First Load

So after sitting in Tulsa for a few days I got a load out. The woman at the local dispatch window said when I asked "well, we got a short little 400 mile load." great, I said, I'll take it.
The load had come from Laredo (i.e. Mexico) and was headed to Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, a Mississippi river town south of St. Louis. It had been dropped in the Tulsa yard because the other driver needed to go home. It was a jumble of metal pieces, mostly I-beams painted grey and ladder sections with the sort of cages around them that are supposed to somehow increase their safety. They were painted a cheery yellow.
All of this was headed to a cement plant that was being built on the banks of the mighty Mississippi. I looked it up on line, it was going to be huge. One of the benefits of its position was that they had built a big harbor so that this cement they were making could be shipped down the river and around the world. Or wherever it is they send cement.
When I got there in the morning it was cold and grey and rainy. I got in line behind a number of other flatbeds and settled in for what I thought would be a long wait. Within a few minutes though a guy in a golfcart with knobbly offroad tires came up to my truck and motioned for m to follow him.
I did. Up a steep muddy road, the construction of which, in the surprisingly steep valleys that lead down to the river here, would have been a great undertaking in and of itself. Stacked all the way up along the length of the road were other parts. Down by the river the half constructed plant loomed in the greyness looking quite post-apocalyptic. It looked like this parts, leading a mile or more up the road that wound up the valley, might be parts of an extensive conveyor to bring some of the raw rock materials from their source to the plant. The whole thing was bizarre. A trip into a world I would never have seen otherwise. and I liked that, since it's really the reason i got into the business in the first place.


The cement plant looking east towards the river from the mud road.








The parts were unloaded. My straps and new shiny truck were covered in this thin pale mud. Basically a mud of ground up rock and water, like a shitty cement itself. Into the truck it comes on your feet and then dries and disintegrates into a fine dust that blows about and covers all the new shiny surfaces. What a bummer.
By the time I had my straps wound up I had another load, this one a pick up in Warrenton, Missouri and delivered to Glade Spring, Virginia, way down in the western tip, near Tennessee.