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.

first days in the new truck

So I am going to make this short because I am typing it on my phone.
Fontana finally got their shit together and off I went to deliver freight. The first thing they had me do was take a load of pallets to Maruchan (makers of ramen noodles) in Irvine. That place smelled like shit. Well, at first it was pleasant but quickly became overwhelming. From there it was over to the LBC (long beach (the countries busiest port)) to pick up some undisclosed freight. The generic warehouse at which iwaited for a very long time had a lot of beer in it but the guy inside told me they are the warehouse for 3 things beer, Moen faucets and x-boxes. I have the latter but don't tell anyone. It is high value and I don't want to get hijacked. At this warehouse essentially they move freight from the containers off the ships from the port and put it on to trucks like mine.
These x-boxes are going to Memphis so I spent today driving across the hot ass Mojave desert. In Needles, CA which is down on the Colorado river it was easily almost 110* I got very dry. Fortunately I-40 then climbs up on to the Colorado plateau in the flagstaff area and it was much cooler there(70s). Now I am in Milan, NM. Which is uneventful and apparently the overnight low will be in the 40s. A change of almost 60 degrees in one day is a bit much for anyone and I am worn out. This is the problem with driving. You get worn out doing almost nothing.

San Bernardino

So I awoke in San Bernardino. the night before i had opened up my lap top to hook up to the internet when I found that at some point on the truck my computer must have taken a fall and the screen was totally fucked up in the cataclysmic seeming way that LCD screens get fucked up. So I decided, i needed to get a new computer. I walked up through San Benardino up E street past the mall where I saw a dead black cat in the middle of the road. now I am not much on the black cat superstition but a dead one seems like a bad sign.

Eventually I got to the train station. I am determined to make these unwalkable places walkable. We have fucked up the environment for enjoying the outside some people say, especially in places like LA/SB but I refuse. I am going to walk and I am going to enjoy it. I got to the train station and caught the train to LA. transferred to th red line to Wilshire and Western and then took the bus to Snata Monica Boulevard. My destination was the Apple Store at Century City. I am sure that there was one closer but this one i knew where it was and it was in one of the most ridiculous shopping areas in the world (close to Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive.) Once in the store I was hooked by the insidious iPhone. it is so pretty and so amazing and, as it turns out they had just lowered the price by $200 so i had to get one of those too. It's only money right.
Then i made the same trip in reverse. Got back into the hotel room and ordered a pizza and set about playing with my new toys.

Today i walked up to the Target and bought some stuff and then went up to the movies and saw 3:10 to Yuma, which was entertaining enough. Then I came back ordered some sushi and wrote all this. Tomorrow, hopefully, I will test out and then can get n this truck and start making some money.

This post has nothing to do with trucking and therefore seems a bit indulgent
and for that I apologize.

Fontana

Did you know that the three major semi tractor manufacturers (Kenworth, Peterbilt, and Freightliner) all have historical origins in the Pacific Northwest? (Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland respectively) Kenworth and Freightliner are still made there (at least some of them), Peterbilts are built in Denton, Texas.

So Jose and I dropped that last load, the 18 tons or so of maxi pads in Redlands and then headed over to the terminal in Fontana. Fontana is essentially the Gary, Indiana of southern California. Starting like most southern California towns as a rural community of orange and lemon groves it was destined for glory because through it plowed old US 66 and a bunch of rail lines. In the 50s they built a steel mill there and it became a center of heavy industry and thus trucking. It really is a miserable pit of a place. If you haven't ever I highly recommend taking the metrolink (LA's commuter rail line akin to the Metra in Chicago or the non-subway trains of the MTA in NYC) from LA Union Station (which is a marvelous mission deco building) out towards San Bernardino. You will find an impressive amount of materials. New stuff, steel and concrete (there is no wood in LA) and old stuff, scrap metal and rubber and smashed cars.
Behind all of this rise so suddenly the San Gabriel Mountains which are spectacularly beautiful and sometimes capped with snow (the highest one, Mount Baldy, is over 10,000ft.) Cool breezes coming in from the ocean are generally warmed by the time they get out here and with them they bring along all of that smog. It gets blown right up to the mountains where it stops. and hangs, a beautiful hazy yellow. Actually it is not beautiful at all.
Along with Rancho Cucamonga, San Bernardino and a bunch of other places it makes up the Inland Empire which i think is a grand name for a thoroughly uninspiring place. Really it is just a way to differentiate itself from all those fags in L.A.

All the major trucking companies and a number of minor ones have terminals in Fontana. Werner is no exception. So here we were. Jose's fourth truck, a Freightliner Classic, was sitting in the lot there to have repairs made but since it was unassigned it was priority zero and after a month it had not moved. We woke up, started it up and drove it over to the Three Sisters car wash (next to the DOT clinic that I got a physical at when last I was in California) A bunch of Mexicans cleaned both trucks and we rolled over to another diesel shop where we left the truck (which needed AC repairs.) Then we drove to Wal-Mart. We were trying to kill time driving around since i needed to log in one more hour to complete my 105 hours of driver training. After that we headed to FarmerBoys, an Inland Empire semi-fast-food chain that serves high quality burgers and salads and delicious fried fish.

Then we returned to Werner where went into the terminal so I could "Test out" I was told I had some more "CBTs" (computer based training) to do. these are course and touch screen multiple choice tests that you complete in little rooms full of people who are not shutting up for some reason. i did this quickly and then was told by the apathetic Hispanic secretary that i would be seen shortly. Meanwhile I went to tell Jose that he could drive up to San Jose. He gave me some money and said he was looking forward to working with me.

Then I waited and waited and waited. I took a shower and then enjoyed the overwroght miseries of the other drivers. One, who had to be at least 6'6" and edging on 400 lbs. was having some trouble. Apparently he was transferring to the flatbed division. This required taking a trip to omaha to take a course in how to tie down frieght and get a new truck. The hitch, however, was that a.) he had a lot of stuff and b.) his wife was with him. His wife was his female equivilent. tall and fat and with one of those permanent ugly frowns. She was also wearing a camisole and black shorts which was ugly. Ugly, Ugly, Ugly.
pparently she lived with him in the truck (they had no other permanent residence) and they were miffed that Werner was willing to pay for his bus ticket to Omaha but not hers. Eventually the bitched and moaned enough to get a rental car. they were awful.

Finally i was called back to meet with the terminal manager who passed me my Drivers test evaluation. This is a bad xerox of a list of all the skills that truckers need to know and your triainer is supposed to take time to observe your driving and fill out the form. the directions state that any "areas of concern" should be underlined. The terminal manager passed me this sheet and repeated this rule and said that this sheet was inadmissable because, in filling it out, Jose had put a check mark next to each item implying that all were satisfactory. the terminal manager didn't think so.
"The folks in Omaha, these guys aren't going to accept this"
"What?!"
"yeah it says here you gotta underline any area of concern and since jose there put a check next to everything it means that you failed everything."
"are you kidding me? Isn't it obvious to you that he wouldn't send me in here having failed evry single item and then signed the bottom saying that i had passed?"
"Well yes, it is obvious to me but they won't accept it in Omaha. and besides we can only test out a certain number of people each day and we have already reached are quota today so we won't be able to anything until monday."
Jesus fucking christ.
I did not understand why the people in omaha were aparently such humourless robots. i did not understand why I was told that it would just be a short time until I would be seen and a short time ended up being 5 hours. I did not understand why they couldn't have forseen this coming and told me to go to the hotel.
I was pretty irate.
but I kept it all inside. more or less.
the damn bus wasn't coming to take us to the motel until 7:00 and it was only 4:45.
So I had to kill more time.
eventually it came and whisked us off to the La Quinta Inn in San Bernardino. This is about 18 miles from Fontana. I suppose this is southern california, land of the automobile. anyway. it was good to be far away from Fontana. i am not so sure i would like to stay in a motel in Fontana.
and the La Quinta inn is very nice.
I went out and bought some chinese food and two tall boys of miller high life and, having not had a drop of alcohol in the last 2 and a half weeks, i did not enjoy it all that much.

corrections

I said something about Jose getting a house to ride around on
I meant Horse.

Also Cerro de la Silla is a mountain outside of Monterrey not in Orange County.

It was often difficult to determine what Jose was talking about.

Jose

so, a little more on Jose.
Jose is from a small town in Nuevo Leon, Mexico.
He moved to the US when he was young and lived in the mexican neighborhoods of Chicago for a while. He fought in Viet Nam. He got a degree from Santa Ana (College/University?) in Engineering of the sort that he says gives him the knowledge to program industrial machines such as lathes. He did this for a while before deciding to get into trucking 2000. He trained at first with Schneider (like I did) and then moved on to Werner for reasons he did not say. He soon thereafter bought his first truck (the 2000 freightliner century that we drove) and functioned as an owner operator. He amassed more trucks, up to 7 at one point, and had people driving them for him. At this point he was also married and had some kids who were mostly to fully grown. He was living in Mission Viejo in orange County and then moved up into the somehwat posher, more secluded Trabuco Canyon. Around this time he met up with his frst girlfriend from back in mexico and they had an affair. He felt pangs of guilt about this confessed to his wife and, although things were rocky for a bit she took him back. Eventually he cheated on her again with this same woman and they realized they couldn't do anything but get together. He divorced his wife but in the process she took half of everything which cut him down to 4 trucks (having sold the others for their cash value.) he married his first girlfriend (it is almost a charming story) and they live in San Jose, California. She helps to run his small trucking business "Cerro de la Silla" which means saddleback range, a formation in the mountains of Orange County.
He loves his wife and confessed this to me many times throughout our travels. He speaks of how in shape and "tight" she is for someone of her age (62) especially compared to how "fat and ugly" he is (his words not mine.) He says they are like kids and I would have to agree. He bickered with his wife on the phone (in spanish thankfully) almost every night, I tried to imagine what it would be like if he was home more than once every two weeks. He would use the word 'chinga' a lot. Then he would hang up and not more than 5 minutes later call again and speak to her in sheepish lovey spanish.
He is a big kid. On the phone I thought he was much younger than he was and even in person although he is 60 he doesn't look a day over 57. He likes to talk about women. Where most people might use the phrase "by the skin of my teeth" Jose says "by a pussy's hair." He is vulgar like that.
He likes to act "American" He is an American citizen and has been a while now. He is very patriotic as many vets are but he defitely thinks george bush is "a fucking idiot."
He wears athletic shorts and a t-shirt every day. He has a lot of each. He is bald with a fringe of grey curls ringing around the back of his head. He is light skinned and sightly hook nosed, very spanish looking. like a plump Picasso. In the back he has jeans and finely tooled cowboy boots for colder weather. He says that this is what he wears when he goes back home (Nuevo Leon borders Texas.) He says it is big cattle country. When I asked what the local specialties were he said the main one would be Cabrito, what i think is spit roasted suckling goat.
Jose is planning his retirement with his wife in Mexico. From what I gather they have a house in the chaparral country side of Nuevo Leon and another on the outskirts of Monterrey. They take frequent trips there to bring supplies and whatnot to the house(s). this is what he was going to do as soon as he dropped me off.
They are trying to sell the house in San Jose and buy one in San Antonio so that they can be closer to Mexico (Monterrey is only about a 6 hour drive from San Antonio). His wife is a little reluctant because she enjoys her social circles in the south bay.
Jose has a large and confusing family (especially since there are his kids from his first marriage and his wife's kids from her first) his wife's first husband was an alcoholic white guy who got into a bad car wreck (presumably while under the influence) had his legs amputated and then, while recovering, developed a clot that caused a stroke rendering him vegetative. They decided to pull the plug.
Her kids from this first marriage were very young at the time and until recently both lived near her in SJ. The son and his wife moved to Denver ad wants his mom and jose to move there but jose refuses, its too cold and he thinks it is time for her to "sever the umbilical cord." The daughter has some depression issues.
Of Jose's kids they seem to be pretty well off. I get it all mixed up but at least one of them lives in Santa Rosa or petaluma.
Of his brothers at least two are truckers and one is a real estate mogul of some sort in Laredo, Texas. He has relatives in the Mexican Mafia. He used to work in a bordello.
On the weekends his wife and him enjoy doing "intellectual" things like going to wine country or to see plays in san francisco. He likes to rise above and differentiate himself from the "cholos" although he does own a '57 chevy that he wants to restore and soup up so he can race it around. When he moves to mexico he looks forward to driving it around in his little town. He also wants to get a house "so I can ride around like a king." At a truckstop near Eugene, Oregon he bought a cane with an elaborately detailed pewter handle (I think it was a dragon) you could unscrew this and it became a sword.
I like to imagine him in retirement, big pimpin in some little town in mexico.
What else is there? so much. I know this is all jumbled but this is how it came to me.

Travels with Jose

Jose it turns out called me back later that night.
"Hey Buddy, look, there's no parking over here at the terminal
so are you ready to go? We can head out down the road a bit and
then catch some zzzs on our way to ohio. can you be ready?"

I had just undressed and slipped into my motel bed snuggling up
with some Law and Order, SVU.

"Umm, yeah, sure."
Frantically I dressed and packed the remainder of my things.I trundled, laden, down to the lobby in the thick air. Eventually a blue truck pulled up. Werner offers its drivers a choice of trucks, Freightliners, Kenworths and Peterbilts all in both "Classic" (the traditional big truck with a long square nose and big exhaust stacks on either side of the doors lotsa chrome.)and the more aerodynamic models (lotsa plastic). The truck that Jose had was a Freightliner Century (the aerodynamic model)which was sort of releif to me because it is the same truck that I drove at Schneider.

Down from the truck came a short Guatemalan and a rotund mexican. He was so rotund that from a distance i thought the guy had to be american. Maybe it was his walk, he had a fat american walk. The fat american walk was Jose and the guatemalan, his trainee that he was dropping off. i would learn later that this guy was the bane of Jose's existence. Not a good driver, timid but obstenent.

"Are ju Mark?" Jose said shaking my hand with a big meaty paw.
"yeah"
"ok buddy, lets go."
and we were in the truck.
We would not leave the truck for any significant length of time for the next two weeks and of
that the truck was moving 80% of the time.

That night we drove to a rest area just east of Harrisburg pulled in to a spot on the re-entry ramp and went to sleep. I slept very well. which was weird.
I don't know how to describe the next 2 weeks except that it was a total blur. most of the time i had no idea what day it was or even what time it was. The radio's clock was set to Pacific Time (Jose if from San Jose, California) The Quallcom (the little satellite communications device used in the truck, was set to Central time (the home office is in Omaha) my watch was et to Eastern time. and we spent some time in every time zone in the lower 48. On top of that I drove sometimes during the day and slept at night and sometimes vice versa.
A blur.
The first load was clothing that Jose had picked up from a distribution center in Massachusetts.
The clothing was Talbot's (waspy women's clothing) and we were to drop it off at the Werner
Terminal in Springfield, Ohio. the next day when I drove Jose was pleased (as was I) to find that I was
a competent driver. I suppose bicycles and big rigs are similar in this respect.
From this point on, he decided, we would run like a team.
The next day we were to head over to the outskirts of Columbus to pick up a load from ForwardAir,
a air freight place that uses a lot of team drivers to move its freight quickly.
We had a load that was supposed to be going to LAX but after sitting for the better part of a day and a half
the load never materialized, i suppose no one was sending stuff to their homies in LA.
We were then given another load this one from a similar company across the street to its terminal
at Laredo, Texas. We still had to wait but it did show up and we drove down to Laredo.
Jose's hopes were that he was going to get routed towards LA (or more accurately the terminal in Fontana)
so that he could head home since he was going on vacation with his wife to Mexico. They are setting up a retirement
house in Nuevo Leon (near Monterrey) where they both were born.
He would drop me off at Fontana and I would get another trainer for the remainder of my time.
somewhere en route however one of his drivers. wait, i need to explain, Jose is an owner/operator.
He owns four trucks. He drives one and he has two other drivers who work for him (one of the trucks is presently
idle.) They are all contracted to Werner which means that werner dispatches all of them and pays jose for the miles
that all of his trucks run and then he pays his drivers at a rate that is actually better than what Werner pays its drivers
but also makes him some money in the mean time.
So one ho his drivers, Jever (at least that is what i think jose was saying his name was) had a breakdown in Colorado
that ended up requiring costly transmission work and so he decided that he was going to stay on with me
until I finished. You see when you are training you get paid for all the miles you drive and all the miles your
trainee drives which means that in the case of someone like me who is totally capable of driving the truck
by himself jose can essentially double his pay and the company gets a cheap team to run expedited freight
which you better believe they charge a hefty rate for.
From Laredo we got a load coming out of Mexico bound for Miami. It was a load of finely made Mexican Dell Computers.
and once we got to Miami, ( city i have never before been to and have no desire to return to) I realised that they were being
delivered to some sort of logistics facility for cruise ships. whether the computers were going to be used on the cruise ship
or whether the cruise ship was just being used as a means of conveyance for said computer i could not ascertain.
From there we were given a short load (650 miles or so)
We picked up the load at International Coffee Warehouse, a pink stuccoed building in one of the many shitty industrial parts of Miami. Inside stoned looking Hatians spoke in Creole and drove pallets loaded with burlap bags of coffee into the back of trailers. Once inside the trailer two incredibly built guys (one sort of a cuban thug, the other a ripply black guy) lifted the bags with hooks (like the kind used for moving bails of hay or very large cuts of beef) and stacked them neatly on the floor of the trailer (why they couldn't sty on the pallets I could not fathom since clearly there was going to be someone on the other end of the line, in this case the facility that processes coffee and spices for Kroeger supermarkets, putting these things back on pallets.) The beans were green and Colombian and the destination was in Pontiac (near Columbia) South Carolina.
From there we got a load from Abingdon, Virginia way down in the Southwest tail of the state. The one was hoods and farings and other parts for semis made of Meton (some sort of thing that is similar to though, i was told by the shipping clerk, far superior to fiberglass. These needed to be in Denton Texas at the main Peterbilt plant and as it was we could get there early so they organised a split for us. This means we were going to drop the trailer at the Werner terminal in Dallas so that someone else could deliver it when the company wanted it and we could move on to another load and not wait around wasting time. We dropped that load and were given a load from another air frieght company (Burlington Air Express or BAX) The pick up was near the airport and the drop at Boeing Field in Seattle (whoohoo, Miami to Seattle in 4 days bitches.) After that we picked up some merchandise from a target warehouse in Lacey (near Olympia) this warehouse is apparently the one that Target uses for its pacific imports, cheap stuff from china, no doubt loaded with lead, shipped into Tacoma.) This stuff was headed to a target DC (distribution center) In Fontana. so we were closing in. Jose liked this because being close to Fontana we could stay in the western area and not, hopefully delay his vacation too much longer.
From Fontana we headed to Fed-Ex in the charmingly named City of Industry, California. This we took up to Sacramento and from there grabbed an empty trailer that was apparently desperately needed by the folks at Amazon.com in Fernley, Nevada.
Once in the miserable state of nevada we were sent to Sparks where we hooked up to a very heavy trailer of Bush's Baked beans bound for the werner drop lot in Salt Lake City. and from that point it was up to Ogden, to Kimberly Clark, to ferry 36,000 pounds of maxi pads down I-15 to Redlands, California (just east of San Bernardino) once we had finished this I would have a grand total of one hour left which Jose and I widdled away friday morning drving around to buy food and go to Wal-Mart and take his 4th truck to be cleaned and maintained because you see, at this point, Jose had offered and i had accepted to work for him. and not directly for Werner.

in the next episode!
more about Jose!
Mark's escapdes in San Bernardino County! (and Los Angeles County)
mark buys a new computer and an iPhone!