’ve pretty much made the conclusion that trucking sucks, and very little has occurred to change my opinion on the matter.

Sunday the truck sat still while we played, and although it was fun to see the reaction of other people who oohed and aahed over the rig, [I'm jaded to this...] it wasn’t fun enduring the hostile stares of the neighbors who had to maneuver around the truck to get out of their garages. When driving something this big in the city, you feel like you’re a bull in a china shop, and you’re 90 percent unwelcome wherever you go. Blaine’s right when he says that people want what’s on the truck, but they don’t want the truck itself in the city limits. He says it with a note of disgust in his voice, but I mostly agree with city ordinances limiting the behavior of rigs inside city limits. Driving something this big on residential streets that weren’t designed for it is a scary proposition at best  It’s all to easy to forget that you outweigh everyone else on the road by a factor of five or ten to one. Narrow streets and poorly designed intersections make driving difficult in a bobtail, and seemingly impossible when pulling a 53 foot trailer. Sure, if the world made sense, we would make the streets wider and more accommodating to big rigs. But the fact of the matter is, property value is largely dependent upon how much lawn or parking space you have in front of your building. If the streets are two feet wider, that means that you have two feet less parking space to sell. People want large lawns, and they don’t give a rip about truck access. The market-driven needs and desires of 97% of the population outweigh the needs and desires of the remaining three percent who drive trucks.  Sorry, but them's the facts.

Anyway, after calling the Texas DPS to obtain new documentation, we find that it isn’t possible for them to fax us anything meaningful, and the time difference between Texas and California is rising up to bite us on the ass. By the time Blaine can fill out the paperwork for a replacement license, the Texas DPS has closed for the day and we are forced to sit overnight as the faxed paperwork languishes in the Austin DPS office. In the morning we call them, and they proceed to process the paperwork, saying that the most they can do is overnight the documents to us at the Stockton yard. So we’ll be in California ANOTHER day, doing nothing but sitting and waiting. The department of public safety is so encumbered by the paperwork and the process of it all that they just don’t seem to care any more. Personal service is a thing of the past, apparently. I watch silently as the remainder of our vacation plans crumble. Our journey to Washington will happen another day, I hope. [The reason for all this garbage is apparent if the reader takes the time to read 49CFR, part 391, with respect to licensing requirements. A CDL is not an ordinary driver's licence. Finishing all of 49CFR (also known as the FMCSR) is an exercise in controlled torture, but worth the read to find out all the "garbage" I have to put up with on a daily basis.] [Don't worry if you don't understand that.  I don't know what a 49CFR is either.]

This is the kind of thing that a truck driver deals with on a daily basis.  I am not amused. [He thinks I was???]  At least Blaine has time to catch up on his logbooks.   Every driver has to keep a book detailing how he spends his day.  He can be driving, on duty but not driving, sleeping, or off duty.  How you log your time determines how many miles you can drive every day.  Many drivers pencil-whip their logbooks within an inch of their lives [or running more than one logbook, a practice I find reprehensible], recording far fewer hours spent driving than actually occurred.  That's tough to do if you've got a Qualcomm in the truck.   In addition to allowing the driver to communicate with the outside world, the Qualcomm transmits certain information about truck performance back to the people who track such things.  If your logs show you driving for nine and a half hours, your Qualcomm data had better not indicate otherwise, or you're going to be looking for another job pretty soon.  Needless to say, Blaine doesn't cheat on his logs.  They may drive him insane from time to time, but he's legit. Unlike Ralph Owens, who badgered him into driving far more than was safe, damn them.

This is Blaine’s world. Seemingly, very few choices in your life are up to you to make. Between ever changing state and national regulations, dispatching issues, and the customer’s full control over how and when you’re unloaded, it’s impossible to know from hour to hour where you’ll be or what you’re doing. You can’t even say for sure where you’ll be hanging your hat from night to night. And since driving a truck is a job without any cachet, the situation will probably never change. Nobody treats lawyers like this. Doctors don’t get such shoddy treatment. Even teachers and carpenters, low paid but respected, get more positive feedback than this. I’m angry as hell right now, and I don’t know at whom. [Think about it carefully for a minute. In an office environment, things don't always go the way you want them to go. Your plans change. Your duties are changed for you at the last minute. There's really not that much different from a "normal job," except that folks who work a "normal job" actually get paid for their time. Over half my total logged hours are unpaid, and almost none of my 'on duty, not driving' hours are paid.]

Wednesday afternoon, we finally get rolling under a load again. Since going up the coast is now impossible due to time constraints, we decide to stick around for another California load. With any luck at all, this will get us back into the Los Angeles area, and allow us to see another friend who lives there. We pick up brake parts in Modesto bound for the Pep Boys warehouse in East LA. As usual in the industry, the Qualcomm says that it’s a "drop and hook" load, where all we do is back up to a trailer, hook up, and drive off, but in reality we have to sit in the parking lot of Brake Parts, wait for them to remember that they really DID want to ship a load, then back up to the dock and wait again while they bump and grind the load into the trailer. Experienced drivers can sleep through loading and unloading, but I wasn’t quite THAT tired. Every time a forklift runs a load into the trailer, it bounces and jars the truck, rather like what happens when someone jumps up and down on the bumper of your car. How can anyone get a restful sleep through that? [As I found out long ago, if you're tired enough, you'll sleep through anything. Once you sleep through it the first time, after that is a cinch.] Two hours later, the dock worker rapped on the door and told us that we were loaded. As we pull away from the dock, we are already three hours late. It’s becoming easy to see why it’s so difficult to make good money in trucking. With duty restrictions put on drivers by the hours-of-service regulations, one screwed up appointment can kill a whole carefully scheduled week of hauling. And so far, of the four loads we’ve carried, we haven’t had a single one that hasn’t been messed up in one way or another.  It seems that the loads that go 100 percent right are few and far between. [Actually, load aren't quite as bad as we've shown here. The difference is that we were trying to get to a certain place at a certain time, which is exceedingly difficult. If you're rolling with the loads as they come, it's nowhere near this bad.]

We drive late into the night, and pull up outside the Pep Boys distribution center at around midnight. It’s 2:00 am central time, and we’re bushed. The warehouse ain’t in the best part of LA, but hey – that’s where the freight delivers, so that’s where we go. Drivers all over the US are popular victims of muggers and robbers. They normally travel alone, they aren’t familiar with the area, and most are friendly enough to roll down the window or open the cab door when you ask them for directions. Easy prey. I watch nervously as Blaine walks the 100 yards to the office entrance. At one point about seventy yards away, a man steps out from behind a parked van and takes up walking behind Blaine. I come dangerously close to grabbing something heavy and jumping out of the cab but before I can move, Blaine is already inside the cone of light outside the Pep Boys guard shack. He’s safe, and I’m paranoid. [In this case, paranoia is a good thing...]

When Blaine returns to the cab, it turns out that we are there, the product is there, the empty trailer we’re exchanging is there, but the person who has to approve the swap isn’t there. So we sleep for a couple of hours while they decide that they really need the brake parts that we have in the trailer, and at 3:00 am Pacific time, they graciously allow us to drop our loaded trailer and pick up an empty one. We drive out to the other side of LA and sleep for a few more hours before raiding the Continental Breakfast Bar of the hotel where our friend is staying, then using the shower facilities in his room to clean up. I begin to think that if you rotated motels, you could probably eat free continental breakfasts for the rest of your life without anyone being any the wiser.

After getting clean and shamelessly well fed at the expense of the Placentia Fairfield Inn, we drive out to the truckyard at Fontana to pick up trailer number 530728, filled to the brim with foam rubber. After looking around the yard for thirty minutes, Blaine runs into the dispatch office, and learns that the trailer isn’t at the main yard, it’s in an overflow yard a mile away. Thanks for telling us. [Something I'm finding out is that Swift, in the past, has grown far faster than it's owned infrastructure can support. The Stockton and Fontana, CA yards are far too small for their own good.] Remember that this exact same thing happened to us at the beginning of our trip? Looking for something that isn’t there annoys the hell out of me. An hour after we find the trailer, we pull out of the Fontana yard on our way back to Texas, to deliver 8,000 lbs of foam rubber into the eagerly waiting hands of its new owner.

Driving eastbound on highway 10, I look at the mountain range that lies to the northeast of Los Angeles, and am saddened that it’s so hazy. You’d think, as caretakers of this planet for our children, we could do a little better job than this. Car buffs all across California are up in arms over having tightly regulated emissions standards, and maybe they're right.  Maybe they shouldn't have stricter standards than the rest of the country.  Perhaps we should all have to submit to such stringent regulation.  Why wait until it becomes a problem? Are we incapable of acting prophylactically? [If you have to ask.....]

It’s two p.m. California time, and I’m hungry again. I can see why truckers are either cigarette junkies or corpulent. If all you have to do all day long behind the wheel is feed your face with twinkies or nicotine, it must be hard to resist.

Apparently there is a carpetlayer somewhere in Houston who is desperate for his carpet padding, and we just can’t make it there fast enough. The planners tell us to drop the load, which will in turn be picked up by another "power unit" and driven by a fresh truck directly to Houston. Kinda like the pony express. In the industry, anything that can carry a loaded trailer is known as a "power unit", and right now we don’t have enough power to satisfy. SO. [I specifically didn't look, but I strongly suspect that the trailer full of carpet padding was still sitting on the Phoenix yard when we left the next morning...]

We drop the trailer and get reassigned to pick up a Wal Mart load destined for Bentonville, Arkansas. Where is the trailer? sigh. Why do we always have to ask this question? The lady inside the office is polite and friendly, and tells us that the trailer is in the Wal Mart distribution center about thirty miles away. She sends us on our way with a pre-printed sheet of directions, and off we go, fortified with drinks and sandwiches yanked out of a vending machine Half an hour later we pull into Wal Mart’s distribution center (inspiringly large – must have 200 dock doors on the place) [he ain't seen nothin' yet!] only to be told that the trailer is, in reality, on the Swift truck lot. Yippee. By this time, the double dose of generic NyQuil has hit me like a ton of Acme brick, and I couldn’t possibly care less where the trailer is. But then, I’m not the one driving the rig. Blaine is dead tired, but has to drive back to the yard now. Thirty minutes later, he has a conversation with the lady that gave us bad instructions, and she grovels admirably.   It’s tough to be mad at someone who’s abasing themselves before you. What do you do? We hook up to the trailer and find a spot to park for the night.

The morning is crisp and cool, with not a single cloud in the sky to break the monotony of blue. We take showers in the company break room, and grab breakfast to go in the company mess hall. Curiously, breakfast costs more than lunch did a couple of days prior. I didn’t expect that, but still it was no more than we’d have paid at a 7-11 for the same fare, and the food was fresh and hot.  I still don't have any feeling in my teeth from my NyQuil shot, and I'm happy as a clam about it.

Clean, fed, and feeling a little better, we hit the road out of Arizona. New Mexico is monotonous at best on I-40, and in many places the horizon is nothing but an unbroken line of brown sand next to an unbroken line of blue sky. How anyone can find a life out here is a mystery to me, but somehow they manage. [It's not that bad; I grew up in that kind of country, and I find it less of a problem. By the same token, I sometimes don't understand how folks can grow up not being able to see something 15 miles away.] It’s a shame that the only things there are to see along the way are adobe-clad stores advertising cheap tourist souvenirs for sale. Marketing is alive and well in the most unlikely of places.

Where to stop for dinner and the night? We look at the mileages involved, and realize that we can’t make it as far as we’d planned that night, so we settle for stopping at a Rip Griffin’s truckstop in Moriarty, New Mexico. Normally we avoid Rip Griffins because the prices on most things are an easy 10 percent higher than any of the other major truckstops [Truckers call the place "Rip-Off Griffins" for a reason...], but this time we have little choice. We pull in at 11:00 pm, and we sit down in the restaurant. There’s one waitress valiantly trying to do everything, from bussing the tables to sweeping the floors, and she has five or six tables to serve to boot. Obviously, service ain’t gonna be great, but we know that she’s doing the best she can.

One problem with eating that late at night, even at 24 hour restaurants, is that they usually are running out of that day’s food by the time you order. You get real used to hearing, "We’re out of that, hon." Usually the only two vegetables they have left are canned green beans and french fries, both of which Blaine is allergic to. Tonight, we settle on a big bowl of mixed vegetables, out of which Blaine is able to pick the broccoli. His grilled chicken is about the diameter of a regulation hockey puck and 1/2 the thickness, and my senior-sized chicken fried steak is swimming in a sea of its own fat. Apparently the direct translation for "country fried potatoes" in New Mexico is "thin potato slices fried in a well of fat with some onion bits." Not appealing. [And unfortunately, the norm for truckstop restaurants.] We aren’t really satisfied with the meal, but the waitress does conveniently forget to charge us for the pecan pie, so it ain’t all bad. By this time, even food isn’t enough to revive us, and we’re out of hours for the day. We go back to the truck and sleep the sleep of the dead, until far too late in the morning. Blaine sets his alarm watch for about 9:00 am, but we sleep through until 11:00 or better. Nothing’s time critical, and he needs the sleep. No-Doz and heavily sugared soft drinks will only get you so far in life, after all. The life of a driver isn’t a pretty one.

Once we wake up, we take advantage of the shower facilities inside the Rip Griffin driver’s lounge, and I find that by far, they are the nicest of anywhere we’ve been on this trip. They might charge too much for their snacks and drinks, but they make up for it with nice shower rooms, which even have hair dryers. Heck, they don’t even charge us for the showers! Blaine says that there are certain times during the middle of the day and night when demand is low that showers don’t cost anything. Pretty cool way of making drivers happy, if you ask me.

In spite of the nice bathrooms, we aren’t about to risk the dining room again, so we run across the road to Subway and gather food there. We do buy drinks and a chips at Rip’s, figuring that as long as it has a sanitary seal on it, the grease monsters in the kitchen couldn’t have polluted it. I shouldn’t rag on them so much – they did have a very nice facility, but when the food isn’t plentiful and hot, it’s hard to take much of a positive view. [And folks wonder why there are so many jokes about Army food...]

On our way back through Amarillo, Texas, Blaine tries to contact his family so that they might meet us somewhere for dinner, but to no avail.   Something is wrong with the phone lines crossing the Texas/New Mexico border, and we can't get through on land lines or cellular phones.  So we later drive through town, mere miles from the people he loves, unable to contact them.  We do stop at a local western store and buy Blaine a replacement wallet, but we can't kill enough time to get in touch with his family so we drive on.  They're so close, but they might as well be a thousand miles away if we can't contact them. 

Our load to Bentonville is uneventful, except for the rude little man who makes Blaine re-park the tractor and trailer so it's two feet further to the right at the Wal Mart warehouse.  It seems to be people like that who make the job so trying at times.  Bitter little men with feelings of inadequacy who feel the need to exert their power in any way possible so that they feel a little better about themselves.   But I digress... [An all too common occurence, unfortunately. The gate guard, that is... ;-)]

We are scheduled to bobtail up to Joplin, Missouri, and we make it up there in good time.  It's nice to be relieved of 40,000 lbs of miscellaneous Wal Mart crap, and the lessened mass makes the truck accelerate much like any other car on the market.  As heavy as a tractor is, 430 horsepower and 1,500 foot pounds of torque can motivate you quite sufficiently! [If I only had two more gears and no speed limit!!!!!]   We make it to Joplin in good time, but we have to hunt around a bit to find our trailer.  Turns out, it's on a small gravel lot outside a agricultural pesticide manufacturer. [It's a drop-yard, actually, courtesy of a 3-truck cartage outfit. Frequently in the industry, one company will contract with another to use facilities to drop trailers when necessary. A parking fee is paid and trailers are dropped.]  The weather has by this time turned chilly, and Blaine dons his coat for the first time this season to get the trailer ready for hookup.  When we finally do get under load and on our way, the liquid inside the 55 gallon drums rocks back and forth, pushing the truck from side to side every time we start, stop, or turn a corner. It's a subtle feeling, but definitely there.  Especially since I have to pee like a banshee.  1000 gallons of rocking liquid isn't helping matters much. [If he thinks that's bad, he'd better not try 185 barrels of raw crude oil, which is what I used to haul....]

When we finally do bed down for the night at a small but friendly truckstop in Oklahoma, we sleep like dead men.  It's been a long day, and although we're in the home stretch of our vacation, we're looking forward to sleeping for a good bit before resuming our journey.  Good thing we did, too.  The next day would prove to be perhaps the most stressful of the journey.

After having a good night's sleep, we use the facilities at the truckstop to clean up, and are amazed at how nice they are. If every truckstop shower were like this, drivers would be in hog heaven.  Walking back to the rig, we notice that they even have a golf cart to haul cold and weary drivers from their rigs to the front door.  Now THAT's service!  It's refreshing in a major way to see a small place of business beat the crap out of the big chain stops.

We haul back into Dallas eager to finish business and get back home.  But as we change lanes in Dallas traffic, Blaine's path is suddenly cut off by a slower car.  He slams on the brakes, avoiding a collision, but we feel the load in the trailer shift.  Looking back in the rearview mirrors, we can see that there are now large bulges in the side of the trailer indicating that the drums have slammed into the walls and dented them outwards.  We can see that the trailer is no longer tracking straight and true, but is angled slightly to the right, indicating that the drums of chemical pesticide have scooted over and are now on one side of the trailer. [It's either that, or the brake lockup shifted the tandems slightly in their runners; at 42 feet from kingpin to tandem, it doesn't take much...]  Since the doors to the trailer have been sealed by the customer, we can only hope that the drums haven't begun leaking their contents onto traffic behind us.   Blaine is somewhat less than pleased by this turn of events, and vents his frustration.  By the time we pull into the consignee's yard at around 4:00 in the afternoon, Blaine has called his dispatcher and notified him of the potentially damaged freight.  Does it make a difference?  Probably not, since the receiving dock closes down at 1:00 pm anyway.   We look over the delivery plan on the Qualcomm, and are abashed to realize that it tells us of the limited delivery times in black and white.   Oops.  We missed that one.  So we haul the messed-up load of barrels of fertilizer back to the truckyard, and drop it.  Another tractor will drive it out to the consignee later, and we don't have to worry about it any more. [Unfortunately, I won't find out if there's a freight claim until it's far too late to do anything about it.] By the time we get home, we are both tired, grumpy, and ready to sit down in something that doesn't either smell of cigarette smoke or diesel fumes. 

I went to pick up the dogs while he stayed home and did the laundry, and was struck by several things.  First of all, I was overjoyed to remember that it is possible (and quite enjoyable!) to rev an engine over 1,800 rpm.  I was so used to hearing the gear changes in the rig that when I got into my car, I also shifted at 1,600 rpm for a couple of minutes.  Winding my car's engine up to 6,000 rpm was refreshing after hearing nothing but low-rpm grunt the past two weeks.  I also noticed that when you're driving a normal car after riding in something so large, the traffic lanes seem like they're 20 feet wide! Driving at 70 mph with your eyes 4 feet off the ground was a thrill, to say the least.  Later Blaine and I confessed to one another that much as we love each other, the time apart was refreshing as lemonade on a hot Texas summer's day.   You can't share the same 50 square feet of real estate for 13 days straight without getting a touch of cabin fever, I guess.  Miracle of it is, we not only came away from our two weeks together still speaking to each other, but closer than we were before.   I guess that says a lot, huh?

I'm not ever going to quit my day job to drive a truck.   It can be fun, and it's certainly an adventure, but I think the lack of a sleeping and eating schedule would drive me insane in short order.  It takes a certain type of person to be willing to give up "normal" life for weeks on end, and I'm not that type.  I like a schedule that (for the most part) doesn't change, and a bed that (for the most part) doesn't move.  I still miss Blaine when he's gone, but now I that I understand what his life on the road is like, I just have to close my eyes and imagine that I'm there with him, filling my mind's eye with pictures I stored up on our vacation.   Believe it or not, it helps.

Written by Scott, with Blaine's post-trip comments in italics.