sweet god when will this end

I'm tiring of the trucking biz. I want to build my oven. I want to live in one place and feel the seasons. But still I carry on, minus a lot of self control and clean living.
From Maryland, when I delivered that load of steel bits to the Power Plant I sat in Hagerstown for a while, too long, and then was told to deadhead up to Pittsburgh. Which I did, where I sat for a while, and then was given a load to pick up the next day at Wheatland Tube in, you guessed it, Wheatland, Pennsylvania, right near the Ohio border. I took a walk in the area. It was one of the most economically depressed and depressing places I have ever seen, I felt like I could be in eastern europe, 20 years ago. i walked up the hill from another huge steel mill into what looked like the "downtown" area. There were no white folks. Two big women smoked a joint in an alley. Three young guys found my presence so absurd that they could not contain their laughter. i was scared. I am a racist asshole. I got back to my truck happy that the doors locked.

I took the tube to an electrical supply company in Conyers, Georgia. Then I picked up some big rolls of fabric of the type that you might lay down on the earth, once you have torn up the grass, to prevent erosion. That went to a construction supply company in Cicero, New York, on the north side of Syracuse. Then I got pissed. I requested to be home on friday, it was monday, and I was told that since it was not 7 days in advance my request could not be granted. !
Then I sat most of the day before being given a load to pick up in Oswego, New York, on the shores of lake ontario. It was rolls of aluminum. very fragile, they make beer cans out of it. I took that to La Crosse, Wisconsin.
I love the northwest. whether we are talking about Washington and Oregon, or "The old northwest" Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota. They are profoundly comfortable places.
From there i was sent up to Eau Claire to pick up boards of foam insulation, super light (9,000 lbs) and took that all the way down to Katy in sweaty old Texas.

and from there a load from Houston. 4 BIG pipes (42" in diameter, 40 feet long) Those went up to Midwest Pipe Coaters in Schererville, Indiana in the Gary metro. and then it was over to Joliet to pick up roofing insulation boards and those went to a roofing contractor in a DC suburb, a place on the beltway poetically named "Beltsville"

And then I drove home.

so good to be home.
The air is cool, the doors are open and the beer is plentiful.


pictures to follow

From Louisiana to Maryland

I got a message that they wanted me to swap the load with a driver in Shreveport. He was from Kansas and needed a load towards home. His load was headed to Maryland. Too bad I had just “come out of the house” (i.e. had a weekend) or it would have been pretty much perfect.
I had talked at length with a driver from Kansas the last time I was in Tulsa. We had delivered together, the load that was to become a pool supply store and chatted while they took the stuff off our trucks. I wondered if this driver from Kansas might be that driver from Kansas.
Turns out indeed it was George whose name I could not remember, and his wire haired terrier Oscar, whose name I could. I backed in next to him at the Love’s, 3 miles from Texas and we swapped trailers and equipment. The temperature had dropped from the mid80s near Lafayette to the low sixties. It was grey and misting. I was loving it.
I headed down the road just a bit to the Petro.

I took a walk around the lot through the mist.
After my walk I went into a small convenience store to buy some beer and a snack. It was small and I was the only person in the place except for the clerk who was a middle aged black woman on the phone behind the counter. I picked up her conversation in mid flow.
“and she says “you heard about yo Huz-band?!’ and I says” a bit irate “no I ain’t heard about my huz-band!” and she says ‘You ain’t heard’ and I says ‘no, I ain’t, what about my huz-band?’ and she says ‘he in jail.’”
Oh boy, I thought.
Reluctantly I approached the counter to complete the sale. The clerk held the phone between her shoulder and skull as she rung me up. She got most of the way through the transaction before looking at me sideways with a little smile. “You gotta id.”
I handed it to her. She looked at it once and then walked to the other side of the register and picked up her peepers with chain and looked again.
“It’s in red near the middle” I said.
“Oh” she laughed, “you plenty old enough.”
“thanks a lot” I said.
“did I ask you for yo id lass time you wuz in here.”
“I’ve never been here before in my life.”
She completed the sale and I walked towards the door. She resumed her conversation.
“I had to ask him fo his id cuz he didn’t look old enough but he was plenty old enough.”
Her voice trailed off as I entered the mist.

The next day was a long slog across the south. Rolling woodland is about all there is to central Mississippi and Alabama. West of Atlanta I put some fuel in the tanks. East of Atlanta a man berated me with all kinds of slurs on the CB because I veered a little too close to the line as he was passing. Something else had been bothering him.

I stopped for the night a little bit further down the road, Carnesville, GA, at a Petro whose parking lot was oddly deserted, It seems like there is too much parking where it is not needed and woefully little where it is needed desperately. (The west coast, the northeast, Florida.)

The next day it was up though the Carolinas and Virginia and then into the DC metro around the beltway and into Montgomery County. The load I had was going to a Power Plant on the Potomac northwest of DC. I stopped in a weigh station on I-270 between Washington and Frederick, I considered stopping there for the night but then thought, while I still had light, I ought to head over the back roads to the power plant rather than wait till morning when the light might not be as great.

I was glad I did. The roads were tiny and hilly and curvy. Very scenic, but scenic rarely means truck friendly. Down a tiny little road I found the entrance to the plant. The guard called the construction supervisor who was apparently mildly perturbed that I had shown up early. He directed me to a place to park overnight in the midst of a lot of other equipment that had been delivered recently. Another driver was there with a similar load but he had brought it from a mill in Alabama. He was a driver who was dedicated to this company, meaning he hauled primarily their freight. He wanted to talk more than I did.
I ate some dinner (carrots and humus, crackers and some cheese and an oatmeal cookie) and read and went to bed. The truck was slanted so my head was slightly above my feet and I sleep very well when it is like this. Maybe I should get a craftmatic adjustable bed.

In the morning they directed us to the location where we would be unloaded and told us to unstrap the load, large metal I-beams painted grasshopper green (like the drink, not the bug). Then they left us alone for a while, I don’t know where they went but it was almost 3 hours before they came back. As our trucks were unloaded I chatted with the foreman. He told me that they were building a structure that would house a system that would recirculate the dirty coal exhaust from the plant and reburn it with limestone resulting in 95% cleaner emissions and a byproduct of gypsum which could be shipped out and turned into drywall. Something like that. I thought that was pretty great.

Now I am in Huyett, just west of Hagerstown, the closest truck stop, at 47 miles away. There are no truckstops near DC, a city that does not produce much of anything.

Out of Florida

So there I sat in St. Augustine sweating away until the next morning when I got a load assignment. I was sent over to Lake City sort of right in the middle of northern Florida, the crackeriest part, to a place called Corbitt Cypress.
I turned into the drive of a very messy, run down yard. Stacks of shaggy felled cypress reached 30 feet in the air. I pulled onto a pretty ragtag looking scale and from a little shack out came a short black woman. She took my info and inquired with the guard about my load, He looked it up and said that I would need to go to lot two and I was given directions. “just remember the blue house.”
I turned right at the blue house onto a wide dirt road that narrowed as it entered the dense north florida pine and palmetto forest. The road, or lane, wound into the forest and than opened to a vast meadow filled with pallets stacked with bags and swathed in plastic. At my end of the field was a house trailer that looked bad even by trailer standards. A man motioned me off the even more rickety scale and into the office. I was sweating again.
Everyone in the office was smoking. A big black guy filled out my bills. A skinny old white woman seemed interested in talking. She explained the cypress mulch industry.
My truck was loaded and I threw straps over it and weighed out, it was over so they took off a pallet and I weighed again. This time it was all good. I was given the bills and I headed out. The load as headed to a Home Depot in Covington, Louisiana. That would mean a drive all the way out the panhandle and skirting the gulf coast. The heat would not relent soon. Nor for that matter would florida. Coming from southern Florida up to St. Augustine and then west out the panhandle is almost 700 miles of florida. If you were to drive from Key West all the way to Pensacola on the western tip of the panhandle that would be 835 miles. You can’t outdo that much intrastate travel unless you’re in Texas. From San Diego to the Oregon border on I-5 in California is only 735 miles. (I don’t think Alaska even has 800 miles of road (at least not paved) The point is Florida is big.
Driving through the gulf coast is eerie. It was eerie even before Katrina. There are tall bridges that rise above some of the bayous and present the landscape. A sea of grey green trees, a sea of grey blue sky. Awash in the middle of nowhere, ready to be swept out to sea.
Covington is on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. A huge oval where the land gave in to the sea. A forklift took the mulch off my trailer. I had another load, this one picked up in Port Allen, west of Baton Rouge.
The load was scaffolding that was being rented to a oil refinery in Kansas. The man there was pissed, not at me, he assured me, but at Melton, who had promised someone would be there at 8am. It was 1:30 and they were supposed to close before lunch on Fridays. I liked the idea of closing before lunch on Fridays. That must be the French influence. Lassiez le bon temps roulez.

Flo-Ridah

Oh disgusting repulsive florida. How did I get here. I'll tell you how:
Over the weekend my DM had another driver drop his trailer loaded with "slinkies" great big coils of 1/4" wire, at my drop spot, and take my empty. The slinkies were headed to Mount Airy, North Carolina where they would be made into the sort of grids of mesh that reinforce concrete, say, in the roads. After that delivery I was sent up to Elizabethton again to pick up more metal buildings. This one was going to Boca Raton (RatMouth) Florida. So that's how. The delivery was to a country club/golf course/stuffy development. It was going to be a maintenance shed for the golf carts and lawn mowers. Again, it is nice to know I am doing the good work.
All of the construction workers were black Caribbeans speaking some sort of creole. The air was thick even at 8 am. There was a haze and a breeze and the sky was bright blue in the north and piling up with monumental clouds in the south.
It felt very foreign.
Just as I left I hopped out of my truck to talk to the guard at the gate and looked down the avenue of palms where I could see the rain advancing. I hopped back in the truck and drove up to the Home Depot and parked in the back to await a load.
I wondered about Florida. So many old people. Why do they come here? Do they retire from not only their jobs but also from the normal cycle of the seasons? Do they think that perhaps by escaping from Winter they are escaping from death, its metaphorical counterpart. That seems foolish. When i grow old I'll move to Minnesota so the cold darkness won't seem like such a shock.

Nothing doing after 4 hours I wrote my DM who told me to head up to St. Augustine where there might be a load tomorrow. And, after what always feels like an impossibly long drive through the beachy urbaness that becomes thick subtropical shag forest, I got here, to the Flying J. and I write you this letter. It is humid and I am sweating, in April.

Rundown, Iowa to Delaware

OK.
From Sioux City I deadheaded all the way across Iowa to Monticello, Iowa (between Dubuque and Cedar Rapids) to pick up metal building parts which I took down to Glenpool, just south of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was going to be a pool supply store. It is always so nice to know that I am part of something bigger than myself.
The night before I camped out in the parking lot of a Lowe's that was under construction and took a nice long walk across a bridge across the Arkansas River and sat in a park looking at a fountain sculpture of bear cubs playing in a mountain stream and felt rather at peace and then, rather foolish for feeling so.
Since it was Friday and I didn't have anything by noon I figured I would probably be sitting in Tulsa all weekend like I did in OKC the weekend before (why always Oklahoma?) So I headed up to the terminal where I got some maintenance done and washed my truck. The next day though, as it turned out. I got a load. Some guy didn't want to take this load of Stainless Steel Pipe and when I saw the assignment, I realized why. There were four stops and it was tarped. This, of course would mean partial untarping and retarping at each stop. But I didn't care, I wanted to get the hell out of Tulsa.
I picked up the load in a dusty windy yard west of Tulsa and headed out. This pipe was beautiful stuff but it was all dipped in oil to prevent corrosion (but it was stainless?) and that oil was making a mess of everything, my tarps included.
The stops were at three plants in Michigan and one in Erie, Pennsylvania. The first stop was a night drop at a plant that made the steering systems for trucks and tractors. Michigan is full of plants making the parts that make cars. I don't know why they don't do it all in one place.


The Pipe Storage in Portland, Michigan












The next was in Grand Rapids at a place that cut and finished pipe to sell to other people. That is lame and they were lame. It was really cold and their staff was astonishingly strict and unpleasant to be around.
The third stop was in Detroit. The directions I had took me to one place on the north side of the city, near Hamtramck, but it turns out the bills said the delivery was for one of their competitors on the south side of the city. Detroit has decided that all of the interstates in its downtown need to be resurfaced and all at the same time, which seems like an odd decision for a city that nature is quickly reclaiming as it's rotting carcass falls into the straits that separate it from Canada. (detroit is French for "straits" or "narrows"). The circuitous and confusing orange barreled detours almost landed me in Canada but fortunately not and I found the right place in short order.
The last stop in Erie was at a small plant that made parts to make parts to make cars. More goddamned absurdity. The pipe gets shipped from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania where they cut it into lengths just right for the shock absorbers, they ship the parts to Mexico to make the shock absorbers and then they probably ship them somewhere else to assemble the suspensions which they ship somewhere else to put in the cars which are shipped to the dealer where you ship it home so you can ship yourself around our ungainly metropolis.
After that I was empty and sent to Medina, Ohio where I picked up a load of Asphalt Roofing shingles. This place was a big disgusting mud pit where Owens Corning put all their palleted shingles to be shipped out. I guess if it doesn't matter whether or not something gets wet you don't need a warehouse as much as a warepit.
I took these to Charlotte down I-77 through hilliest West Virginia. A real slog with a heavy load like this. The got delivered to a building supply place and then I was sent up to Elizabethton, Tennessee to Star Building systems, the same makers of metal building components that I had picked up from in Monticello, Iowa.
For my route I chose US-321 from Gastonia through Boone and into Tennessee. This is a wonderfully hilly and curvy road through the highest (and in my opinion prettiest) part of the Appalachians. I was very glad I had not picked this route while laden as it could have been impossibly slow and, on the downhills, possibly quite dangerous.
US-321 near Boone, hilly curvy and under construction.









Melton does enough business with Star that they have preloaded trailers meaning we can just drop and hook. But with flatbedding this is not as much of an advantage as it is with vans since the loading often does not take all that long, its the securing and these loads can be a real pain to secure. There are often lots of layers, lots of little things and lots of things in crates that are not really made to be strapped down so tightly.
I had an ittybitty load going up to Newark, Delaware which I knew was my home load since it was nearing the end of three weeks and Newark is only about 50 miles from my house.
I delivered the load on Friday morning and drove home.