Kansas Mississippi Texas Iowa Nebraska Texas

They've been keeping me running around with a lot of short loads.
After delivering the insulation it was up to Ottawa, Kansas where, adjacent to the American Eagle Outfitters National Distribution Center there is a place that makes big I-beams. I took two of them, each 40 feet long and 4 feet tall, to a Steel Mill in Mississippi. The website for the mill said it was located in "a growing manufacturing infrastructure in the Southern United States." This struck me as odd. For years the industrial infrastructure has been the domain of the north, especially the Rust Belt area around the Great Lakes and of course it has been in decline for a long time. When you think Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh you don't think "hey those places are really on the up and up!" Much of this is due to the unfortunate outsourcing of manufacturing to places where whose governments don't have strict laws about treating people fairly and paying them a living wage, where quality is lower and materials cheaper, so much so that even with the (ever increasing) cost of transporting these products thousands of mile by land sea and air they are still less expensive. It seems odd then that here is a burgeoning manufacturing in the Southeast. One the one hand great, jobs in the US, people being paid fair(er) wages and being treated well (enough) but on the other hand it seems a bit backward, to industrialize an area that for a long time (since the beginnings of this country) has been agricultural and let the rusting hulks in the north continue to dissolve into the earth. I'm sure it makes sense somewhere, probably in ledger or stock portfolio.

From there (there being Columbus, Mississippi in the northeast part of the state, I headed to the other side of town and picked up some floor joist, through some straps over them and took them to Justin, Texas on the northeast side of Fort Worth. Justin, Texas is where they make Justin boots which you might be aware of, if you are ware of things like western boot manufacturers.
Then it was over to Royse City on the far east side Dallas to get some Trailer Axles. Axles for the sort of trailers you might tow behind a pickup to transport tools or a vehicle. There were 3 stops, one in Grandview, Missouri and two in a little town in southwestern Iowa called Clarinda (birthplace of big band leader Glenn Miller and 4-H and home to WWII internment camp for German, Japanese and Italian POWs (what a place! thanks Wikipedia)).
I made the first two stops and then headed north out of town to the third. As it turns out H&H trailers who on their website claim to be "The World's Best Trailer Value" can sell you a trailer so cheeeep because they build them with prison labor. (There is no mention of this on the website).
To enter their facility on the grounds of the Clarinda Correctional Facility (which describes itself as "an adult male medium-security prison to serve primarily chemically dependent, mentally retarded and socially inadequate offenders" one must enter through a dual gate system (sort of like an air lock) and have one's truck searched and be frisked. I think it would have been nice to know about this before hand. The delivery went smoothly though and in no time I was out of there and sitting behind the Super8 waiting for my next load.
That next load would take me to Norfolk, Nebraska (inexplicably pronounced 'Nor-Fork'* and childhood home of Johnny Carson) Far on the northeast side of town there is a big steel mill and in a quick pick up I loaded up with 9 coils of steel bar about 3/4" in diameter. These were destined for Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, via Laredo, Texas, USA.



* I guess it's not that inexplicable, Wikipedia offers this: "The name "Norfolk" is traditionally pronounced "Norfork" by Nebraskans. When the city was incorporated (as a village) in 1881, it was named after the "north fork" tributary of the Elkhorn River on which it lies. The United States Postal Service assumed that "Norfork" was a mistake and changed the name to "Norfolk". This became the official spelling, but the local pronunciation did not change."

Oklahoma Storm

After delivering my load of various metal shapes I was sent up to the north side of Dallas to pick up boards of foam insulation.
I had picked up here before. That time it was windy and the strapping and tarping of the load was an absurdly difficult spectacle. This time it was calm and in short order I had the load strapped tarped and ready to go.
I was headed north to Pittsburg, Kansas, a town in the southeast corner in the midst of building a new police station. A new police station that apparently needed insulation.
On US-69 in Oklahoma great storm clouds began to billow and pile on one another and before long the first winds of the storm storm were jostling this high light load around like a boat at sea. Then came the rain pelting sideways and cracks of lightning with stronger gusts. One of these gusts manage to catch the fold in the tarp at the rear of the load and by the time I pulled into the Love's in Eufaula the relentless wind had snapped and shredded the back of the tarp to tatters.
I bought some more bungees in the store and filled up with fuel before setting out to resecure the back of the load as best I could. Being a load that is 13'6" high I had to get out the ladder which, I think you can understand, made me a bit nervous as lightning continued to split the sky around me.
I got it done and continued down the road. The rain had let up almost entirely but the wind had not. Standard Trucking tarps come in two pieces, each has a top and three flaps, two long ones and a short one (for the front of back of the load) When you tarp you put the rear on first and then the front so that the open end of the rear tarp (which faces forward) is covered by the rear facing open end of the front tarp, so as to prevent wind from catching the rear tarp and pulling it clean off the trailer. Somehow in this storm the rear tarp had worked its way slowly backward until at one pointit eeked out from beneath the front tarp just enough to catch the wind which promptly pulled it off the trailer. In so doing it broke every bungee cord (appx 30) except 4 at the rear which held it out like a drag parachute on a fighter jet. I pulled to the side of the road and in the spitting rain and orange light folded the tarp in the grass as little bits of wet grass and seed stuck to my sandled feet. I proceeded to the terminal in Tulsa, the only place where I might be able to get back on top of the load to retarp it, and got a new tarp, more bungees and no grief, which was a relief.
There was some minor damage to the rear of the product where the tarps had flapped violently against the soft foam and, of course, it had been rained on but the guys at the jobsite in Kansas didn't seem to give a shit.

Jersey-Chicago-Dallas

I woke up early and headed to the truckstop in Centreville where I drop my trailer before coming home. Pleased it had not been stolen I hooked to it and carried on back to Washington where I made the first delivery of those big fabric rolls i had picked up on friday. Then it was up to New Jersey for the second stop and after that a wait. I headed to the truckstop in Paulsboro and hooked up to the idleaire. It was really hot and I was willing to pay not to be. (Idleaire is a system that pipes a lot of services into a truck. Among them:heat/ac, cable tv, phone, internet, electrical outlets etc... at a rate that is cheaper per hour than idling the truck (an idling truck uses about 1 gallon per hour. and many truckers idle the truck all night, even when the temperature outside is comfortable. think about that, cost wise and fossil fuel usage wise)) You have probably seen this service. It looks like a number of metal box trusses spanning the parking lot with yellow tubular appendages dangling into each space. If you haven't noticed it before you will next time you see it.
It took a while to get a load (something I don't get given that I was in the beating nasty core of the east coast megalopolis. but finally I did and I headed up to Perth Amboy to pick up some steel, hooray for steel!
Perth Amboy is located on a point where the Raritan River from New Jersey meets Arthur Kill (a tidal strait that separates Staten Island from New Jersey) and flow into Raritan Bay, a bay of the Atlantic Ocean) If the whole NYC metro area were a big cow, Perth Amboy would be the spot where that cow was about to take a crap. Not that I'm sure it doesn't have its lovely bits. It is he birthplace of Jon Bon Jovi.
This steel production facility used recycled scrap to make lower quality wire and bar products. It was on the banks of the Raritan river and all about there were odd bits of scrap metal including a rail line that came on to the property just to bring in railcars that were ready to be scrapped.
I was picking up some rebar which was coiled into big beehives, an odd way to ship it since I imagine it must be uncoiled and straitened before use. It was headed out to (Mr.) Belvidere, Illinois, near Rockford. By the time I had it strapped and tarped my shirt was as soaked as if i had spent the time in a driving rain.
I drove it the first night to western PA and slept well. I had gone through a cold front and up into the hills. A bit of rain and temperature drop of 40 degrees.

I stopped the next afternoon in Chicago parked at what I like to think of as my secret spot, a little Speedway on the south side at 35th and California with a tiny lot that I always pray will not be full. I was excited to see a friend of mine who lives in Andersonville. I was going to bike. If you know Chicago you know this is a bit of a hike but, having not done anything particularly active for a while and loving, as i do, the biking in the city, the 12 miles went by quickly.
The next day I made the delivery in Belvidere and then was directed to Schaumberg (a far northwest suburb of Chicago and home of the Chicagoland's IKEA. The load wouldn't be ready until 11pm so using my Apple Brand iPhone (which has made my life immeasurable more fulfilling) I found that i was pretty close to a Metra commuter line station, biked there, hopped on and visited some other friends in Chicago. the headed back out, picked up my trailer, loaded with pipes and bars of various shapes and sizes and tarped just in time to guard against a brisk and torrential downpour.
The pipes were destined for Dallas and that, faithfully, is where I took them.
I got there on Saturday night and since the load wasn't to be delivered until Monday I spent Sunday exploring Dallas.
My intent was to head to a nearby Home Depot to buy some chain and a padlock for my bike and then to head into downtown with my primary goal being the Dallas Museum of Art. En route to the Home Depot I developed a flat, since it seems that the roads in texas are sprinkled with broken glass, just for fun.
Using again my iPhone I found that my only hope was a target on the south side (it was sunday) and I bussed down there, fixed the flat and headed back into the city.
To my delight there was an Art fair going on and so I had some overpriced beers and saw the collection of the DMA (who's collection certainly indicates a city of wealthy patrons) for free. and i sweated a lot and got sunburned. what a delight Texas is.
On the way back to my truck I got another flat.

Hotlanta

Diagonally from the northwest to the southeast is not a way that the interstates had mind, at least not directly. Most interstates go north-south or east-west and most diagonals are southwest to northeast.
So i found myself headed down US-41 through Indiana and Evansville where I visited a friend who is a talented photo journalist. We had a fine evening eating German food at one of the most aesthetically entertaining restaurants in the middle west followed by some billiards. Very civilized. A few shots from north of Evansville:




































The delivery in Atlanta (technically in Suwanee) went fine though sweatily and then I was given a load to pick up in Pendergrass. I had been to this place before. Big rolls of fabric (of the sort that mitigate erosion) These had two stops, one in Hyattsville, Maryland (east side of DC) and the next in Williamstown, New Jersey, in the southern part of the state. It was Friday and the deliveries were on Monday and so I was expected to take my weekend between pick up and deliveries. In order to get any decent weekend out of this I would need to bust ass to get home friday night. I did and I did (legally) eeking into the deserted house at 11:45 pm. My parents were in Connecticut for the weekend for my mom's high school reunion.
The next day I went to my high school reunion. It was blisteringly hot. Our conversations seemed too easy for people who had not seen one another in 10 years.
Afterwards I headed back to Kent County for a friend's birthday party where my exhaustion and ingestion resulted in passing out by the pool, something that sounds more glamorous than it is.

Beulah, North Dakota

So I was being sent to Beulah North Dakota to pick up something from a place called Entergy something, which I assumed (correctly) was a power plant of some sort. The commodity was listed in the load assignment as "Industrial Toolings" I had no idea what that meant.
Turning north at Beulah I headed up into a sea of grey green grassy hills and coming over a rise I saw my destination, a great mute blue monolith in soft focus, Richter-esque, if you will.
First, on the left I passed a great hole in the earth where enormous machines with tires that boggle the find haul out the coal, This part of the west, it seems, is one big lump of coal with grass growing over top and cattle munching on the grass. Then to the right a coal gasification plant which smelled both horrible and appetizing, like over smoked rancid ham, the intensity of which made me wonder how long I could stand it. Then, past the ham gasification plant my stop, a big coal power plant. I pulled up to the guard shack and checked in with a surprisingly beautiful woman who seemed unsure why I was there but directed me to one of the Siemens employees who was just getting off his shift. This gruff union troll told me to pull in and park to the side of the road and he would show me where to go since he had o head back with his car to get his tools.
Inside the power plant he directed me to head "back towards that corner and then take an elevator to the 4th floor and ask around up there. These elevators here are so busy you're libel to end up on the 15th floor before you know it."
He was yelling all this at me. He was yelling because the noise in a power plant, you might guess, is a bit overwhelming. It isn't painful overwhelming like a jet or a siren, just a background whir and hum and it isn't until you try to hear someone that you realize just how loud it is.
I headed back toward the corner through a landscape bewildering in its scale and instrumentation. I felt i was walking through an industrial-apocalyptic movie scene such as the one in Batman when the Joker falls into the acid. Is it the Joker?
Some ceilings were low and then opened up 4 stories or 15, all around machines spun and valves hissed. Does it really take all this to generate some electricity?
I found the elevator and headed to the 4th floor. There I encountered a large man with a thick southern accent who, when I told him I was from Melton said "Boy am I glad to see you!" He then explained that he and his coworkers were employees of Siemens. One of the things Siemens does is build power plants. They had been making some repairs or additions to this plant and now were done. It would be my job to take their tools back to the home base just outside of Atlanta. They were glad to see me because, i suppose, these southerners were ready to be done with North Dakota.
They said that I was earlier than they had expected and were pleased since that meant that they could foist the responsibility of loading me onto the night shift.
It was raining lightly and ceaselessly.
They had me back into a bay in the center of the plant, in a part that was open 5 floors, 5 tall floors, probably 100 ft. While I waited for night shift to get done with a safety meeting I repaired my tarps that had been cut in a few places by the sharp grain bin parts.
Eventually loading began and took the better part of 6 hours since all of these steel boxes full of tools (some of them not particularly big) had to be lowered by crane from the 4th floor. This wouldn't have been so bad if afterwards I had not had to pull out and tarp it in the light rain at 12:30 in the morning. Anything with many levels is difficult to tarp since wherever there is a level change there is a possibility for loose tarp and loose tarp means flapping and flapping can result in loosening or tearing of the tarp. This load had enough levels to resemble a city scape and many sharp "ears", where hooks could be fasten to hoist or lower the boxes by crane and so all the ears needed padding before the thing could be tarped and tarping sucks (even more) when you are tired. I finished and slept, still having not caught up on my sleep from my "busy" weekend at the college reunion.

North Dakota

It is pitiful, my inattendance to this blog.
I write when I am inspired to do so and I suppose of late I have not been particularly inspired. I'm looking forward to the end of my trucking journey (semi-journey?) and figuring out how this bread oven business is going to work out. I'm sure the transition will not be as easy or as pleasant as i could hope it to be but it will be different and that will be welcome.
I did have a good last outing, filled with lucky timing and visits.
I left the house and headed as usual over to Baltimore to pick up steel coils. These were headed to St. Joseph, Missouri, a Missouri River town north of Kansas City and south of Omaha. It was the western most rail point in the US in the antebellum era and the place where jesse james' life was brought to an end. It is also a place where a great many cows end their lives and it was part of that industry that it seems I was serving.
The tin plate I was carrying was headed to Silgan Can who make a great majority of the tin cans in this country. The area south of St. Joe is where the stockyards are and surrounding this industry is the industry for packaging all this meat. It is almost like one huge factory made up of different companies and facilities. (Next door was cryovac, the company that makes the vacuum packed plastic bags in which larger cuts of meat are packed.
Before I had even gotten to St. Joe I was sent a message directing me to head to Assumption, Illinois once I was unloaded. This was back in the direction that I had come another 300 miles. Long deadheads are great. I'm still getting paid and the truck is faster and more fuel efficient.
The pick up in Assumption was of steel grain bin components. from a company called GSI which was undoubtedly Grain Systems Incorporated or International or something. These things I was picking up are the round corrugated steel bins with conical roofs that create the vertical aspect of the midwestern landscape.
These grain bins pieces, which took a long time to load and were a pain in the ass to tarp, were headed to Page North Dakota, a small town about an hour north west of Fargo.
A day before I had come to pick up this load i had received a call from some friends of mine asking if I would be able to come to our 5 year college reunion. I said that I did not know, that the freight was the decider and apparently the freight smiled on me that weekend since en route to North Dakota I could stop through Grinnell (Iowa) for the better part of the weekend.
On Sunday, after breakfast i hopped in the truck and drove north through the back roads of Iowa loving the beauty of the landscape in spring, a landscape whose dreariness a few months earlier made me wonder how i could have ever lived here.
I zipped up and around Minneapolis thinking of the first times I had been in this city, a tender and miserable memory. Then the long drive to the northwest towards Fargo. At a rest stop another trucker was putting away his fishing pole having spent an hour by the lake behind the visitors center.
I stopped in Fargo for a shower at the Petro and then continued to Page parking along the wide empty street of this tiny town over night until the sun woke me to unload.
Another driver and I had our trailers unloaded and then we repaired some tarps (sharp edges on these silo parts) and I got a load much more quickly that I had anticipated. I was to head to Beulah in the western part of the state about 100 miles from the Montana border.
The day was grey and cold and rainy and the soft green hills, strange enough in full sunlight were even more ghostly. Along ND-36 there are few towns and the lack of reference points makes for a drive in which time seems to dissolve. The drive did not seem short or long it just was, as if all happened at the same time or not at all.