Milan, New Mexico

The last time i was in Milan, New Mexico was right after I got this truck and was headed to Memphis from Long Beach with a truck load of X-Boxes. It is different now. Lightly powdered in places with snow and COLD. Today was not so bad, high around 50 but then as night falls so too does the temperature. The low tonight looking to be right around 0. North of here in Alamosa, Colorado the low will be more on the order of 30 below.
Earlier today i got a flurry of messages on the qualcomm. First saying I should swap the load with a driver in Winslow, Arizona. Then that i should take it to its final destination in Ontario, California (which I would have liked as it would be a hell of a long load (about 2700 miles) and would take me through the New Years holiday thus avoiding any possible delays because of the holidays (it is hard to get loaded on a day when no one is working)). The nuts in Omaha finally decided that what they wanted me to do was take it to Phoenix, which is not so bad, a load of 2300 miles and to a somewhat warmer place but it does leave me with lot of time that will undoubtedly be killed on the first day of 2008.

From Oklahoma a fine, though long, somewhat boring and very light brown day. The early part in darkness since I left at 3:45, thinking, as i did then, that i was trying to get to Albuquerque by midday. The sunrise over the Texas panhandle was pleasant. the flat expanses, and eroded arroyos. Gradually the land gets (somehow) even more drawn out, more vast and desolate and you cross the invisible line into New Mexico. High mountains just before Albuquerque were dusted with snow and a strong wind out of the north all day tried to push me into the fast lane.
Some pictures:
Texas Panhandle













Grain Storage (the iPhone has an odd but sometimes appealing way of distorting the images taken from a moving truck) somewhere in Texas








snow in the mountains east of Albuquerque

Kelleyville, Oklahoma

I’m headed to Albuquerque with a load of beer and Bacardi based malt beverages. I picked them up at an Anheuser-Busch brewery in Baldwinsville, near Syracuse, New York. They are actually going to Anheuser-Busch in Ontario, California, east of L.A. Why on earth it would make sense to make beer in a brewery and then ship it to another brewery 2500 miles away while passing within sight of two other Anheuser-Busch breweries (Columbus and St. Louis) is a mystery to me.


Throughout southwestern Missouri and northeastern Oklahoma, where the Ozarks roll and rock outcroppings sprout stout trees, the woods looked not quite right. The trees had no grace. They looked black and burned. But not burned, everything around them was fine. And then it occurred to me that a few weeks ago a vicious ice storm had rolled through here coating everything with an (apparently) astonishing amount of ice. The trees were all broken off, mostly at the tops, sometimes larger lower branches. The damage was impressively widespread. If I recall correctly the ice storm was followed by high winds and I guess that did it.



A nice walk down a country road at sunset, the sky fading from orange yellow to deep blue and silhouetting powerlines, ranch gates and broken trees quite picturesquely.

Memphis, Tennessee

Again I have come into the south. I suppose It was in Arkansas. I just don’t think of Missouri as the south. So it must be Arkansas. The signs here are things like Cotton Fields, Pine trees, brown grass, pale brown dirt, black folks.

In southern Illinois the southernmost city is called Cairo (which is pronounced Kay-ro) and is in the marshy confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi river which for some reason is called “Little Egypt.” Cairo, I have learned, thanks to Wikipedia, is further south than Richmond, Virginia and is equidistant from Chicago and Jackson, Mississippi. So this question of where the south begins is such a tricky one. Above is the Mississippi River at Cairo

Down around Memphis this area is really called the mid-south, a good melding of the Midwest and the south. It seems like both and the change from the plains of the Midwest to the plains of the south is really only one of climate and vegetation.

South of Memphis in Mississippi in the area erroneously called The Mississippi Delta I felt like I was really in a place. The Delta is technically an alluvial plain between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. It is mercilessly flat and full of fertile soil growing mostly cotton. This is the great spooky empty poor south of blues music. The place where Robert Johnson legend has it traded his immortal soul to the devil so that he might be the king of delta blues in this life. What a legend. I put the satellite radio onto the blues channel.
North of Drew I passed the large gate and dry grass of the Mississippi State Penitentiary. In the yard two men in black and white striped jump suits picked up trash. No kidding. I was in “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?”
I delivered the cans to a warehouse in Drew. Not the cannery. Just a storage warehouse. The air was perfectly silent all I could hear was my feet on the concrete. Inside was a single black man, a forklift and millions of tin cans stacked 20 feet to the ceiling filling the whole of the space. How many trucks worth?
My next load had two pickups and two drops. Pickup one in Memphis and #2 in Tupelo, Mississippi and drops at K-Mart DCs in Pennsylvania. I headed up to Memphis and spent the night at a pilot a mile up the road from Hamilton Beach where I would pick up in the morning.

Ina, Illinois

Once in Merrillville i delivered my salt to the Lowes and was delighted to find a Costco in the adjacent lot. I am very nearly evangelical about the merits of Costco. not being a big fan of big box stores i suppose i am pleased to find one that seems to be doing it more or less right(er).

My next load was a pick up in Milwaukee and a delivery to Drew, Mississippi. I had an extra day in there and it was supposed to snow buckets so I knew that i would be able to stop and see my chicago friends again.

I headed up to Milwaukee in the midst of Chicago's "rush hour" (roughly 6am to 8pm Monday through friday) and spent the night south of Milwaukee. The next morning snow was falling lightly as i drove up to the Ball Corporation on the north side of Milwaukee. These streets, these were made for trucks, hugely wide with big corners and easy to read signs well in advance. I learned to drive trucks in Wisconsin (green bay) and it is generally a joy to drive in this state which, regardless, is one of my favorites. the load was tin cans headed to Allen Canning who can things that southerners like (such as greens and black eyed peas) Then down into Illinois where I parked at the little Speedway Station on California and 35th which has only about 8 parking spaces and is closest to public transit, the best place to park when i am in Chicago and I have a trailer (if I don't i just park on he street) This place is my secret, if too many people find out about it i will not be able to park here so please keep it on the DL.

The next day I didn't get back to the truck until 1pm which was fine as i had plenty of time. I headed south down I-57 which I think is a bit of a neglected road as the plowing in spots was shitty. There were also a lot of spots fully open to large fields to the west from which snow drifted veil like over the road.

Catlettsburg, Kentucky

From Hampton Roads it was over to Branchville, VA where I was to pick up a load headed to Merrillville, Indiana (which could be said to be in the “Chicagoland” area, a term I find somewhat irritating for reasons probably relating to this girl I knew my freshman year whowas irritating and, when asked where she was from would reply “oh, the chicaaagoleeand eareea” in an irritating chicagoland accent.) I did not get over to Branchville until after dark and it was a challenge finding the place where I was supposed to go for three reasons. A.) no directions were provided. B.) The place was basically a grain elevator and C.) it was closed. (oh yeah and D.) it wasn’t the right location.)
Turns out that this location was the main office (which was somewhat difficult to believe) but that the pick up location was about 12 miles north in the town of Courtland. Three other drivers had shown up in the hour since I first arrived. One of them somehow managed to figure out this actual location and, because I was out of hours, I went there the next morning. This correct location was merely a larger complex of grain elevators.
I was pretty irritated that Werner had given me the wrong pickup address and didn't seem to know what the fuck was going on in general as far as this load was concerned. But here I figured out why.
The Shipper was Meherrin Fertilizer Inc. and their main business was mixing fertilizers and also mixing IceMelt (a mixture of salt, potash and a nonslip texture addititve.) Up to this point Werner had never done any shipping for them but Lowes (the home improvement chain) had called up Meherrin and said they would buy all the icemelt they could sell them or their stores in the upper midwest who were, you might recall, getting slammed by early season ice and snow storms. Virginia had not had any significant ice or snow in the last couple years and so had stores of this stuff. Werner does a lot of the shipping for Lowes and so off they sent us to pick up some ice melt. The other guys were going to locations in Michigan and I to Merillville.
Turns out they didn't even have enough product at this Courtland location to fill all 4 trucks and so I followed a truck load of african american fellows up to Sedley, an even smaller town about 15 miles away over roads that really were not built for semi traffic. Another grain elevator (well let's be accurate, there is no grain, all fertilizer and salt) and I bakced into this "dock" uneven and very much more grassy than your average Wal*Mart dock.
While four young guys stacked bags on pallets two older black guys bickered about how best to load the trailer for proper weight distribution. This resultled in the partial loading and unloading of the trailer at least twice which, at this point, was getting obnoxious. Meanwhile two fat old white men stood around and watched everyone else work and the whole scene felt strangely anachronistic.

Finally I was loaded and off I went through Petersburg and Lynchburg over the rolling hills of the Piedmont and gradually those hills grew taller and became the appalachians and I was in Roanoke. Then into West Virginia to Beckley and Charleston at sunset and as much rush hour as they could muster. then in the darkness into Kentucky, skirting the Ohio River and coming to a rest at a Flying J where I took a shower for the first time in some time.

Hampton Roads, VA

A journey across a 17 mile bridge! To Chicago (Again!) Into the Deep South and surfacing again!
all in this post.
And (all new, all color) pictures!

When last I left you I was at the bottom of Maryland's Eastern Shore in Pocomoke City after which I continued down the DelMarVa into the Va, a long skinny water riddled spit of land buffered between the wide Chesapeake Bay and the (somewhat wider) Atlantic Ocean. To the left is an image of the peninsula the skinniest part of it is the Virginia part of the DelMarVa. To the left is the Chesapeake Bay and to the right is the Atlantic and further north the Delaware Bay and the peninsula of Southern Jersey



At Cape Charles, the tip of this land people once figured there ought to be a fixed crossing to the Virginia mainland to the conurbanation known as Hampton Roads (the cities of Norfolk, Newport News, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Suffolk etc... did you know that Virginia Beach is the most populous city in Virginia?). The problem with a fixed crossing woud be the rough seas at the mouth of the bay and the fact that the distance between the two lands is over 17 miles. No worries a bridge was planned with mostly causeway and a few high sections to allow large boats to pass up the bay to Baltimore and into the Hampton Roads area, a big Naval and shipping center.

The navy wasn't keen on the idea of span that, by accident or malicious intent, could fall thus blocking the entrance and exit to this strategic point. The solution was to make one high truss at the northern end of the crossing and two tunnels beneath the main shipping channels between other sections of causeway. The passage over this bridge is an exceptionally bizzare experience. It is odd enough to be on the center of a bridge from which, on a day with even slight haze, no firm land can be seen but then the bridge just sort of dives beneath the water and then, about a mile later, resurfaces. Madness. You can see the point at which the bridge becomes a tunnel to the left.

I crossed the bridge and found the first Office Max in Virginia Beach where it took FOR-EVER to unload and which the manager, a lady later blamed on the fact that the unloading was being done by a man. While I was waiting I saw a door lying next to a dumpster. A nice solid door. I figured, Hey, I'm building a bakery, It will probably need doors and leaving this door here on the pavement would be tantamount to leaving a hundred dollar bill (at least) on the pavement when clearly no one else wanted it. So I wrestled it into the truck where It still is and will be until I get home.

The unloading at the second OfficeMax in Chesapeake went much more smoothly and before long I was on my way.

Pocomoke City, Maryland

It is a favorite topic of conversation, where does one region stop and another begin? When does the East Coast become Appalachia become the Midwest become the Great Plains become the Rocky Mountains become the Cascades become the West Coast? All the way across the country, vast changes in landscape and no clear idea when one becomes the other. (some are easier than others. It is very obvious, when at the Denver International Airport, where the Plains become the Rockies.)

Perhaps the most pondered division is that between “The North” and “The South.” When I hopped down from the cab today parked in the Wal*Mart parking lot in Pocomoke City, Maryland, the mild air scented with pines and paper, I knew that I had definitely crossed into the South.

I picked up this load, office products destined for two OfficeMax stores in the Norfolk, VA area, from the DC in Hazleton, PA. That was in the north. What changed? When did it happen?

I drove down the DelMarVa peninsula, an odd appendage on the east coast like a hand pointing south, comprised of parts of Maryland, Delaware and Virginia, separated from the “mainland” by the Chesapeake Bay. It is on this peninsula that 27 years ago I was born and where I lived until I went to college in the, not separated from any sort of mainland, Midwest. It is easier to take this dividing of North and South one area at a time so lets look at the DelMarVa.

An easy, although false feeling, answer is that the line is the northern and eastern border of Maryland, i.e. the The Mason-Dixon Line which separates Maryland from Pennsylvania to the north and Delaware to the east. Today I traveled south through Delaware on DE-1 and US-13. Near Wilmington in the north it felt like “The North” the land rolls with rocky outcroppings and vibrant fall foliage. It can look a lot like New England (Many people think that the movie “Dead Poets Society” was filmed at a New England boarding school but, indeed, it was shot almost entirely in northern Delaware) But in the extremely flat southernmost county (Sussex) you will find loblolly pines, enormous chicken farms (Purdue) and the northernmost cypress swamp in the country. That feels pretty southern to me.

I suppose where these lines exist depends on what sort of geographical or social markers you look for. Where you begin to find these markers you will say “here we are.” Take this for example: I had a teacher in high school who was originally from Egypt. She had gone to college in the US and lived here for quite a while. She and her husband were returning to Delaware from New York City when, after surfacing in New Jersey from the Lincoln Tunnel, she said to her husband “The south really does feel different.” I don’t know what her markers for what made the south were but apparently there they were, somewhere between the meadowlands and oil refineries of northern New Jersey.

Youngstown, OH

There are some trucking companies that try to attract drivers with the line "No NYC! No New England!"
There is a good reason for this. Of the places in America to drive a 70+ foot vehicle, the older parts,
the parts that, when built, could not have seen the need for streets and intersections open enough
for semis are, generally, not places where driving a semi is "easy." There is also a lot of traffic.

I picked up this load of Armored Cable in New Bedford, MA. which, down in the southeast corner of the state
along with Fall River, is sort of a forgotten niche of the state. It isn't boston, it isn't the cape, it isn't even Rhode Island
for god's sake. I trucked it just into Rhode Island and bedded down at a truck stop outside of West Warwick (or just outside
of Providence as everything in Rhode Island is) This truck stop billed itself as, yea indeed was called, "Rhode
Island's only 24 hour Auto and Truck Plaza" which seems a lot wordier than, say, "Pilot."
One of the real bitches about east coast and more urban truckstops is that they often charge for parking.
This is some real crap. It wouldn't be, I suppose, if every truck stop charged money, but well over 90% of them do not
and so, those that do really seem like they are ripping you off. Especially if they are in crappy little rhode island.

Across Connecticut the next morning traffic surged and slowed as it was pumped through the congested arteries
in New Have, Bridgeport and Stamford then into New York, across Westchester County, things opening up, down into New Jersey and through the Delaware Water Gap into Pennsylvania and woosh, to Ohio.

As you leave the east coast the traffic opens up ,the landscape opens up, everything seems to start to take deeper breaths
and you too take deeper breaths and life is good again because you are not on the east coast anymore.
Continuing on this breathing gets deeper and wider all the way to the rockies and then again opens up
and then over the cascades or sierra nevada before your breath comes back tight in your chest in seattle or san francisco
or los angeles, but in the spaces between, its not so bad.

The snow here is letting up, and I ought to get on the road and over to chicago before too long.

Roanoke, Virginia

They will not get me off the effing east coast! I told my dispatcher, or “Fleet Manager” as Werner calls them (which is better than Schneider who called them “STL” or ”Service Team Leader” (When did business become so enamored of stupid euphemisms. They always seem to conceal something.) anyway, I told my dispatcher that I would stay out on the road for 5 weeks in order to save up days that I could take off for Christmas. Technically I can do whatever I want since I am a “contractor” but I do want to have some money. So anyway I also asked my dispatcher if I could get west sine I would be out for so long. But no. This time out I have just barely gotten west of the Mississippi (at the brewery in St. Louis, about 500 yds from the river) And since then I have been really east coasting it up.
From Lebanon, PA I went to Chambersburg, PA to pick up K-Mart clothes to take to a DC in Greensboro, North Carolina and from there I deadheaded (no trailer) to New Concord, Ohio (Deadheaded! That was more than 370 miles! wtf) where I picked up Colgate/Palmolive products and took them to another Colgate/Palmolive place in Trenton, NJ and from there it was up to Carteret, NJ to pick up some import merchandise headed to a Lowe’s DC in eastern Connecticut and from there another long deadhead to Syracuse, NY to pick up cast fittings for electrical installation (like the things that hold conduit in circuit boxes) at Cooper/ Crouse-Hinds going to one of their DCs in Roanoke, Virginia where, as you can see from the title, I am now. I’m at a TA by I-81. I’m waiting. It’s Sunday. I also only have 1.5 hours left on my 80 for tomorrow (and 5.5 left today) so I am not really in a hurry.
SO… I want to answer some of your questions. A long while back a reader of my blog posted the following:
“I'd love for you to write more about WHY you're trucking -- of all the things you could do and have studied to do, why have you gone back to this? Is it the money/ease equation? Do you like driving? Can you see yourself doing this forever? What does your family think?”
First a little background. This poster and I went to college together so she knows a few things that a reader of this blog who I do not know would not know. (isn’t that cute, he thinks there are people reading this who he doesn’t know!)
I went to Grinnell College in Iowa which is a well respected (expensive) school. Very few of the graduates of Grinnell have probably worked as truckers, for whatever reason. I also went to a private boarding high school and come from an upper middle class family. What I am trying to say without seeming like too much of a turd is I am overeducated and not in the demographic that people usually associate with trucking. Note: “That people usually associate with trucking”, I have met truckers from all over the socio-economic spectrum. So, without further ado, here are the answers to your questions, Hillary:

Let’s start with the first time I started trucking, as I think I covered in the first post. After graduating from college I was looking for a job. I was having a lot of trouble with this. I thought, perhaps because it is a line I have been fed since birth “get a college degree and you can do anything” I thought I could do anything. Now I know that I could do anything, the tricky part is convincing others of this. I have never been a good salesman, especially for myself, since this seems unnecessarily immodest. But more than that I think there has been a sort of sea change since the 90s. A change that created an overly zealous job market in which employers needed false affirmation that you could do a job and have commitment and all the skills and prerequisite experience before hand rather than believe that an intelligent person could easily learn any job.
So I got fed up with this bullshit and went for a job that a.) I definitely didn’t know how to do but b.) someone (Schneider in this case) was eagerly willing to teach me. I liked this. They believed that I (or just about any non-felon who could pass a drug test) could learn this job, a job, I think, that requires a lot more specific and difficult skill set than telemarketing or some other crappy cubicle job. At that point, when I first started driving, I needed a job. I had bills (especially college loans) that needed to be paid. I also have always enjoyed driving and figured I could manage the “workload.” It also certainly had the allure of being “exotic.” Something that I saw all around me but knew almost nothing about. (a reason I think people enjoy reading this blog.)
But then I left. I left because I was bored. I left because I thought I could get a job doing something in “the industry” in LA (I graduated from college with a degree in theatre design, technical stuff like lighting and set design and construction) again, overzealous job market based heavily on having previous experience, usually experience that does not pay, which was not an option, and based, in LA, maybe more than anywhere, on who you know. I left also because I thought trucking was killing me. I was out of shape and did not feel “well.” I blamed trucking but really it was me, I was not eating well and I was not exercising, at all. (this time around I am doing better on this front.)
I came back to trucking this time around because I figured out what I want to do with my life (well, at least part of my life). I decided to build a brick oven and open a small bakery. In order to do this I needed to make some money. Money to pay off debt (student loans, and credit card debt that I accrued mostly while living in LA and Olympia with little or no employment income) and money to build this oven. The job that I had, working at an outdoor school, I liked but paid terribly and so I went back to something I knew would make me a fair amount of money. An especially fair amount of money considering I am single and have no housing expenses. (I get my mail at my parents house and split my time off, every other weekend, max) between Chicago and my parents’ home in Maryland. If you would like to follow the progress of this oven project I have started another blog, find it in the sidebar or on my profile page. (keep in mind I can only work on this project when I am home, once a month or so, so that blog will be updated even less frequently than this one.)
So that’s why I am doing this now, money.
As I said above, I do like driving. There are probably other jobs I could have gotten that pay more or less the same. But driving jobs are easy to get, and there is no “boss” not on that is present at least. It gives me a lot of time to think and read and write (like this excessively long entry) I get to see places and become more familiar with this fascinating industry. That being said it is not something I want to do forever, or even more than a year or two, and in that respect it is better this time around since I have a goal. It is a means to an end. And so I can not see myself doing this forever.
My parents don’t mind at all. They are open minded folks and they too know it is a means to an end. That being said, if trucking was something I wanted to do for a while or forever and it made me happy, they would be all for it.
I hope this answers these questions. If anyone else has any other questions please post them as comments to this post. Anything at all from basic trucking “logistics” to the great metaphysical matters that I consider while cruising across Kansas on I-70.
Additionally I invite any of my friends who have the time and inclination to come with me on the road. (this offer is only open to people I know, and even then not everyone :) Details: you would have to have no plans for at least 2 weeks. The only cost is that of food and any other miscellaneous expenses that you incur. Fuel and "lodging" (there are 2 beds in the cab) are obviously taken care of.

Lebanon, Pennsylvania

I am here at Valspar, a company that makes varnish and the like, with a load of plastic cans/buckets from Central Can Company in Chicago, a shipper that was indeed my first load when I started driving a truck for Schneider way back in October of 2004. That load was full of buckets that were labeled for holding Calcium Carbide a “dangerous when wet” substance. Apparently it gets all exothermic and places that melt down scrap metal throw the buckets whole into the glowing vats to increase the temperature and speed up the process, at least that’s what some dude a the carbide place in Kentucky where I delivered said cans told me.
Toady I rumbled along the Ohio and Pennsylvania turnpikes for the umpteenth time having come across the Indiana one the day before. I read somewhere that there was an early plan to connect New York and Chicago with toll roads. Now the intent probably wasn’t to charge people a lot of money as much as it was to connect the two cities with multilane limited access highways and the early versions of these were, in fact, all toll roads. (The completion dates of the roads in question: The New Jersey Turnpike, Pennsylvania Turnpike, Ohio Turnpike, Indiana Toll Road and Chicago Skyway are 1951, 1940, 1955, 1956, and 1958. (The Interstate system wasn’t even authorized until 1956 and not completed until 1991, although, technically, there are still some parts of the original plans that haven’t been built.)) The cost for a car to travel from New York City to Chicago (including the toll on the George Washington Bridge and the bridge crossing the Delaware River) would be $53.15. The same distance in a truck would cost $241.20. The bulk of both is the damn Pennsylvania turnpike which charges trucks $142.00 for 359 miles of tight, hilly, congested, poorly paved road, or six hours of delightful mountain scenery, depending on how you want to see it.
Prior to loading these cans I had Some Beer from Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis that I picked up after the Fruit2O delivery across the River in Granite City. I took that up to Arlington Heights on the northwest side of Chicago where I swapped it at the distributor where I was supposed to deliver it with a guy who was out of hours to deliver his load in nearby Morton Grove, a load of Potato Chips. With our powers combined what a party it could have been.
When I showed up at Anheuser-Busch they told me the load would not be ready until 10pm (13 hours from then) and so I settled in and got some work done and wondered what I could do. Although the day was cold and rainy Downtown St. Louis was only about a 2 mile walk up the street and though I have been through the city a number of times I have never seen what was there, nor indeed ever exited the vehicle in which I was traveling. I figured I needed to do what everyone should do in St. Louis. See the arch!
If you are searching for far and away the weirdest thing that the National Park Service has to offer, visiting the Arch would be it. Did you know you can travel to the top in a sort of elevator type thing?! Neither did I. So Weird! This elevator thing is completely bizzaro-world and really looks in all ways like something cast off from the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Check it out on Wikipedia.
Seriously though, all thoughts of imperialist manifest destiny and Indian genocide aside, the arch is a beautiful monument to the inexorable westward movement of European settlement in the north American continent and an engineering marvel.

Granite City, Illinois

Here I am in what they call the American Bottom. I has something to do with being down here in the flood plain of the Mississippi, a flat low area and a great miserable metaphor for the hell on earth that is East St. Louis a place where apparently, at least at one time, there were no manhole covers because the wretchedly indigent population had taken them to sell for scrap metal and the town government had not the time and or the inclination to replace them. They apparently created a bit of a driving hazard.
The beautiful capricious nature of freight left me with this load, a great truck full of Fruit2O, one of a collection of water/juice drinks popular these days (Sobe’s Life Water, Vitamin Water, etc…) probably because they are, presumably, low(er) in calories and higher in vitamins and shit and loved by producers because they are mostly of their cheapest ingredient, water. Well maybe their 2nd cheapest ingredient (after corn syrup). The load is from Kraft in Ayer, Massachusetts which I picked up on the 21st and wasn’t due here in “the bottoms” until tomorrow (the 25th) morning. So I got to spend the thanksgiving holiday with my friends in Boston (Somerville to be precise). I parked the truck at a medium size (enormous size in New England terms) truckstop and biked in the very misty foggy morning to the commuter rail station at Grafton.
The ride in was uneventful through a thick and persistent fog which outlined the skeletons of birch and maple and aspen in a breathy silence and out of which I thoroughly expected Squanto and the Pilgrims to emerge with turkeys and fish (to bury with the corn of course). Suddenly spindly treed wood dotted with pleasant houses and Volvos give way to something that looks like a suburb, but not in a way that anyone who wasn’t familiar with the east coat would understand.
Dinner was lovely as were drinks at the bar afterwards with another friend and a bartendress who invited us to enjoy pies and (what must have been room temperature) shrimp laid out on one table the thought of which, on such a full stomach, was gross. She also chided us because “ya like haaff myage and ya fahkin sittin theyah, get up and have some fun.” Or something like that but definitely with the accent which is almost as hard to phoneticize as it is to replicate.
I woke up early and then went back to bed and then woke up again, still early but not as much as before and biked in what had become a bitingly brisk morning up beacon to the Porter Square stop in the red line and shuttled into South Station hearing Eliot Smith and pretending to be Matt Damon as the train arced over the Charles. The ride out on the Framingham/ Worcester line was quicker since it skipped all the stops from Yawkey (the Boston equivalent of “nasty”) to the 30 or so stops that have Wellesley in their name.
Then another brisk ride up to the truck and I was off. Thick traffic on I-84, everybody was going to the mall. Through the Poconos (not mountains I recently found out, but a deeply dissected (by rivers) plateau, which, when you look at it makes sense and also explains why the place is so creepy.) Across Pennsylvania, a bit of snow glittering in the headlights and finally into Ohio and coming to a rest near Seville. Nearby there is a town called “Barberton” and I wonder if there is the same sort of ridiculousness going on here as there is southwest of Chicago in Joliet and Romeoville.
This morning it was cold. Winter is here (along with Christmas carols and unbridled spending). Through the rest of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois. Nothing new here. Settling into a groove, appreciating the Saturday line up on NPR.

Seneca Falls, NY

That was the shittiest shower ever. The room was very cold. The pressure was terrible.
(and that is as far as I got in Seneca Falls)

Port Wentworth, Georgia

This happens sometimes.
Nothing.

I made delivery of the Washers and Dryers this morning. A jam packed lot. Four other trucks waiting at the gate when I arrived. Eventually I managed to wedge the trailer in between another and a container dropped it and grabbed a shitty old empty from the other side of the lot. New trailers begin with the number 3. The older ones begin with 4, 6 or 9 this one begins with a 9. Old trailers are fine in almost any respect except for the tandems. These are the wheels on the back of the trailer and as you should know by now, they slide back and forth and lock into place in order to redistribute weight on each set of axles. In order to unlock the wheels and slide them you go back to the wheels and reach under the trailer and pull a rod that retracts four 1.5" bolts that lock the tandems into a track on the underside of the trailer. On newer trailers the bolts are attached to the retracting mechanism by a spring so you can pull out the handle, lock it into place and then when you begin the sliding process the bolts will snap back out of the track allowing the tandems to move freely. On old trailers the bolts are more directly connected to the release rod so when you pull the rod, if the bolts are jammed in the track the rod won't budge and you have to either move the truck just enough to get the bolts into the right place relative to the track that they will not bind. Or you can pull the rod out as far as you can, put a visegrips on it and pound (with a hammer) on the bolts until they retract. There is also a sort of puller that is made to apply mechanical advantage to the situation but when those bitches are stuck they are stuck.
And that is why you try to find new trailers. (did that make any sense)
So I got this crappy old 9 trailer and got out of there and went up the road about 6 miles to a Pilot on the edge of I-95 and the Savannah River that separates Georiga from South Carolina. That was at 9:00am.
Presently it is 7:54pm and I am sitting here in the same space. It seems that Savannah is a port but not a producer. Lots of trucks coming in, not a lot going out.
I get frustrated at times but mostly it is just one of those things you can's really do anything about and so it goes.
I've been listening to a lot of NPR, more perhaps even than usual. I typed this. I added the other entries that I wrote yesterday and the day before. i took a shower. I've read. I bought two gallons of water. (BTW this drought in Georgia is no joke, I don't even care that Sonny Purdue wants to have a rain prayer session at the capital, these fools need some rain. The ground is so dry its white and i passed a lake yesterday whose docks were high and dry up on the reddish margins of the water where the lake had long since receded. Madness.
I look forward to getting out of here. Anywhere. It doesn't matter. Shit, I'd even go to Florida.

Richmond Hill, Georgia

Everything

My nasty ass I’da ripped him up.

Uh huh

An be sure you didn’t get caught.

Ha, whew, hey Laurence you know…

Right, I’m in the…

You fuckin with em nasty

(a roll of laughter)

Oh man.

Bitch was doin shit all night,
He’s sittin’ there at the kitchen table all cryin’ and shit
He aint even looking at me just got his face in his hands

Do I really give a fuck at all, really.

You got me bro.
You know what I’m saying.
My moms a whore, ha.
You know what I mean.
I seen him out at the bar and shit.

(a high pitch cackle)

I made your sisters fall out.

I’m talking about bitches I, I used to fuck.
Sisters and cousins.

The above, snippets of a conversation of the mechanics overheard while I was getting a PM (preventative maintenance i.e. oil change) I didn’t catch all of it and I didn’t type it out because I thought it was exceptional in any way. It was just something to do.
I’m in Georgia. Richmond Hill to be exact. South of Savannah. I came down here because I needed to get a PM and a front end alignment. They don’t do front end alignments here and so the PM is all I get.
I have this load that was supposed to be delivered at midnight however the guard at the warehouse said people don’t show up at the Electrolux part of the facility until 6am and I should probably come back at 8am. Way to go Werner with that well made appointment.
The warehouse is in Port Wentworth on the northwest side of Savannah. In a rundown (very southern) part of town with narrow roads, deep ditches, and tight lots jam packed with trailers and containers. I would guess that it is the destiny of these washers and dryers in my truck to be put in a container and given a fine cruise to Europe. Electrolux after all is a European brand. Design it in Europe, build it in Iowa, truck it to Georgia, ship it to Europe. The logic of this system fails me still. Sometimes I wish I could get together a team of people who would look at where everything is made and reorganize the whole goddamn mess so that things were made near the source of their materials and near the place of their sale/use. The increase in efficiency would blow everyone’s mind but truckers would get all pissed off cause all of a sudden there would be many fewer jobs in this area. But we humans are so terrible at seeing the forest for the trees especially when the trees are ourselves.
When I open my bakery I hope to buy local wheat and sell bread to local people. I have no desire to sell bread outside even of Kent County, Maryland. If people in other states or counties want bread baked in small batches in a wood fired brick oven someone is going to have to build that oven and bake that bread but it won’t be me. Maybe I’ll help start it up. I don’t hate money.
It is always so nice to be in the south in the colder months. The surprise of stepping out of the truck and not being bitten in the face by the wind is lovely, like a hundred first days of spring. The traffic southbound on I-75 from Chattanooga through Atlanta all the way to Macon was heavy. Lots of Cadillacs moving slowly toward Florida. At Macon I veered slightly east onto I-16 possibly some of the dullest road in the country. From Macon to Savannah 165 miles of nothing but pine trees. I really dislike driving in the inland south because you can’t see anything. Nothing but dry scraggly loblolly pines. Nothing like the lush evergreens of the northwest. Driving near the gulf is not so bad. I-95 in Georgia is close enough to the Atlantic, with its wide estuarine marshiness, as to be interesting. The southern Appalachians are great. But these fucking pine trees. They feel so empty.
And then there is the smell. The paper mill smell, overcooked broccoli and something metallic, chemical, carcinogenic. Maine smells like this, Louisiana, Washington, but each place is a little different, each place is cooking different trees into Copier Paper.
It’s a nice clear night, a low in the high forties, fresh oil in the crankcase.

Morton's Gap, Kentucky

A fine enough day, I awoke this morning at 5:30 restless and unable to sleep thanks to some odd, pleasant but unsettling dreams (hmmm). The night was spent in Webster City after picking up some washers and dryers from the Electrolux plant here. It seems that Iowa has a monopoly on appliance assembly. (Maytag and Amana are/were also located here). I had hoped, last night, to pick up that load quickly and jaunt down to Grinnell, where I went to college to visit a friend who is still living there but this was not to be and I spent a nice long time at Electrolux and when I was finished drove only down to the edge of town on US-20 and parked for the night.
This morning I drove from Webster City, Iowa to Altoona, near Des Moines, where I stopped at the Bossellman travel center to look clean for breakfast with my Grinnell friend, which was a sort of consolation prize for not getting to spend the evening. Breakfast was fine at the A&M, a place that tries for bizarre roadfood-esque ambiance but the effect is a bit too odd and a little creepy. I had some biscuits and gravy which, despite being a bit overly viscous were tasty and certainly filing. The food tasted better than I remember likely because I was not miserably hungover. It was also cheeeeep and I was reminded, and astounded by the thought, of how little money I must have had in college. I had parked down by the interstate at a new Kum and Go (the actual name of a Midwestern gas/convenience store) which had some truck parking. Grinnell is about 3 miles north of the interstate so I biked into town imagining that I must have been crazy to do this, as I often did, up a 4 lane 55mph road with only a loose gravel shoulder. There was, on the way, a big new Wal-mart super center, directly across from where the old, tiny (not super) Wal-Mart used to be. My dad loved the old walmart because it was small and he thought perfectly adequate (this being relevant because Chestertown, where I grew up, had been fighting the installation of a large Wal-mart store at the time, a historical footnote: we won.) But clearly it was not an adequate walmart and the nearest existing super center in Newton, a ghastly 16 miles down US-6 was much too far away. That 16 miles, by the way, is some of the prettiest Iowa road you’ll find, bumpy, but pretty.
So back to the truck I biked, into the wind this time and with a belly full of biscuits and gravy sludge and the ride was not as fun. Then it was out across the prairie and down to my present stop, Mortons Gap, Kentucky with only a short 10 minute rest stop break on I-57 north of Mattoon, Illinois.
Just south of Mattoon I left the interstate to avoid the absurd westward bend I-57 takes and headed south on little roads through Newton, Olney, Albion and Greyville, hopped onto I-64 east and then US-41 south through Evansville, Indiana and into Kentucky. Originally the border of these two states must have been the Ohio River but over time, it seems, rivers change course (who knew?) but state lines do not and so, before crossing the river you cross the state line into a little sliver of Kentucky where the river once was. Throughout the Ohio and Mississppi river systems wherever the river makes up the border of the states (which is pretty much everywhere out here) you will find these little anomalies, look at a map of southern Illinois or Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana, its ridiculous.
Mortons Gap is nice enough, just a truckstop on the Edward T. Breathitt Pennyrile Parkway. Kentucky has this extensive system of Parkways. Apparently the Interstate system was not going to meet their needs, so they built a bunch of toll roads but it was written into the rules that once tolls had been collected enough to pay for the construction of the roads they would become freeways. And so they have. Edward T. Breathitt was a Kentucky politician who was a big civil rights supporter. He was born in Hopkinsville, where this road terminates ergo the dedication. Pennyrile is another name for Pennyroyal, an herb in the mint family known for its use in folk medicine as it contains a toxin that can stimulate abortions. This may be familiar to some readers aware of Nirvana’s song “Pennyroyal Tea” from the In Utero album. I suppose that this is a plant that grows round these parts.
Anyway, these Washers and Dryers are destined for Port Wentworth, Georgia, near Savannah where hopefully I will be tomorrow, where hopefully it will be pleasant sleeping as the last few nights have been a might chilly, and being, as I am, someone not inclined to burn up yet more diesel fuel just to stay warm, so hopefully I can ward off the apocalypse for another hour or two.

Sparta, WI

I’m pretty sure that the only thing on tv anywhere anymore is Two and a Half Men, which is total, unbelievable garbage.
In Wisconsin the all leaves have fallen off the trees and it looks very much like winter as I guess it must in November, most certainly in the upper Midwest. What is it about Wisconsin that I like so much. I think it sort of feels cozy, on a geographical level. It’s sort of jammed up in this cozy little corner between lake Michigan, Lake Superior and the UP. It has some of the vastness of the Midwest. But a bit more roll to the land. A few more trees in the south and then the thick northwoods. It is sort of a combination of New England and the Midwest. Besides the cheeses are unbeatable. Forgive me if I have related this before but here goes:
In college I got tired of driving through Ohio and Indiana (from Maryland to Iowa and back). At the end of one summer I decided to drive back to Iowa via Canada. I drove up through New York and Vermont. Through Montreal and into Ontario skirting along what felt like the far north of Ontario through North Bay, Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie (really this is in the southernmost third of the province.) Then I came down through the UP and Wisconsin. Along with me on this trip I brought a cooler and en route filled it with cheeses. Delicious Cheeses. Vermont has many fine Cheddars (almost exclusively cheddars along with some goat and sheep cheeses and something called Crowley which, with all due respect, is like boring cheddar) but Wisconsin has a wider variety of cheeses. Many Swiss style cheeses (especially in the southwestern part of the state) many fine cheddars, many German cheeses (including the only factory in the US still making Limburger, a surface ripened repulsive smelling, mild tasting variety), and a lot of big industrial cheese factories. In short a more varied and, in my opinion, totally more awesome cheese state. Wisconsin doesn’t have that obnoxious new England arrogance or accent either. (some people don’t like the upper Midwest accent. I find it sort of homey and in some cases perhaps even attractive.)
I am en route to La Crosse with a load of Fiberglass. Presently I am in Sparta, which has some sort of army fort adjacent, I wonder if they are, well, Spartan, or just like the rest of the military. I was looking at a map of the area and was somewhat delighted to find that La Crosse’s airport is located on an island in the Mississippi. This section of the Mississippi is quite interesting. Lots and lots of islands and bars and really just a way. Like an empty highway. Not all of it being used right now but clearly it is the domain of the water and one of these days I’ll bet they will be sorry they put that fucking airport on an island. Or maybe they won’t, perhaps, I am wiling to admit, there is something I don’t know.
This area of the river is really great. It is in what is know as the driftless area of SE Minnesota, SW Wisconsin and NE Iowa, that was untouched by glaciers during the last ice age. As such it is more dramatically contoured than the surrounding land. And coming up from the river into Minnesota on I-90 one could be convinced, for a moment, that they were in the mountains. There is a lot of rock and bluffs and hills and all in all it is one of those places the Midwest is full of, pleasant surprises.

Apologies

My most sincere apologies for neglecting this blog for so long. i got side tracked. and for the last 2 weeks I was training. Which means that I had a student with me 24/7 and this was more than a bit stressful. In short it sucked and I dont think I want to do it again. The only apparent benefit being money, and not wanting to be someone who holds money above too many things, especially things like, reading, writing, privacy and sanity. So with my student who I picked up in Indianapolis we delivered pesticide to Girdletree, MD (on the way southern eastern shore), then took K-Mart junk from Chambersburg, PA to Greensboro, NC, Craftsman tools from Gastonia, NC to Columbus, OH, Beer from Columbus to Tarentum (NE of Pittsburgh), Laundry Detergent from Lima, OH to Bedford, PA. Then we got a multi stop pickup of clothes, books, and pots and pans (all-clad, ohh!), from Girard, OH; Blawnox, PA; and Eighty Four, PA (home of the lumber company). That was to be delivered to TJ Maxx in North Las Vegas but we swapped in Wheat Ridge, CO (west of Denver) with a load of Lowe's merchandise that had to get to Grand Junction asap. Then we had a 301 mile deadhead to Fort Collins to pick up some delicious Busch Light and Budweiser beer destined for Clarksville, TN but that load was swapped in Champaign, Illinois. Just before this my student quit on me. We got too close to his hometown (of Casey, Illinois) and he realized that this long haul, away from the family for a long time thing was not going to work for him. out of the swap I got a load of plastic pallets that were supposed to go to Coors in Elkton, VA but that load i swapped north of Harrisburg, PA with a guy who had no load making me free to drive home, which, beacuse I was so god damn exhausted, I did the next day after some decent sleep. i loped over the hills of Lancaster county and home where I rested briefly before going to a big party where i did not get too drunk and embarass myself. Yes!
For the next few weeks I promise to be more active on this blog since I learned that people actually do read it. Thanks guys.

Parowan, Utah

October the 1st

It is stormy in Parowan, Utah. I haven’t seen any rain in a while. At home it hasn’t rained in so long my parents are worried their well might be running dry.
Today I awoke and briefly considered the buffet at Whiskey Pete’s and then thought better of it, checked the pressure on my tires and headed north.
One of the tires on the trailer was flat so I stopped at the petro north of Las Vegas and called in to Werner, waiting on hold for 10 minutes before getting authorization to have the people there repair it. While the guy did this he found that the valve stem on another tire was leaking air and in order to get this fixed I had to call in again and wait on hold again only to be told to go ahead and do it. The people in the Petro however said they couldn’t fix it unless Werner called them or they called Werner and Werner hadn’t called them. So again we call in and wait and wait and wait.
Finally the valve stem is replaced and I am off, out of the Las Vegas Valley and across the wide Mojave again and then, in Arizona slipping into a crack in the mountain called the Virgin River Gorge, a spectacular canyon (and apparently some of the most expensive interstate per mile) interstate that takes you up though the canyon before depositing you into the quickly growing region of Southwest Utah. Home to Mormons, fundamentalist, Polygamous and otherwise. St. George and Hurricane and then up further onto the Colorado plateau, cooler temperature and some green finally (The red rocks and the green pines and the blue sky make Utah one of the most wonderfully colorful places, especially when coming from the endlessly taupe Mojave.)
On the plateau you’ll find Cedar City and then Parowan, where there is a truckstop.
Parowan is a pleasant enough place. As I walked from the TA on the far side of Interstate 15 I could hear the sounds of a football game behind the enormous high school that seems to be the centerpiece of the town. I also past the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Seminary. A simple solid greek-ish brick building where I suppose they must train the boys to go out and convert the heathens.
The town had a few nice buildings and a funny selection of businesses; two real estate offices, an “antique” store (I think that west of the Mississippi Antique store means junk shop.) a Dairy Freeze (that incorporated none of the bright colors or flashy logos of your typical soft serve store) and two Cafes. One that was an espresso type coffee shop and one that was a lunch counter type coffee shop. One old man sat at the counter in the latter. It was very picturesque.
On the walk back the wind, which earlier had been gusty and pleasant, had died down. In the far distance rose the mountains like a wall and the sky behind those to the south west glowed orange red with the setting sun. The sky to the west northwest was streaked with dark sheets of rain and billowy grey clouds rose from them. I stopped in and got some taco bell and the rain picked up just as I reached the truck.

When last I left you I think I was in Del Rio, Texas. The rest of that drive, to Calexico, was fine. In west texas I found a road through the Davis Mountains connecting US-90 at Alpine to I-10 at Kent. This drive was magnificent although at one point, just past the McDonald Observatory, the road narrowed to a two lane no shoulder road through the pale green grass of West Texas. This made me a bit nervous but the load was a light one and the day was fine.
I spent the night in Willcox, Arizona. Throughout a long walk from the truck stop into the town and back I found nothing of any interest. Low small houses with pale roofs seemed well suited to the heat. A woman called to her son for dinner. He was riding bikes with a boy in the driveway across the street. A retarded seeming man lurched down the sidewalk ignoring me as we passed each other. A girl leaned out the drive through window of the Dairy Queen, glowing in the black night, talking to boys in a blue Honda. It was a pleasant night. It does cool off nicely in the desert once the sun goes down.

I awoke early and drove to Calexico. I think that Imperial County California may well be the most bizarre county in the country. Much of it is below sea level. It is hotter than hell in the height of summer, there are many hyper-saline lakes the largest of which is the Salton Sea. Much of the land, despite the extreme aridity of the region, is under intensive agriculture made possible by canals that cross everywhere. Great concrete ditches flowing with blue water. On the eastern end the Colorado, the source of all this redirected water, cuts through all this desert lush grasses lining its banks. It brings to mind the cradle of civilization and baby Moses in a basket.
I dropped the load in the dusty drop lot at the north end of Calexico and was given a short load. They needed someone to go to Calexico east (the truck border crossing that is the home to (like Laredo) a lot of freight forwarding warehouses) to pick up a load and drop it at the Calexico lot. The problem, however, was that I needed an empty trailer and the closest one was in Blythe. Blythe is only about 105 miles from Calexico. The route, up California route 78 was a windy two lane road that crosses perhaps what makes Imperial County really super weird, the Algodones Dunes (sometimes also called The Imperial Sand Dunes.) These are these incredible dunes that are my childhood idea of a desert. Deep undulating hills of perfect soft sand, no trees, no shrubs, no grass no nothing, just sand.

The dunes are called an erg, an Arabic term that implies a completely vegetation free, active (migrating) field of sand. These are the only such dunes in North America. And what do you think human beings do when they encounter something so unique, so other worldly, so undeniably beautiful? They make it the premier place in North America to ride around on ATVs and Dune Buggies. They set up rvs and camp out when they aren’t tearing over the hills.
Its really so fucking awesome.

I picked up the trailer from Blythe ad then headed back to Calexico having run out of hours completely so that after I was loaded I could only drive around the corner to a small truck stop that was full of trucks that were clearly just parked they owners elsewhere, at home in Calexico perhaps. I hate these kind of truck stops. I feel like I am breaking some kind of rule by staying here. And what the fuck. There are supposed to be people around.
For my walk this evening I thought I had the perfect thing. I was about a mile from Mexico and how fun would it be to take a little international evening stroll. But of all the places in America for walking, the Mexican border must be the least pleasant.
I took my passport and headed down the side of the highway toward mexico. A big road with fences all over the place eventually there is a clear path for pedestrians that want to cross into Mexico and so I took it.
The walk is parallel to and separated from the highway by a jersey divider and curves up and over an irrigation canal and into Mexico. On the bridge I came across two guys sitting down against the divider looking suspicious in that smoking pot sort of way.
In Mexico everything was pretty much the same except perhaps a little shabbier and in Spanish. I walked right on in. There was no apparent place for me to go as a pedestrian entering the country and the two customs and immigration guys who were checking with people in cars definitely saw me and definitely didn’t care. Once I was past that I could see that there wasn’t a whole lot going on here. Earlier I had talked to the guy at the warehouse about Mexicali and he said it was a great place, a city of 600,000, the capital of Baja Norte. Lots of bars and women. But that was the part of the city further west. Here, at the east border crossing there was nothing so I walked cross the south bound lanes and then across the very crowded north bound lanes.
I can’t figure out why there were so many people coming into the USA. Most of the cars had Baja Norte plates but the line was backed up a good ½ mile. There was no line on the southbound lanes. I think it is just that the US people are so over cautious and or inefficient. Amidst the traffic headed north were poor people, many of whom looked to have a good deal of Aztec blood, hawking things like hats or candy or these cakes that were reddish, I think they were food but I couldn’t really tell. or just panhandling. One woman siting down against the barrier was breast feeding her baby, two young girls milled around trying to help their parents with something. Some people just waited for something. I don’t know what.

I walked up to the large and soaring US Customs and Immigraton Building. The front was all glass and inside it looked like an airport with desks and baggage x-rays but no one was there. I tried the door, locked. I tried the other 4 doors, all locked. I looked at the traffic. I wasn’t going to wade through the car booths to get back into the US. What was I supposed to do? There was nothing, no sign, in Spanish or English, with any sort of directions whatsoever. I stifled within myself the slight urge to panic. I did not want to stay in Mexico. I figured I would just go back the way I came. I walked south, through the traffic across the traffic and then back up the ramp over the irrigation canal and along the road and into the US.
I figured that was all there was to it and I ambled along making calls on my phone (which would not work in Mexico) and sending a text or two. All of a sudden, apparently out of nowhere was a man with a dog.
“Where are you coming from sir?”
“back that way” I said nonchalantly pointing towards Mexico.
“You can’t come this way, you have to go through immigration on the other side”
“Yeah, I figured. That’s the way I came before and all the doors were locked and no one was there.”
“Yes, that’s right you have to go through that building.”
“Yeah but the door was locked and no one was there.”
“Its open.”
“No I was just there, look I have my passport and everything can I just keep walking?”
“No Sir, you have to go through immigration just like everyone else [whitey]”
“Look I’m not trying to cause a problem I just want to make sure I know what I am doing so I don’t walk all the way back there and no one is there again.” By this point I was about 5 miles into a what i intended to be a three mile walk. I had not brought any water and the relative humidity was hanging in the low teens at best. The sun was almost gone.
“Sir, either you go over there yourself or we arrest you and take you over there.”
I thought about this, I wouldn’t have minded being driven.
“No, no I don’t want to get arrested.” I walked back. Over the bridge across the traffic through the poor people and to the building which this time, miraculously, was filled with people. A group of middle school football players from Yuma who had apparently been playing a game in Mexicali or getting some kind of group brothel discount.
I passed through customs with no problem and walked, finally, back to the truck.

This morning I took that load to the drop lot in Mexicali and then headed through the pale blue morning light to San Diego to pick up a load of one or a combination of the following: Audio or VHS Cassettes, CDs, DVDs, or batteries made by Maxell in, I would guess, Mexico. I drove up through San Diego, a pretty city, and through the hinterlands that separate the San Diego metro from the eastern LA metro. And then up and over Cajon Pass and into the Mojave, that great sprawling empty drive between LA and Las Vegas. The hills are so deceptive here because the road is perfectly strait and strait up these gradual hills it goes up and up and up for miles. Joshua trees are so strange. Much too tall and substantial for a desert plant.
After the last hill you come down and into Nevada at Primm, a “town” that consists of three casino/hotels owned by the same company “Terrible’s” and an outlet mall. This is where I stopped for the night. I perused all the casinos, all of them pretty much being the same and that being the same as and casino in Vegas or the Mesquakie Casino in Tama, Iowa or Dover Downs Slots in Delaware. The main difference between here and Vegas is that a beer is only $2.50. I think people go to a casino not because it is fun (because it isn’t, very few people in a casino are having fun) but because it symbolizes the idea of fun, the idea of being “off-duty” being in a place where there are no rules (because a few of the normal rules have been relaxed) and no obligations. It is the same reason I think a lot of people, especially post college, drink. They are trying to capture the idea of fun with a symbol. “When I am drinking I am not doing anything else, I can not be responsible for things. I have no obligations. I am having fun” Perhaps it is even the same reason people have sex with people they don’t love. They want the idea of love. We are a nation of semiotic zombies.


That being said, I think I had fun in Primm.

Del Rio

Now I find myself in Del Rio en route to Calexico I am pretty much following the border the whole way which is fun because I once came up with an idea for a roadtrip that follwed the roads closest to the coasts or the borders all the way around the US. These roads were some of them. It is also nice not to be on the interstate because the walking is better.
Tonight as I walked around Del Rio and did a bit of shopping at the HEB (a grocery store that I choose to beleive is very subtily antisemitic) I got a feeling for a border town than I have not before. it felt like a real town. there were so many families.
Everyone was hispanic, i felt very much a minority but at the same time completely comfortable. It was a nice night, perhaps a bit hot but I suppose that is just the way it is. It woul dbe like going to Alaska and expecting it to be pleasantly warm. I bought some chips and salsa made by a company called Julio's from San Angelo that were inexplicably good, inexplicably until I found that msg was an ingredient in both of them. I also bought a bomber of Shiner Bock. the texas answer to Leinenkugels or Yuengling that is inexpensive and tasty enough but certainly bears almost no resemblance to the bock style.
I am watching tv now but there are no stations that are not in Spanish or dubbed in spanish (earlier was malcolm in the middle) so i am not really getting anything out of it. I really ought to learn spanish. Maybe I should get some tapes. But when will I find the time.
The show I am watching now has been, for the last 20 minutes or so, people working out and conversing inwhat I assume must be a slightly humourous way, but strained because they are all working out so hard.
I'm tired. Tomorrow to New Mexico (or maybe Arizona if I am snappy about it. and then California and then, hopefully, we'll be on our way back.
buenos noches amigos.





My Butterfly collection from a drive through South Texas.

The Streets of Laredo

I have taken at least 5 loads to (and taken as many away from) Laredo but I have never really been to Laredo.
The town, i am sure, must have something to it. But all the acrea upon acres of trucking business is on the north side. The border (sort of) works like this) American trucks are not allowed into Mexico. Mexican trucks (until recently and even stil not so much) are only allowed in to America something like 100 miles. But we have all this stuff Mexicans wants and they have all this stuff we pay them nothing to make for us. So there is a lot of freight moving across the border and the majority of this freight is coming through Laredo (the Nations busiest inland port of entry.) There are other crossings at Brownsville/Matamoros and all that mess down river. and then Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras, Del Rio/Ciudad Acuna, Presidio/ Ojinaga and El Paso/ Juarez in Texas. Douglas/Agua Prieta and Nogales/Nogales in Arizona and Calexico/Mexicali and San Diego/Tijuana in California. the busiest for trucking are Laredo, El Paso, Nogales and one just west of San Diego called Otay Mesa. But Laredo is the busiest. This is probably because it is the most direct link to Monterrey, the third biggest city in Mexico (after Mexico City and Guadelajara) and a big industrial center.
When you go to the border with a load as an American trucker you must first go to your carriers terminal (all the major carriers have terminals (termini) in Laredo) and get the trailer fully inspected and get paperwork neccesary at the broker/forwarder. Then you go to the broker/forwarder. there are many many of these places in Laredo and to be honest I don't know exactly what they do. As far as I am concerned they act just like a regular consignee. I drop the trailer there, they sign my paperwork and I leave. Then a mexican trucker will come to the broker and pick up the trailer and take it to its destination in Mexico. I, menawhile, return to my terminal where I hand in some of the paper work and then send the rest in to the main office in Omaha and then wait for another load. These in bound (or northbound as they are usually called) loads are brought in by mexican trucks and dropped directly at our terminal .Juding by their trucks I would say the drivers bringing these loads are locals who ferry trailers from brokers and forwarders in Mexico over to the terminals in the US. Then I pick up the load and take it wher it needs to go. From Laredo i have gone to Wichita, KS; Miami, FL, Columbus, OH and now to Calexico. but this is a special case. it is a load that originated in mexico and is destined for Mexico but the best road from Nuevo Laredo to Mexicali is through the US and so the whole thing has to go through this whole shenanigans.
Itinerant food vendors (what are sometimes called "roachcoaches" are big business in Laredo and they make some fine mexican foods. Toady I had a burrito with carne asada and some salsa verde that was hotter than hell. delicious.
Getting out of Laredo, at least from the area where Werner's terminal is is always a challenge. A glut of semis all trying to get in and out over some of the shittiest roads you can imagine. It is vividly illustrative, however, of the mass of trade that is going on between these two countries.

Dilley, Texas

Last night I spent the night in Dilley.
It is a small town about an hour south of San Antonio and and hour and a half north of Laredo.
It doesn't seem to have a lot going for it, but then again, i didn't really look that hard. I went for a walk but it wasn't very long because it was hot as hell outside although soon enough I can imagine I will be complaining about the cold and snow. Truckers are often known to say that there are two seasons, winter and road construction. But this is miserable in way that only people who spend the majority of their day alone and doing neer on nothing can be.
I recall having a load to Laredo once in March (this was when I was living in Chicago) and I found the fact that it was 90deg almost refreshing.
Dilley had a couple of "truckstops." Gas stations with diesel pumps and bigger than average swaths of busted up concrete behind them. The lot I parked in was so rutted and pitted that, at least in one part, you could see the rebar hanging loosely in the midst of the potholes.
The convenience store was small and and had a smell to it. Inside was a Church's Chicken. An old Mexican was tossing chicken in flour and then slipping it into the bubbling oil. Another old mexican, this one fat and with huge thick glasses that made him look hip in that" I am (sort of) self consciously trying to look retarded" way, was manning the register. He seemed to be in charge. i bought some chicken. As I left a cockroach skittered across my path.
I awoke early and headed to Laredo.

Lufkin, Texas

On the way to Houston with that barbed wire I stopped in Lufkin and wrote this:

September 26th, 2007
I have not been writing much of late because I suppose I am bored. Although I am sure the details of loads and cities and industry are interesting on some level I can’t get excited enough to write about them. This is not to say that I am bored throughout the day, in fact, most of the time I am having a fine time. I appreciate the time to think and write (if I can find something to write about) and read and try and reconnect with why I like to travel and why I like the US.
It occurred to me the other day as I was driving through Missouri (or was it Arkansas) that I first got excited about traveling through the country when I went away to college in Iowa. I have known that this was the ignition for my travel interest but I did not know why. The other day I realized that it was because all these places. (Illinois!) They were so far away. So different. It was a mystery to be uncovered and pieced together. Curiosity drove me further west until I got to the ocean. At some point it got less interesting and less intriguing. Everything felt familiar. Especially after I started driving trucks (the first time). And what feels familiar is not far away and is not very intriguing. This was exemplified in my roadtrip this summer with my sister. Even places I had not been before (all the fantastic parks in Utah) were sort of de rigueur. Meanwhile my sister was captivated. It wasn’t much fun.
What I had done, I realize now, is smear this familiarity over the whole country. In feeling familiar with the country I was making huge assumptions that I had seen all there was to see and that nothing was far away. Not true! Arkansas is far, far away from Maryland. Maybe not to a trucker but on the quotidian level not many people travel like this. The people, the accent, the food the culture, while superficially similar, are not. I don’t know about you but I, and I know it is tired, I blame television. Everybody sees the same things, wants the same things, has the same cultural touchstones but if we look deeper we find there are things that are not common ground. A person from Texas is unlikely to know what a skipjack is and a person from Maryland is unlikely to have any concept of what it is like to live in a border town on the Rio Grande (even if they both know what happened on last week’s episode of Heroes.) It is these things that we must fight to preserve if we are not to become a dangerously homogenous nation.
So my blog isn’t going to be all about trucking. It also has to be about the places that I go that are not on the interstate. One of the things that I promised myself I would do when I returned to trucking was have more discipline, especially as it relates to food and physical activity. It is too easy to literally not move all day and then eat the junk from convenience stores and fast food restaurants. To meet the physical activity requirement I have been taking long walks at sunset in the various places that I stop for the night. Sometimes this is a daunting prospect but like my walk in Allentown I am commited to making these unwalkable places walkable. One thing I have noticed so far is that people can not seem to leave you alone. Either they look at you like you’re insane or (usually in the case of young me) honk or holler at you, or just give of a general air of distrust. Why would somebody be walking here? They must be a murderer, rapist, child molester, etc…
Yesterday I took a walk in Lufkin, Texas which seemed an especially hostile place to walk. There seemed to be sideways glances everywhere. People didn’t politely pull to the opposite side of the street like usual and I believe that in east texas it must be a requirement to own a blood thirsty murderous dog. I walked up one street and finding it too poor and mexican (poor and Mexican often means more murderous dogs, not trying to be too overtly racist here just a sociological observation, perhaps it is sociology that is racist (ho Ho!) I turned around and walked the other way in a loop about 3 miles long. The first leg of the loop led past low ranchers, every one with a port-cochere and a lot of lawn furniture. I suppose people in this area like to sit outside and really soak in that steamy gulf air. The poverty here was slightly less severe and generally more Caucasian and there were some dogs but they were mostly chained up or behind fences. One, as I reached the far corner of my rhomboid loop seemed nasty (and had big testicles) but was so intently focused on rooting something out of the grassy ditch that he did not even register my presence.
As I rounded the corner the landscape opened up and stopped being residential, well at least in the typical sense. There was a big jail, The Angelina County Correctional Facility or something like that. Across the street from this were a few very small buildings (sort of like the kind you might buy at home depot to keep your lawn tools in.) that were set up as bail bonds businesses. One advertised on a big yellow banner that it was voted best bail bonds service in the Best of Lufkin awards 2006.
The last side of the rhombus was the frontage road on US-59 that led me back to the small truckstop where I had parked.
Texas is madly fond of these frontage roads and in fact it really constitutes an entirely different way of thinking of a highway than the more typical exit on to a cross street model. In this model you exit veering off only slightly onto a small road that is one way in the direction you are traveling and parallel to the larger road. Traffic already on the frontage road must yield to traffic exiting the freeway and entering the frontage road (or vice versa). On this road are many businesses (like truckstops and fast food restaurants). All cross streets can freely intersect with the frontage road at T-intersections. Larger cross streets will intersect at grade with the frontage roads and cross over or under the main highway. At these under or over passings there is also usually the opportunity to make a U-Turn and go the opposite direction on the Frontage road on the other side of the highway (or subsequently to join the highway in that direction soon thereafter.)
(Did that make any sense?)
So I was walking south on the shoulder of the northbound frontage road and passed a rather sizeable high school with a rather impressive football facility. It is Texas and (I found out later) Lufkin is especially well know for High School Football within the state. I got back to my truck and by this time I was quite sweaty. It was about eight at night and just getting below 90°.

Quick update

Sorry I haven't been writing. more on that in the next episode.
since the last instalment I picked up a load of crushed limestone
(used to color plastic) in Cockeysville, MD and delivered it to
Terre Haute, Indiana (a state, i should add, famous for its limestone)
Then I picked up a load of wire products (including barbed wire) from a steel and wire
mill south of Peoria, IL. That went to a Handy Hardware Warehouse in Houston. Then it was over the industrial wastelands of galveston bay to Baytown to pick up some Polymers. (the raw material of plastic is sold in these little beads whih are melted down and molded into whatever is being molded.
Those were headed to Tlacapulcho de zinaga (or something) Jalisco, but I only go as far as Laredo, Texas. Then this afternoon I got a load of water heaters made in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas that are headed to Mexicali, Baja California Norte but it is easier to go through the US I guess. Again I am only going as far as Calexico, California (what a classy name, I'm sure the reality will rise to it.
SO I haven't been bloggin because I haven't been near the internet for a few days and the prospect of typing this much on an iPhone is daunting. So following is a post I wrote yesterday on msword and then I will follow that with something new.

Williamsburg to Hagerstown

I picked up the beer today. Drove from Ashland to Williamsburg and then had to go through Anheuser-Busch's byzantine rigamarole.
1.) Weigh in, full truck and empty trailer.
2.) Check in with guard.
3.) Pull Forward to have guard check empty trailer.
4.) If clean, drop trailer in rows 1 or 2. If dirty proceed to trailer sweepout area, sweepout trailer and then drop trailer in row 3
5.) Procedd to entrace gate for Bobtail weight. (again this time with no trailer? what is the point).
6.) Get trailer assignment from guard.
7.) Proceed into the plant to find trailer.
8.) Hook up to trailer, brace load with straps, adjust tandems (rear wheels) to best guess of where the right position is for legal weight distribution.
9.) Proceed to exit gate.
10.) weigh trailer
11.) If overweight on axle distribution, return to the drop yard to adjust tandems.
12.) return to scale (repeat steps 10-12 until legal (12,000 on the steer axle, 34,000 on the drive axles (combined) and 34,000 on the trailer (tandems) axles.)
13.) Get papers.
14.) Have guard seal trailer (a seal is a little plastic strip that might well be a deterent to theft but anyone with fingers (or teeth) could break it. I suppose the purpose is more proof of non-tampered-with-ness.
15.) Leave.

all this took just 90 minutes!
This beer doesn't have as much room (it is in cans Busch and perhaps Busch light) to slosh around but it is stil heavy as balls (43,000 pounds) and on the crppy roads of Virginia knocked me around quite a bit.
The Busch plant is quite a place. Smelly in that malty with a hint of hops sort of way. steam billowing out all over the place train tracks leading in but not coming from anywhere (perhaps they used to bring in all the barley by train but no longer).
Enormous.
I got through DC just fine this time and then up to Hagerstown where I delivered (am presently delivering) mercifully just before the Appalachains get into full swing. (Heavy loads are very slow going up hill and very fast going down and so are a bit frustrating and nervewracking, alternately.
The next load will take me to Cockeysville, north of Baltimore, to pick up and the to Terre Haute, Indiana to deliver. What could it be! every time the quallcomm (the satellite comunications device) beeps it's like Christmas!

Sortie numero deux

Back over the stupid Delaware River and into New Jersey again having to pick up an empty trailer in Barrington (nearly where I dropped the last load) They don’t seem to understand that I live far way from everything and yet in the middle of the east coast. New Jersey has a way and that was not made for but is entirely dependent on large trucks. Lame-o.
The next stop was down into the southern part of the state. Down into that odd part that feels a lot like where I am from because ecologically and geologically (or hydrologically) it is very similar and (of course) as the crow flies, it is less than 50 miles away. Clement Pappas was the name of the shipper and the product: Juice. Why juice here in rural southern jersey? Cranberries maybe, or all the fruit from Wilmington (all the tropical fruit on the east coast is shipped into the port of Wilmington (like ALL the bananas.) Dole and Chiquita have big holdings there*.
Juice is heavy and it sloshes so the whole load bucks and kicks miserably. 42,000 pounds of juice. From there I took it back over the bridge and across the Susquehanna right at the head of the bay. And down into Baltimore through the tunnels and on to the misery of Washington DC beltway traffic at 5:00pm (bad timing) and then west on 66 (even worse traffic!) into the rolling hills of the hunt country and up a narrow 4 lane road to a Family Dollar Distribution Center in Front Royal.
The next load, Beer, adult juice, from Anheuser-Busch in Williamsburg (right next to Busch Gardens!) taking it up to Hagerstown, Maryland.
I am hoping the next load is not a bullshitty 200 mile one like these. Now I am in Ashland just north of Richmond and tomorrow I will pick up this beer. Having been home, which was very nice, I have some new stuff in the cab, more clothes, good healthy food and some décor. I feel better. Being at home also relaxes you into loving the road again. You don’t count mile markers quite as much.

*turns out it was because of cranberries. Clement Pappas, the internet tells me, was a greek immigrant who started a lot of food processing operations in southern jersey (which is quite a (non corn and soybeans) agricultural producer) (thus the otherwise rather dubious moniker "The Garden State.") Gradually these operations focused more on Cranberry juice and then other juices (I had, in addition to cranberry, orange-pineapple, and red grapefruit.) The fucked up thing though is that now apparently they import most of the cranberries from Massachsetts or Wisconsin. Food, in todays paradigm, is apparently not worth making unless it is well traveled.

back across the country

Alright, so when last I left you we were in New Mexico appreciating the cool of the desert night on our sweaty skin. I woke up in New Mexico and carried on. It is odd when you get these really long trips, ones that take three or four days (or occasionally 5 days) and really the only thing you are doing in driving. No backing into docks, no pointless waiting no bitchy shipping clerks. On one hand it is somewhat dull. There is nothing to break up the day but on the other hand, when you are paid by the mile these are the days that you are raking in the cash. at about 650 miles a day and $.34 a mile its about $220 for the day which is pretty good for doing nothing but sitting on your butt and keeping the truck on the road.

That day, after traveling across New Mexico (whose northwestern section is most definitely part of the great plains) I entered the Texas Panhandle. All day and at the truckstop the previous night I had seen trucks from one company in Saskatoon and they all had Haz-Mat placards on them that said "7-Radioactive" This is a rarer placard to see and is a little unnerving. Then I remembered that near Amarillo there is a place called Pantex. (Panhandle of Texas, though it sounds like some sort of "feminine product") Which is a military installation dedicated to the assembly and disassembly of Nuclear (Nuculer) Weapons. A how lovely. But the plains of the Texas panhandle are, in fact quite lovely, occasionally broken by narrow rocky canyons and one, Palo Duro Canyon, which is quite big, the next grandest canyon, you could say, but you can not see it from I-40. I stopped to buy some lunch at a Petro on the east side of town and a lot lizard (truck stop prostitute cruised slowly by in her car. She looked up at me in my truck and put her hand up and looked at me like "I don't know, what do you think?" I shook my head no, politely, I hoped and not condescendingly.
Texas gives way to Oklahoma, a state which, like the other plains states stacked on top of it (Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas) I quite like. I guess I appreciate the minimal landscape. I passed through Oklahoma City around dinner time and then as darkness fell It got more humid and green and I stopped for the night in Okemah. In the small gas station a bunch of seemingly (and very possibly) retarded indians wanted cheeseburgers but all they had was fried chicken.

When i woke up the next morning it was foggy and wet which was certainly a change and I carried on and the sun burnt through the fog in a most dramatic and wonderful way and then I was in Arkansas where the trees turn to pine and the air ha the overcooked vegetable smell of paper making and you know that you are in some sort of the south. Arkansas is one of those places you know would be great to get out and explore, hike though, go fishing or boating, but is dreadfully dull on the interstate (like where I come from, I imagine.) Little Rock, or the northern part of it, breaks the drive in half, the rolling west from the surprisingly flat east. Then you are in West Memphis, trucking capital of the mid-south (as this are is called (I guess the mid south is Arkansas, southern Missouri, western Tennessee, and northern Mississippi and Louisiana, I don't know) and then its across the river and into Memphis, which is a city with a strangeness on par with Baltimore to which more attention ought be given. I delivered the load to a very busy warehouse on the south side of town that apparently could not get enough x-boxes, (is there some sort of new microsoft game system coming out soon?) Te guard here was perhaps the most kind, helpful (and handsome) I have ever encountered in this line of work.
they had given me a bunch of loads and then canceled them before settling on one that would require me to deadhead (drive with an empty trailer, which no company wants to do since they have to pay you but they get nothing in return) almost 200 miles up to the non-existent town of Neely's Landing, Missouri, near Cape Girardeau. The drive up was pleasant in the fertile and flat flood plain of the Mississippi, cotton growing all around, ugly black sticks with white puffballs growing out of them. Some was ready for harvest and one harvester dumped a big fluffy dusty mass into a truck.
I spent the night in the gravel lot of an unstaffed fueling point near my pickup, a large Proctor and Gamble facility in the middle of nowhere. Missouri freaks me out. I feel like everyone there likes to fight with big foam swords.
I picked up the load and headed up I-55, though St. Louis and then across the Mississippi again and west on I-70 through the curiously named "Effingham." Would "Fuckingham" have been too rude?
Then through Terre Haute, Indiana and Indianapolis and Columbus and now I am just east of Wheeling in the slender northern pointing finger of West Virginia. Tomorrow I will tackle the length of the godforsaken (so narrow and winding) Pennsylvania Turnpike, cross the Delaware, deliver this load (of Bounty paper towels to CVS) and then, hopefully bobtail (drive with no trailer whatsoever) home.

The very next day...
So i made it across Pennsylvania and over the Delaware river (and through the toll booths) and to CVS where a young black man from the islands or africa tells me that no one, whatsoever, is there to accept my delivery (not even him apparently). So I have to drive 15 miles up the road to a Petro in Bordentown where I sit now, miserable that I did not get to go home tonight. but i will go home tomorrow and all will be ok, i hope.