In a while I’m going to go get in my Mack day cab and drive up to Oklahoma and get another load of sand. It’s a long drive but not too bad. Then I’ll back my pneumatic tanker up to a silo and blow the sand off and then do it all over again tomorrow. And no doubt somewhere along the road I’ll ask myself, as I do every day, “what the heck am I doing this for?” After all, I have a college degree, years of experience behind a desk. I could be sitting in a nice, air-conditioned office, working eight to five, but here I am, putting in fourteen-hour days.
At about four AM on a Monday morning as I was on my way to trucking school, February 1993 I spotted a herd of deer grazing on the highway. As I approached two of them panicked and jumped in front of my pickup. But the truck was still drivable and so I kept going after screwing my head light holder to the truck frame in a makeshift fashion. The idea I had as I drove towards NTCC was to get one of those new-fangled CDL’s and then go back home and get a job driving a delivery truck, for Pepsi or Coke or somebody. I remember pulling in the lot at the school around sunup, dragging an old pop-up camper, my pickup looking mangled and kind’a sad. I got out and stood staring at a row of sleeper cabs with 48-foot trailers. “Oh, Lord,” I muttered. “That’s what we’re training in?”
In the late fall of 1992 jobs were scarce in my little part of Texas and even with a college degree I hadn’t been able to find anything. Out of frustration I managed to scrape up financing for trucking school. So there I was on a cold February morning in 1993, staring at those huge trucks and thinking seriously about turning around and going home. But I didn’t. After a few days of classroom, the truck-driver-instructors stuck us in those big trucks and we started driving them in circles, in low gear, only in the yard. Then we moved up to running them in low range around a dirt road a few miles long which circled behind the school. Then, onto the highway after we got our learners’ permit. By then, I was hooked.
The school was a month long, fast paced, and I finished with high scores. Trucking companies sent recruiters and everyone who left the school went right to work. I chose to go to work for a “local” company, a small company, because it held the promise of getting me home more often. Yeah right. I graduated on an icy and cold Wednesday and on Friday I showed up at Oakridge Trucking Company. I learned a few quick lessons right away. One is that there’s almost always a war going on between dispatchers and drivers. The second is that it isn’t as far from East Texas to Mississippi as I thought. And the third is that some trucking companies care for one thing only: getting the load delivered on time.
“You’ll have to ride with someone else until your trainer gets back,” the dispatcher said. “Drop your bag there.” I stood beside the fence with my bag as the dispatcher walked across the yard to the fuel island where a driver stood fueling his truck. I couldn’t make out the conversation clearly but I heard parts it. The driver was yelling at the dispatcher, and he was stomping his foot and shaking his head. This didn’t look good. But the dispatcher came back and told me, “Juan will be ready in a little bit. Take your stuff to his truck.” With some hesitation I picked up my bag and walked toward the driver.
The driver was short, thin, Hispanic, and wore a huge cowboy hat. “Put your stuff in back and get in.” His voice was not kind. I obeyed. Within a half an hour I we were headed to Mississippi. I sat while Juan drove and talked. “I don’t like students. Students tear trucks up. They scare me. You just sit there. I’ll drive. This sucks.” After a while, though, Juan cooled off and then a bit later he decided to see if I could drive. When he discovered I could he crawled in the sleeper and I drove almost the entire trip myself. By the time we were back we were friends and he said, “you’re not so bad.” I took that as a tremendous compliment.
Bud, the man I’d be more or less living with for the next several weeks, was a big, burly guy. He huffed and puffed like a steam engine and his voice was always a grumble. I was now a student in Bud’s God-damned school of truck driving. Not since my days in Air Force Basic had I heard such a collection of words come out of someone’s mouth. Scratch a gear, “You’re going to tear up my God-damned transmission!” Get close to a telephone pole, “you’re going to hit that God-damned telephone pole!” But it wasn’t only me he cursed. It was the world, I think, that frustrated Bud. He cursed the trailer when we couldn’t get the wheels to slide. He cussed a “little Chinese guy,” actually a Vietnamese man, in Atlanta, because the man wanted us to put the trailer somewhere it would not go. But after a while I got to know Bud and discovered that underneath, he was a good man and was truly dedicated to making me good driver. Bud had a new truck, an International hood with a big sleeper. He never talked when he drove, he ate constantly from a cooler he kept stocked, and he smoked pack after pack of cigarettes. I don’t smoke so breathing was a challenge in his truck. When it was my turn to sleep, I’d close the curtains and open the tiny air vent and prop myself up against it.
But Bud was hard to take sometimes and his ranting got under my skin once too often so it was my turn to tell off the dispatcher and demand a truck for myself or another trainer or I was walking. I got another trainer. This time an exact opposite of Bud, an erstwhile preacher who chewed tobacco and talked philosophy and drove one of the “old” trucks, an ’86 model International cabover. This driver, Will, and I made a few odd runs with paper and then got stuck on a turn-around in Mississippi for nine days. After that we came back to the yard and I got my own truck. Sort ‘of.
Oakridge Trucking Company at the time had a diverse fleet of trucks. The veteran drivers were getting newer straight trucks and the trainees, like me, were being handed keys to old and dilapidated cabovers. When I was ready for my own truck I was told my assigned truck, 1305, was in the shop so I’d have to drive the “yard truck” for a few days. The yard truck was, like my assigned International and the one Will drove, a ragged, high-mile International with a straight seven-speed stick. It was a truck that wasn’t driven, it was herded. I made one short trip to Shreveport and then was off to Tennessee with a load of paper. I learned a few more lessons.
The first lesson was never stop at a scale house to use the restroom. It was a slow day at that Arkansas chicken coop and I obliged them by providing a truck to inspect. I had a few lights out and, alas, my bingo card had expired. They let me go with a warning on the bingo card and lights and sent me down the road to get the lights fixed. “We’ll check on you too, driver,” they said. I got the lights fixed. On to Tennessee. After I unloaded, I picked up a burger and fries at a little country store. Bad idea. Something wasn’t quite right about that burger and by the time I got back to the west-bound scales, the infamous Tennessee scales, I was feeling poorly. But the officers didn’t seem to care as they flagged me around and inspected my truck. Between the major work they required on my trailer and the fines for expired bingo cards Oakridge Trucking company was out about a grand. On across Arkansas I went, bouncing on that roughest of Interstates, I-30. I made quick stop in Hooks, Texas, for a bowl of soup and to kiss Texas soil. The waitress asked me if I was OK. I suppose I looked a bit ragged. Down the road to Greenville, I spent the night and woke up the next morning to discover I had a flat. When I finally rolled back into the yard from that first trip Oakridge Trucking was out something like $1500 and I was still reeling from the bad food. Welcome to Truck driving.
I then got the keys to 1305 and set out on a five-month odyssey. The truck could not have ridden rougher if it had been a buckboard with steel wheels. It had a bad habit of going dead when it climbed hills. It banged and rattled and there was always something not working. The temperature was 100 along Interstate 10 when my a/c decided to quit. “Bring it to the shop, we can’t afford to fix it on the road, air conditioning is not needed.” Right, I said, not needed. I picked up loads in cow pastures, hauled recyclables from the Orlando land fill, and bumped tiny little docks in places that my Dad and sometimes passenger could not believe could be bumped. There was the hazmat load I was sent to get in Atlanta. They loaded more kinds of stuff on my truck than I could imagine, over loaded it, unloaded it, started re-loading it, and when I saw that it was an illegal collection I called in and my boss said unload it again and I took off, having wasted a day there.
In Branson I had a trailer tire slide off the pavement while I was trying to keep 1305 running while climbing a steep grade and rounding a turn on a narrow street. The truck was loaded and 1305 didn’t have the power to pull the trailer out so I had to call a wrecker who promptly hooked his cable to my steering assembly and pulled the whole thing loose. Using two tow trucks and my engine we got the truck up the hill and out of traffic. Two days later, after the truck was repaired, I headed off with my load, riding the starter button all the way to Springfield as the engine would die on each uphill grade.
In August when I was returning from a weekend run to Mississippi. I pulled off I-20 in Shreveport, stopped at a stop light on 79, and then suddenly my RPM spun wildly and the truck would not go. In the street behind my truck lay my drive shaft and the rear of the transmission which had simply come apart because of age. I can’t imagine what would have happened if the shaft had fallen out half an hour earlier while I was tooling down the interstate full bore. My wife had been with me on this trip and she wasn’t happy. After sitting on the side of the road for fourteen hours waiting on the truck to be repaired, I drove it to the yard and gave them the keys. I no longer felt safe in it. Only a few weeks earlier the truck had hit its millionth mile.
Two weeks later I was a new driver for J. B. Hunt. And I was happy. I didn’t care what some drivers said about that company, it wasn’t true, and I had a nice, new cabover, a dispatcher who was actually friendly, and long-haul loads that didn’t involve cow pastures or land fills. After orientation in Houston, I went to DC, Baltimore, then up to Gary, Indiana and on to Green Bay. Then down to Chicago and from there to Lubbock and then California. No one was trying to push me past my logbook and I was making good money. And it looked as though I’d see my other half once in a blue moon. But my truck ran well, the bunk was huge, and the freight was all no-touch. From California it was back through Texas, picking up a load in Fort Worth and by home for a little while. I said goodbye to my wife on a soggy, wet morning and headed for Mississippi. The weather was crummy the entire way. At the Walmart warehouse where I was to deliver, I started out of my truck as I had done hundreds of times before. But my hand slipped off of the wet handle and I came falling down, shattering my knee as I hit the pavement. It kind’a hurt. My driving career came to a sudden and abrupt halt. At least for another seven years or so.