On the Road (again)

The Midwest

2010-05-17T16:28:00.000-07:00

I picked up a load of sausages from Hillshire Farms (now a division of Sara Lee) in New London, Wisconsin (north of Oshkosh, west of Green Bay). The day was gray and rainy and the air heavy with the scent of smoke and pork flesh. It is not easy to tell the difference, on the exterior, between a food processing plant such as this one, and a plant that produces anything else, edible or not. It is all metal siding, pipes and fans and machines and docks to back into and load up.
I took said sausages to Tolleson, Arizona (part of the hideous Phoenix metro) to a Sara lee "Mixing" facility. A place like this takes products from all the various subsidiaries of a parent company and "mix" them and ship them out to warehouses and distribution centers, a sort of warehouse for warehouses, another middle man, more truck movement.
From New London I traveled southwest on US-151 a route that cuts a beautiful diagonal across the state of Wisconsin from Manitowoc on Lake Michigan (home to Manitowoc, makers of such dissimilar products as cranes and ice machines) through the capital at Madison, across the driftless zone, a relatively rugged area untouched by glaciation in the last ice age, and crosses the Mississippi into Iowa at Dubuque.

The Wisconsin state capitol at Madison.

A road cut exposing "prairie stone" in southwest Wisconsin.

Iowa farmland outside of Dubuque.

More Iowa farmland near Brooklyn.

The (possibly most ostentatious) state capitol at Des Moines.

Ontario, not that one

2010-03-28T14:51:00.000-07:00

But rather the one in California.
The one in the Inland Empire, that great swath of the eastern LA metro, just over the first set of hills, where the ground gets drier and the air hotter and the people more hispanic. You could call Ontario the "heart" of the Inland Empire, that is, if the Inland Empire could possibly have a heart. It is where the main airport for the area is, and there's a big mall, Ontario Mills. What is the deal with calling malls "mills?" Is it a misspelling? They can't possibly have anything to do with mills which make something, textiles, flour, gunpowder, feed, puppies. Malls don't make anything, except money.
Anyway, Ontario is where i went to orientation for this new job. It is essentially a big plot of land covered in featureless warehouses and factories that crank out shit, or dole out shit. The only feature of these warehouses is their logo and so you see great white boxes with names like MagLight or JensenUSA (a bike parts distributor) or Fender or Louisville Slugger. Like its neighbors, Fontana and Mira Loma and Rancho Cucamonga, it is utterly congested with trucks.

Winter in the Inland Empire

An abandoned vineyard in a single block surrounded by warehouses.

An Elephant Statue in the Safari Business Park, Ontario, California

Superstition Mountains

2010-03-21T15:51:00.000-07:00

Before we get to the trucking a few photos from the Superstition Mountains. When I first got into to Tempe I headed with some friends up to the Superstitions Mountain, a range just to the east of the Phoenix metro They are a popular destination for Phoenicians (?) trying to flee the misery of their awful city. I had a pretty low opinion of Arizona (except maybe the whole Grand Canyon thing) but that is because I am thinking of the (completely unacceptable) urban areas and not of the (completely sublime) rural areas. We headed east on US-60, the Superstition Highway (ohhhhhh) out to Apache Junction and then hit the Apache Trail toward the town of Tortilla Flat, the least populated town in Arizona with a zip code. Essentially it appeared to be a false front western sort of place that was a store and a restaurant and a tourist trap. In a dip just beyond Tortilla Flat the pavement ended and the Salt River (or a tributary thereof), full from the recent rains, flowed over the road. A sign warned against crossing in such conditions but we said fuck it and headed over. The road narrowed and became a harrowing single lane track along the side of a mountain with a scrap of a guard rail that was more a visual barrier than any sort of physical one. Not to far up the road we pulled off and hiked up Fish Creek canyon a ways. It was a scrambly sort of hike and a lot of fun. So Pictures...

again, again, againagain

2010-03-21T15:25:00.000-07:00

back on the road friendos.
After delivering produce throughout Western Washington for 8 months I have returned to the long haul. The produce gig was interesting and it was fascinating to see another leg in the journey of our food from farm to table. I delivered produce to supermarkets and restaurants throughout the Puget Sound region. My first routes took me to Top Foods locations in the Seattle metro and after I while i "graduated" to deliveries further afield, typically to Bellingham and Blaine (a town north of Bellingham right on the Canadian border) and on the occasional weekend would make the run to the miserable town of Aberdeen (birthplace of Kurt Cobain) and the town of Ocean Shores to the west. All of these routes were at night, usually starting at 6am and getting off sometime between 2 and 5am. I spent most of the time in Seattle being excruciatingly tired and looking back on that time I was constantly in some sort of zombiefied haze. but it was nice.

It is time now to get back to the business of making money to start this other business and that can't be done making the money i was making at the produce job or working a job where paying rent was required. My initial plan was to switch to a long haul job and spend my weekends alternately in Seattle and Maryland (where the bread oven (and my parents) are) but when I called to finalize plans with the long haul company it turns out they had just instituted a hiring freeze in he Pacific Northwest. Turns out they did not have enough freight in that neck of the woods to get their current drivers who lived in Washington and Oregon home and they were not keen on having more. At first I thought, well fine I'll just change my driver's license back to Maryland and that's that but I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to be relegated to the East both for the variety and the miles and so, having some friends in Arizona, I "moved" there. I shipped off most of my stuff via mail (i don't have a lot of stuff) and the rest came with me on a motorcycle down the coast and into the desert. It was a nice ride on which I will elaborate later.
I got my Arizona license and a few days later headed to orientation in Ontario, California via the always delightful Greyhound.
I wasn't sure I would continue blogging but at least one person wants me to and in their request referred to this as a "Photo Blog" which made me think, i can do that, just photos. less writing. so here you go.

San Rafael Swell

2009-06-14T10:23:00.001-07:00

First off it is Rafael. I spelled it Raphael in an earlier post and that is just wrong.

The San Rafael Swell is a desolate area of eroded beauty in central Utah. All of Utah could really be called an area of eroded beauty (though certainly not of eroded morals) but the Swell, pretty much smack in the middle of the state is exceptional.

Lets begin with geology. Simplistically land is made up of layers of sediment and then sometimes these layers are lifted up, or pushed down or cut through by water and wind. Though this is the case pretty much everywhere it is easiest to see out west since there is less of that pesky vegetation covering everything up.
Utah's layers (the layers of the Colorado plateau) were deposited successively by differing processes over the eons. At points Utah was the floor of a great sea and the sediments are those of shell and other calcium rich substances (limestone) other times it was the edge of the sea and there are layers of sand that has been compressed into cohesive strata (sandstone) and other times it might be hardened lava or volcanic ash. Tectonic forces pushed up the area known as the Colorado Plateau (which consists of parts of the four corners states, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico) in a relatively uniform block (as opposed to being folded or subducted into mountains.) The San Rafael Swell is an uplift upon this uplift. Structurally you could think of it as many blankets layered over a trampoline (the blankets are the successive rock layers). Then forces pushed up on the bottom of the trampoline resulting in a layered dome structure.
Any time land is lifted up water that falls on that land will want to move down to lower elevations and when it does so it will erode the rock along with it. In the southwest the climate is usually very dry and when it does rain it tends to rain a lot and the soils, as dry as they are, cannot absorb any of this water and you end up with catastrophic floods that have even more erosive power. As such you get great gorges and canyons cut through the strata which are very scenic (National Parks on the Colorado Plateau include: Canyonlands, Arches, Capital Reef, Bryce Canyon, Zion and Grand Canyon)(I went on a road trip with my sister a few summers ago that included visits to all of these parks and by the time we were done I decided I was pretty cashed out on erosion and ready to see some volcanoes.)
The San Rafael Swell is so cut through and erratically eroded that it is quite difficult to travel across and, in fact, I-70 is the only paved road to cross it. Even then you have to wonder why since 70's western terminus is Cove Fort, Utah, which isn't much of a town. I suppose the reason would be to provide a link from the southwest (LA and Vegas on I-15) towards Denver, but still traveling 70 through Utah you have to think "this couldn't have been easy."

I-70 E following a canyon off of the swell.

Wrap up Posts

2009-06-14T10:15:00.000-07:00

It has been a long time and I apologize. My excuse this time for the long absence will be the infernal Twitter. I have found it so easy to use my phone to snap pictures and quickly tweet them that it leaves me little inspiration for adding to the blog.
@truckermark is the name under which you will find my twittiness.

This will be the first in a series of wrap up posts on the experiences of trucking out west which perhaps has been so captivating that I have wanted only to soak it in and not immediately regurgitate it on these pages. At any rate now I will and that will be that.
Why, you ask? Well I have found myself a local trucking job delivering produce throughout western (and central) Washington state that will allow me to be home every day and that will be nice. I am not sure if it will provide fodder for blogging but if it does I will begin a new blog. In the mean time enjoy the following posts about the great western United States.

The Virgin River Gorge

2009-04-14T08:56:00.000-07:00

I had picked up a load of imported Target merchandise from NYK Logistics in the LBC. For those of you not as "West Coast" as my self that's Long Beach, California, I will try and avoid thuggin out too hard henceforth.) This load of trinkets from Japan and China was headed to a Distribution Center in Pueblo, Colorado 1200 miles distant. Often there are multiple routes available to get from one point to another and many truckers just pick the Interstate, that uniform 4+ lane strip of dullness where the mountains are cut through and the valleys filled making travel through them easier, faster, and more unremarkable. Anyone who has driven across the country (or even any state) and found it dull did so on the interstate (or is just a hater, in which case, quit wasting gas.)
The back roads are often shorter, slower and almost invariably more interesting. Besides the towns and villages where you might encounter people smaller roads traverse terrain where building larger roads would be impossible or not cost efficient. i.e. prettier country. My advice, if you have the time, take the back roads.

HOWEVER, there are stretches of interstate with mind bending scenery. You can't avoid beauty that assiduously. Some such stretches are I-90 from Ellensburg to Seattle, Washington over Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascades (the only stretch of Interstate that is designated a national scenic byway), I-5 over the grapevine in Southern California, I-81 along the Blue Ridge in Virginia etc... Most of these roads clearly connect two important areas that need connecting an in so doing must surmount apparent obstacles (typically abrupt changes in elevation, mountains.) Some areas, however make you wonder why they would have ever put a interstate here, two such locations are ones that I had to travel to move this target shit to Colorado. I-15 through the Virgin River Gorge in the far northwestern Arizona and I-70 through the San Raphael Swell in central Utah.
The push to carve a highway in the Virgin River Gorge is more understandable as it connects Las Vegas and Los Angeles to the valley of the Great Salt Lake. There is an enormous elevation obstacle along this route in the name of the Colorado Plateau. I'm not going to get too geologically specific but suffice it to say this region, centered around the 4 corners area, was uplifted in millenia past by whatever it is that uplifts the earth. With all this elevation, and water still wanting, as it does, to flow down hill, gradually canyons were cut through this elevation creating the scenic amazements that are the Grand Canyon and the parks of Utah: Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, Capital Reef and Zion. The Virgin River, which flows southwest out of Zion eventually tumbles off the plateau and into the Mojave Desert in so doing carving itself a nice canyon in the far northwest corner of Arizona (just to give you an idea of the elevation differential here, Vegas, down in the low hot Mojave, is at 2000 ft and Cedar City, UT is at over 5,800.
Naturally when looking for a way to mount this rise the interstate builders looked for a precut route and the Virgin River Gorge was just such a route. Nonetheless, mile for mile, it was one of the most expensive stretches of interstate. Some pictures:

Entering the Gorge

Curvyness

Up on the Plateau in Utah

In the next episode: The insanity that is The San Raphael Swell...

Apology Post

2009-04-14T08:47:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry friendos.
Inspiration/desire to write blog posts and the time to do so do not often overlap with internet access. Especially out here in this lonesome crowded west. I've been in a lot of really amazing places of late. of note: The San Raphael Swell in central Utah, US-50 through Colorado, US-395 in the Owens Valley of Eastern California, all of the desolate polygon that is Nevada, Craters of the Moon and the Salmon River Valley in Idaho, and the Bitteroot mountains and river valley of Western Montana. I will take on each of these places in pictures and words, probably more pictures.

I'm so sad about my lack of blog posts that I have taken to hiding between my truck and trailer where no one can hear me weeping.

getting to know I-5

2009-03-05T07:41:00.000-08:00

This blog has been getting so much attention ever since Jaime started the TBTL Meta Blog. And that's awesome. This has occurred concurrently with my birth into the bizarre world of twitter and I have been twittering pictures of my travels so I'm not sure what I'll have to post here. I suppose I will have to get more interesting and less "then i took x from y to z." The extra attention is also a good motivator. thanks people.

I did not stray far, for the whole last 2 weeks, from Interstate 5. In fact, when I made this move (from the east coast) i was told/warned that this is how freight moves in the west. Unlike the east which has a dense coastal population and a good distribution of people throughout the Appalachians and Midwest, the west, aside from the dense coastal cities has almost no population and as such, no manufacturing and no demand for goods (relatively speaking). So I don't so much mind driving up and down the I-5 since I get paid by the mile and if I am sitting in Roswell, New Mexico for a day and a half I don't make anything. (and roswell is not a place i would choose to vacation, especially by myself).

I-5 begins, or ends, at the Mexican border, just south of San Diego and north of Tijuana. Immediately east of here is the area called Otay Mesa which is where the vast majority of the truck traffic from the maquiladoras enters the US. (Maquiladoras are Mexican assembly plants who import parts, tax free, and export finished goods for the US market. They are almost all in border cities like Nuevo Laredo, Juarez, Mexicali, and Tijuana. Does this make them essentially "wage shelters" where US companies can get long hours for low wages free of the tiresome and costly worker's rights laws (like the luxuriant $6.55 min. wage) of the US government? Yes, yes it does, but I'm not really trying to start that conversation.)

From there the freeway heads north through Orange County and into the LA Metro (Large limited access roads are called "Freeways" in California (mostly out east the term "highway" is used.) California gives names to all their freeways and different names to different sections. I-5 or "the 5" is known as "The San Diego Freeway" "The Santa Ana Freeway" and, for the majority of its route through California "The Golden State Freeway.)
North of Los Angeles the freeway passes through the San Fernando valley home of movie studios before climbing up to summit Tejon Pass and tumble into the San Joaquin Valley.
The entirety of southern California is a great low, mostly dry, valley. Through extensive aqueduct projects that move water from rainy northern California and the snowy Sierra Nevada down the length of the valley it has become one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country (25% of the nations production (cash value) (according to wikipedia)). Grapes for one provide much of the less expensive wine (like that sold in 1.5 L bottles or, better yet, boxes.) They also turn grapes into rasins. Almonds are a huge crop, and as i mentioned last week, they are in bloom currently and very much what you notice at this time of year. This area also produces a lot of the early season vegetables for those people in parts of the country that need vegetables at the wrong time.
North of Stockton, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers flow together toward the Bay Area estuary, you enter the Northern Central Valley, or Sacramento Valley whose products are similar to that of the southern San Joaquin, but add rice, olives and plums for making 2/3 of the worldwide production of prunes (again wikipedia).

Just before Redding the terrain, which has to this point been relentlessly flat, flatter than most of the midwest (though always with mountains visible in the distance to the east and west) begins to swell and rise a bit before climbing up into the Siskiyou/Klamath/South Cascade mountains. The road passes Shasta Lake, an impoundment of the Sacramento River, which provides much of the water for central valley irrigation projects. It is currently drastically low, a result of a three year drought in California.

I-5 skirts along the edge of Mount Shasta, which, when it is clear, is pretty dramatic. It is sort of the southern bookend to the Cascades (as Mount Baker in Northern Washington is the northern).

At the Oregon border the highway crosses Siskiyou Summit, the highest point on I-5 and the descent northbound is the steepest interstate grade in the US. Add to that frequent precipitation (frequently at temperatures at or below freezing) and you got yourself a pretty treacherous bobsled run.
All of southern Oregon (and northern California) is basically a big clump of mountains that separate the Central Valley of California and the Willamette Valley of Oregon (The Willamette was where you were heading during those hours of caulking wagons, shooting buffalo and repairing axles in Oregon Trail.) So in order to get from nice flat road to nice flat road you must pass a number of summits and traverse the valleys of mountain streams like the Rogue and Umpqua in Southern Oregon.
Finally, at Eugene, you're out of the mountains for good (on I-5 at least.)
The Willamette valley produces a lot of berries and hazlenuts, as well as hops (for all those Oregon microbreweries) and sod/grass seed. Oh yes and wine grapes of course.
Here again, the terrain is flat and lush and mountains are visible to the east and the low coast range to the west.
Portland is where the Willamette flows into the Columbia and where I-5 enters Washington as it follows the Columbia's northward bend to the cities of Kelso and Longview. The land is hilly and densely forested with trees that someone is aching to cut down and make into paper or a soon to be foreclosed on house. Joining the basin of Puget Sound at Olympia you can see the state capital dome prominently (I have heard that it is the second highest masonry dome in the world after the Duomo (designed by Brunelleschi) in Florence. but wikipedia says 4th tallest (damn them))
Between Olympia and Tacoma lies Fort Lewis, a large Army base, and that's all i have to say about that.
Tacoma, as I noted earlier, smells bad.
After Tacoma I-5 passes through the suburbs of Seattle/Tacoma like Fife, Federal Way, Tukwila and the beautifully named "SeaTac" (home of the airport) and all their terrible traffic, terrible probably because it all has to squeeze through the narrow space between the Cascades and Puget Sound.
North of Seattle (an area I have not traveled much by truck) there are the alluvial plains of rivers like the Snohomish and Skagit as they spread into marshy convergence with Puget Sound (The Skagit river delta is known for its tulip production) and then a small range of mountains and the basin of land around Bellingham Bay. North of Bellingham the land is quite flat and essentially in the valley of the Fraser River (the river that flows through Vancouver, BC). The road ends, or begins, at Blaine, about 30 miles south of Vancouver.

I'm not sure how this became a route description of I-5 but there you have it in about 1/100 the time it takes to drive it.

I-5, The Golden State Freeway!

2009-02-24T21:50:00.000-08:00

I had a few days off after my last sortie, if you will, to spend in Seattle, and Seattle decided to woo me with clear skies and fair temperatures (but I know better.) I spent the mornings biking around my knew environs and the afternoons eating rich foods and drinking ciders and beers of local origin, which, coming from a place where this is less possible (the local part, not the drinking, we drink plenty in maryland), is really great. On the last night we ate salami from Salumi, Made hamburgers topped with thin slices of green apple and sharp cheddar cheese and made this:

Needless to say the next day i felt like shit.

This week has been, thus far, more what I expected from this new Western gig, I picked up a load in Seattle, also from NYK logistics which you may remember from the previous post, and took it down to Woodland, California, where there is a large and delightful Target Distribution Center. Then, it being sunday, I sat all day and then was assigned a load to pick up the next day in Folsom, east of Sacramento (indeed home of the eponymous prison of Johnny Cash fame). The load had nothing to do with prison but more with soy sauce, in big 5 gallon buckets from Kikkoman. This Soy Sauce was headed to Irving, Texas, but I only took it as far as French Camp (near Stockton) and dropped it for another driver to take the rest of the way. I, meanwhile, picked up a trailer load of Robert Mondavi Wine from Lodi and took it to the Vons warehouse in Santa Fe Springs (So.East LA). Vons is a LA area grocery store owned by Safeway.
Central California is alternately duller than dull and bizarrely wondrous. There are the parts that are unending fields or orchards and there are the parts that are surreal steep green hills folding into themselves, hiding other worlds, possibly, and then you're back in Illinois again.

From there i had a short load picking up a load of Target brand bleach cleanser from its manufacturer (also in Santa Fe Springs) and took those up to yet another Target dc north of Bakersfield.
And as of now I am sitting at a flying J in the central valley breathing in the sometimes lovely, sometimes, repulsive smell of almond trees in bloom. Tomorrow I pick up some sears crap to take to Everett, Washington. Oh the life.

Endless almond trees in the central valley, i had no idea we ate so many almonds.

As a side note, I have started a project of taking portraits of truckers and their dogs. here is one of the first, this is Dennis and his dog, Baby:

Front Range to the Wasatch Front (The Back Range?)

2009-02-09T18:41:00.000-08:00

And Then! Another load from Denver back into New Mexico! (I was beginning to get exasperated, I-25 along the front range of the Rockies is beautiful but any road after the 3rd time in a row begins to get old.)
This load was Nestle PureLife Bottled Water from a plant in Denver on its way to a Wal*Mart DC in Los Lunas, NM. I asked the shipping clerk what the source of the water was and he said it was from the Denver municipal supply, i.e. tap water. Now, I know that a lot of bottles water is tap water but this movement struck me as ridiculous.
I know New Mexico is a desert but it has plenty of drinking water which, curiously comes from the Rio Grande, a river with its source in where? Colorado. And how does it get to New Mexico? By trucks running at 6mpg? no, by gravity. hmmmm.
Anyway. Then I got a load to pick up in Roswell, New Mexico, the sight (well biggest town near the sight of) of a "UFO" crash and alien autopsy. Look it up on wikipedia.
Roswell is a different part of New Mexico, part that feels more like Texas or Oklahoma with vast (dry brown) grassy plains and the smell of concentrated herds of dairy cattle all around.
New Mexico, surprisingly is a very productive dairy state and Leprino Foods here operates the worlds largest mozzarella cheese plant making IQF shredded cheese, primarily for pizzas, I would guess. I don't drive a reefer (refrigerated trailer) so I was not here to pick up cheese but rather a byproduct of cheese making.
When you make cheese, you must first separate the milk solids (curds, which will become cheese) from the whey, a protein rich translucent liquid (think what rotten milk in your fridge looks like). If you have a huge cheese plant (ie it would be very hard to do this at home) you can dry this whey into a fine powder, whey protein concentrate, which is used as a nutritional supplement and industrial baking additive.
I trucked this stuff up to Salt Lake City and unloaded at a cold storage warehouse on the west side of town, not far from the shores of the city's namesake body of water. When I opened the trailer doors a rich sweet smell reminiscent of milkshakes, wafted from within. I sit now, at a Pilot on the west side, typing away, waiting for some way to get back to the beautiful northwest.

(looking west on NW 116th or 117th St. in Seattle, down into Carkeek Park and across to the Olympic Mountains (click to enlarge and see the snowy peaks))

To the Front Range!

2009-02-09T17:38:00.001-08:00

I've been not doing a whole lot of driving of late as freight is "soft" i.e. (brace yourself) the economy is not doing too well.
I drove down to the droptlot and then got a ride with Mylie, a Hawai'ian/Portugese lady who drives a truck based out of Portland. She was coming down from having just picked up a load in Seattle which she would drop in Portland for some home time. I had to get a ride with her because my truck was in Portland but my parking location is in Sumner, a small town with a heavily industrial north end, near Tacoma (about 39 miles south of Seattle.
I found my truck (inexplicably older than my last truck. One side benefit of transfering to the west coast, i thought, would be that I could almost certainly get a newer truck. well HA HA mark, of the 10% of the fleet that could be older than my last truck I won the lottery!) and settled in. The next morning I met with dispatcher, a nice guy from South Dakota who seems to be in the northwest for similar reasons to mine. I think we will get along well, at least as far as drivers and dispatcher typically do. (NB I am not the sort of asshole driver who thinks his dispatcher is trying to ruin his day.)
Then I hopped back in my truck and got a load with two stops, one on the far side of portland, out on the spit of land where the Willamette River empties into the mighty Columbia. The second stop was in Fife, Washington, right outside of beautiful Tacoma. (Tacoma, for those of you not familiar with the area, is seattle's ugly little sister. It is the Camden to Seattle's Philadelphia, the Gary to it's Chicago. Which probably isn't fair and I am sure there are lots of good things about Tacoma (and Gary and Camden) It often reeks of the "tacomaroma" the heady overcooked broccoli stank of paper making.
It's name is the Lushootseed (Puyallup) name for Mt. Rainier (Mother of Waters) whose presence on the southeastern horizon (on a clear day) is incredible). It is a much busier port than Seattle, importing goods from Asia that are then shipped by rail eastward across the country (like the busier port of LA/Long Beach, to the south).)
After making the delivery in Fife I headed over to the dropyard in Sumner and hopped in my car and headed over to Fred Meyer to buy some food for the next few weeks. Fred Meyer is a PNW chain of mega stores similar to Wal*Mart but somehow when you walk in they seem even more immense. When I returned to my truck I found I had gotten a new load assignment. A pick up at NYK logistics (a place that takes imports and sorts them out to be delivered to various locations (such as Target DCs, where this one was going) The place was conveniently, literally, next door (or gate) and so I popped over, picked up the trailer, and came back to the drop yard.
The load was going to Topeka, Kansas, a nice long one (1800 miles) though curiously out of my range (my new job description is Western Regional (meaning I drive the 11 western states (Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico). When I discussed this the next day with my dispatcher we eventually decided to relay it in Denver, still a healthy run (1200 miles).
From there I got a load of baled scrap cardboard from a Safeway DC in Denver on its way down to a paper mill that makes new cardboard out of old cardboard in Prewitt, New Mexico. Apparently when we pull these cardboard loads into Prewitt we often pull loads of new stock out of Prewitt and typically these go to Southern California, putting you on the I-5 and making a return up to the northwest easier. (Not a lot of freight goes up to the Northwest, other than up from southern California or from Mexico (Laredo, Nogales or Otay Mesa (Tijuana))
Inexplicably the load I got was headed back to Denver.

West Coast (my fingers are making a W)

2009-01-27T10:47:00.001-08:00

So I have moved out here to the West Coast (coincidentally, did you know that it is also the 'best coast'?! crazy, I know.)
Goal is to see new places, make money, have good times in Seattle and eventually, when I'm ready, return to The B'east coast to make the bread oven happen fo' real.
The drive out, apart from my driving partner's sudden, quickly passing, and violent illness (he was poisoned by a serb) was pretty uneventful. In South Dakota it was even warm enough to eat lunch in Rapid City outside in shirtsleeves.
We slid into Seattle in a dusky fog and only the outlines and presence of the enormous trees of the magical forest.

Yesterday I headed down to Sumner near Tacoma where Schneider has a droplot. It may possibly be the most beautiful droplot in the world.
I waited there most of the day for a driver who was going to give me a ride down to the Portland Operating Center where I would pick up a truck. She was delayed at a shipper in Seattle (picking up crates of broken glass from TVs to be recycled.) Eventually we got down here, I found my truck and moved myself in.

This morning it is snowing in Portland as I am waiting to deliver my first West Coast load which has a stop in Portland and another in Fife, Washington, also near Tacoma.

Standby for more delightful adventures from the left coast.

Here's a view of the Olympics from Carkeek park which is not far from where I am crashing in Seattle:

And some ice on the beach beneath my feet:

Recent Occurences

2008-12-28T09:41:00.000-08:00

I always like the way the Blue Beacons (truck washes) look at night because they are so bright and usually billowing with steam. It is all very dramatic. I was south of Atlanta on my way from Florida up to Kentucky with Dollar General schtuff.

I saw this Mexican restaurant in Cambridge, Ohio. I gotta wonder how the locals deal with pronouncing this. The folks back where I comes from have some troubles with the local pizza place 'Procolino's' and that's pretty standard Italian not ancient Nahuatl. I imagine they just say "the mexican place next to Wal*Mart"

After delivering some cereal (mostly honeycombs and fruity and cocoa pebbles) to Hunt's Point Market in the Bronx I had a pick up in Jersey City but I had to wait a while for it and so I took a walk with a friend who was catching a ride down to Maryland for the holidays. Amazingly we found this pleasant little beach (albeit strewn with tires and whatnot) overlooking this tranquil scene of international commerce.

I am currently taking a load of corrugated cardboard from Akron, Ohio to Charlotte, North Carolina. Since it is a short load and I had all weekend to do it I took little roads through Ohio which were pretty but at times tortuous. Here along the Ohio River I saw a tug pushing 15 barges of coal up river.

Looking west across the Ohio towards Ohio, from Ravenswood, West Virginia.

Sunny Florida

2008-12-18T17:07:00.000-08:00

Today was a beautiful day, a day that makes you wonder why it was so good, what led up to it, what is it comprised of and what can be done to replicate those parameters so that every day from now on is like this one. And the really weird thing is most of this day happened in Florida.

After delivering a load of Sodium Bicarbonate (baking soda) to a pool supply store in Birmingham, Alabama. I was sent down to International Paper in Prattville where the rich vegetal-chemical wretch of a pulp mill poured from my nostrils down seemingly to the pit of my stomach and recalled, in proper Proustian fashion, other paper milling regions, Maine, Louisiana, Northern Wisconsin and, fondly, the Pacific Northwest.
6 huge rolls of cardstock were on their way to Harrisburg (wait for it) North Carolina (?) to a place that made packaging.
I was then directed to drop my empty trailer at the operating center in Charlotte and bobtail to Jacksonville, Florida to pick up a different empty trailer. I can not make out the logic of this 366 mile jaunt but it does wonders for my mpg average. (a criteria on which a potential bonus is based.)
I picked up the trailer and deadheaded to Alachua passing through the odd mini ranch land land of north central Florida. It seems that everyone here has a house (rancher style) in the middle of a 5-8 acre parcel of treeless land (there are trees at the edges) enclosed by a wooden fence and most people have horses. The trees are either tall scrappy loblolly pines or live oaks draped in Spanish moss the color of oxidized copper.
I picked up a load of merchandise from a Dollar General Distribution Center that is destined for another Dollar General distribution center in Scottsville, Kentucky. Lord knows why they need to move stuff between distribution centers like this.
I headed up the road and just before the Georgia Line stopped and bought some citrus fruits for christmas time. The fact that citrus ripens in the winter is a fact that makes me think that maybe the world or god or whatever is looking out for us.

Nothing exciting today, just a day where I felt excited.

One Day

2008-12-12T17:56:00.000-08:00

All of this happened today, I swear:

1.) I woke up in Danville, Kentucky where I was supposed to deliver a load of engines yesterday but I got held up in Dallas as my truck needed some work on its own engine. (I got there last night but they were closed which made me nervous since I had already been assigned another load to pick up in the morning and the pick up was "critical" what they call "line shut down" as in, you don't show up on time you fuck up the works.)

2.) I got unloaded fairly fast with just enough time to get where I needed to go.

3.) I booked it down US-150 part of which is not a legal truck route, but had I took a legal truck route I would not have made it on time (which I did).

4.) The pick up was at a tobacco warehouse in London, Kentucky and the whole "line shut down" thing was because they basically have trucks coming in off farms unloading tobacco all day and that tobacco is then graded and weighed and put in new trucks and sent to North Carolina to made into cigarettes (this kind of tobacco, Burley, is grown almost entirely in Kentucky (70% of national production) and is prized for its mildness and ability to grow in really shitty soil. Almost all cigarettes in the US are made from this varietal.

5.) Last night in the hills and hollers of Eastern Kentucky a sloppy wet snow had fallen and as a result the tobacco was coming in slowly since the farmers were either waiting for it to clear up or were just plain stuck. Consequently trucks were being loaded slowly and there was absolutely no rush since I would not be loaded til later.

6.) When I returned to my truck I realized I had somehow managed to lock myself out. I have never done this before.

7.) I tried to see if i could get in through the wing windows since the hinge on the driver's side one is broken and therefore the whole thing is a bit loose. In my over exuberance I broke the window and in braking the window I managed to cut my wrist. (not too badly, But I was so startled by the way auto glass just sort of 'pops' that I didn't realize I was bleeding until five minutes into cleaning up the glass when I felt some wetness running down my arm.)

8.) I sat around waiting to get into a door at the tobacco warehouse until after noon.

9.) After I got into a door it took til 1:00 til someone came by to inspect the trailer.

10.) The manager found a hole in my trailer that I failed to notice and told me I needed a new trailer or to have that one repaired.

11.) Luckily there was a Walmart DC nearby that Schneider runs a dedicated account out of and so I went over there and the bored mechanics were thrilled to have something to do.

12.) They fixed my broken wing window at the same time.

13.) I went back to the tobacco warehouse.

14.) As I went into the office I heard the manager say "Yeah trailer TA739376,[my trailer] we're gonna have to cancel that load." There wasn't enough tobacco coming in that day.

15.) I drove down to the Pilot in Corbin were I wait still for a load. It's friday night, freight is often bad on the weekends and we are in one of the "softest" freight markets in some time. (i.e. There's a chance I'll be sitting for a while.)

16.) I went to use the bathroom at the Pilot and as I was standing at the urinal a man and his 10-12 year old son come in. The son says, "dad I got to poop again" and goes into a stall. The man takes the urinal next to me. We both stare intently at the wall. From the stall the son says "Dad?" and the Dad says "yeah" and the son says "I love you" and the dad says "I love you too."

Sheila

2008-12-07T08:31:00.000-08:00

I was sitting in a truckstop in Effingham, Illinois, a city I have often noted for its humorous name. I can suggest others, Essingham, Beaessville, Washington G.D.
Anyway, I was in the lot of the TA (while we're on the subject of lewd initials). Some TAs are nice, new and shiny and generally well kept. But many are not. The parking lot is full of potholes and the whole place seems to be covered in a patina of diesel soot and hair grease. This TA was one of the later variety. I had just delivered a load of newsprint and was awaiting a new assignment when a woman pulling a small wheeled suitcase approached my door. I rolled down the window.
"Hey there, you wouldn't by any chance be going to Toledo would you?" She was polite but seemed a bit desperate and had the look of an older, more haggard Courtney Love.
"No Sorry." I began to roll the window back up.
"Can I use your CB to see if there's anyone around here headed that way."
I turned on my CB and handed the mic out the window. She pouted a bit and whined, "what i can't sit down?" I let her in the passenger side door. (It is at this point in the telling that most people freak out. She didn't seem harmful (except perhaps to herself) though later in our conversation I contemplated how likely she was to stab me with a short knife and take what little money I had in my wallet.)
I had recently downloaded a new ap for the iPhone that allowed me to make relatively hi-fi recordings and as she settled in I started it up and so what follows (however unethically) is a transcript of that conversation:
S=Sheila, M=me, mark

I started by asking her how she came to be looking for a ride in Effingham...

S:Oh that's a long story

M:Yeah

S:I couldn't cross the Canadian border with my boyfriend cause I didn't have my birth certificate, all i had was my driver's license with me.

[I'd have to go down to] South Carolina to get that but I don't really... (trails off)

M: Your boyfriend a truck driver?

S: Yeah outta Montreal

M: Oh, OK.

CB: WHATS THE FASTEST WAY TO GET TO EVANSVILLE, INDIANA FROM HERE?

S: (to herself) close to Coryden (into the CB) Is that close to Coryden, driver?

CB: (response to driver's question inaudible)

CB: TAKE IT, TAKE IT, GO DOWN TO MOUNT VERNON AND GET 64?

CB: (another inaudible response)

CB: OK, 10-4 THANKYA MAN. IT AINT BETTER TO GO DOWN 33 TO 130 AND ALL THAT CRAP, OR JUST GET ON THE INTERSTATE, I GOT TWO HOURS TO BE THERE.

M: Well he better hustle then.

Me and Sheila: (chuckle)

CB: IF YOU GOT TWO HOURS YOU BETTER HAMMER ON IT

Me and Sheila: (Heartier chuckle)

CB: I WILL TRY

S: Maybe I should go on, to, Toledo,

CB: THANKS A LOT THERE, SAYS ITS ONLY 100 MILES BUT, I DON'T KNOW...

I hate going all the way out to Tucson I mean, I been livin there but I hate fuckin Texas, all that, It's hot down there,

M: That's a long way

S: mm hmm.

S: (on the CB) Anybody goin towards Toledo?

S: Is anybody goin towards Toledo?

(nonsense CB noise)

S: oh, no...

(long pause)

M: What's in Toledo?

S: I've been there and I, I know the town.

M: Oh, OK

S: I know the city...

M: How about Coryden?

S: (emphatically) Coryden is a GOOD place in Indiana.

M: Yeah?

S: Yeah. A really good place...

M: It near Louisville?

S: (somewhat surprised) Yeah. (long pause) but there's not one truck stop in Coryden.

M: No, It's all hilly down there, not much flat space.

S: (almost emotional) That's a good little town, (mumbles) I gotta make my mind up,
(mumbles) really go to Tucson.

M: Tucsons an option too?

S: Yeah

M: What's in Tucson?

S: Well I been livin there the better part of a year so I know people there.

M: Oh, OK. That's a whole different place isn't it?

S: Mmmm Hmmm. I mean it gets cold in the desert but ...

(CB cuts in somebody selling something, we exchange a few unintelligible lines)

S: Lot a truck stops there in Toledo (to the CB) Anybody goin to Toledo, Tucson or Little Rock?

(long pause)

S: Anybody over there at the Flying J can y'all hear me drivers? Sometimes it takes a little bit. Are you in a hurry?

M: No I was about to go inside but, I'm just waitin on a load.

(long pause)

S: (on the CB) How bout it at the uh Flying J anybody goin to Toledo or Tucson?

CB: (a female voice) Break 1-9. Hi Speedco Customers if you're planning on stopping at Speedco truck lube and tire service at exit 160 we currently have 3 open oil bays 2 open tire bays.

(pause)

M: Lemme, I'm going, Lemme check and see if it's calibrated right, sometimes it falls outta calibration. (pause) yeah it should be doing pretty well

S: It doin alright?

M: yeah

S: Drivers at the TA or Flyin' J anybody going to Toledo or Tucson?

(pause)

S: Sometimes you have real good luck sometimes it takes a little bit.

M: Yeah.

S: Well while you're sittin here.. My name's Sheila (she offers me her hand)

M: Hey

S: Hi, What's your name?

M: Mark

S: Mark, do you care if I drink a beer while we're sittin here?

M: I'd prefer if you didn't drink it in my truck just caus...

S: Oh, Ok.

M: It's a company thing, you know.

S: Even when you're sittin still you can't do it can you?

M: Yeah, I can't ever have alcohol in the truck.

S: Oh. Yeah?

M: Yeah, I wouldn't mind usually but it's just...

S: (sincerely) Yeah I understand.

M: You never know if you know, another driver's gonna drive by..

S: Yeah everybody tells on everybody so much! I didn't know drivers were like that but they, do, they can be (CB crackles) They're nosy.

M: Yeah they think if they get somebody else fired they'll get more freight or, I don't know its stupid, the companies enormous, they got like 13,000 drivers.

S: Yeah?

M: One person's not gonna affect that, you know. But... Yeah I'm not gonna say I've never had a beer in the truck you know but I'm just trying...

S: Yeah... I understand

M: try not to.

(CB crackles)

S: I just don't wanna go down south

M: How come?

S: Hot. Can't stand the sun and the heat.

M: You prefer it like it was last night?

S: mm hmm.

M: In the 20s?

S: Oh, yeah.

M: That why you wanna head up to Canada?

S: Yeah, Well my boyfriend's from Montreal. I love that weather. And the Snow.

M: Mmmhmm. snow much in Little Rock?

S: No, Very seldom. (pause) If they try and give me some problems about knockin on doors, askin to use radios, The police brought me here.

M: Oh they did?

S: I needed them to, Yeah (defensively) so they know exactly what I'm doin so, you know.

M: How did the, uh...

S: Oh...

M: the uh police...if you don't mind my asking?

S: I went to the hospital last night to get detox.

M: Oh really?

S: And they don't medically detox you in Effingham. So I asked them, they said the police'll pick you up and take you, so the police pick me up and I, I told em I need to get a ride and he brought me right here. So... They can't say shit to me.

M: I guess not.

S: And I am gettin (interrupts herself, on the CB) Break 1-9 for a radio check.

(unrelated CB chatter)

S: Break 1-9 for a radio check...
Break 1-9 for a radio check...
Break 1-9 for a radio check...

CB: (Indian accent) Yar radio ees workin.

S: Thank You.

CB: Yar welcoom.

S: Driver is anybody goin toward Toledo or Tucson?

(long pause)

S: (sigh) I guess they're not goin right now

M: Na...

S: I'm gonna go in and use the bathroom, and fool around in there, maybe I'll get somebody.

M: I as just about to head in, go to the bathroom myself. Good luck.

S: Thank you.

M" Sorry about your... your uh, luck out here. You know it's a slow time, slow time.

S: I know!

M: Everybody's...

S: It'll come around.

M: Yeah.

S: I just don't like waitin, waitin for it. You know, just like anybody else, impatient.

M: I hear ya. Good Luck.

S: Thank you.

(climbs out of the cab and heads towards the TA, suitcase in tow.)

-fin-

Run Down

2008-11-29T05:01:00.000-08:00

I don’t know why I haven’t been writing. Haven’t wanted to. Haven’t thought of it. Don’t have the time. That last reason is certainly the most full of shit for I do indeed have the time. Here’s some things that have happened in the last few weeks:

I hauled Eucalyptus Pulp from the port of Baltimore to Central Illinois. It was harvested from mono-culture groves in Brazil and would be made into automotive filters. It is good to know that in addition to hauling freight for Wal*Mart, consuming a gallon of fuel every 7 miles, and generally contributing to an economy that I think is fundamentally at odds with the way in which humans should live on the earth I am also helping to destroy the rain forest. Perhaps next week I will get to haul the clubs that are used to beat baby seals.

(The way that started off it sounds like I am going to rant but, I assure you, that is not my intention.)

I hauled bicycles from Illinois to a Wal*Mart DC (distribution center) in southern Virginia. The company, Pacific Cycles, is a big conglomerate that you probably haven’t heard of but they have bought up a number of brands you probably have heard of (Schwinn, Mongoose, etc…) and made them cheap and crappy, almost assuredly at the behest of their great satanic overlords, The Walton family. In the run down warehouse I asked the shipping clerk if they made the bikes there.
“We used to…Now we just distribute ‘em.”
Unbelievably it is cheaper to manufacture these things in China, put them in a container, truck that container to a port, put the container on a boat, float that boat 6000+ miles to Los Angeles, put those containers on a train, roll the train 2000+ miles to Chicago or Saint Louis, put that container on a truck chassis, drive the truck to Olney, Illinois, unload the container only to load it onto another truck which takes it 700+ miles to Virginia where it is unloaded only to be put in yet another truck which unloads it at a store so you can go pick up at Wal*Mart, your “green” means of transportation/exercise or whatever it is people ride bikes for. It’s cheaper to do that than to make the goddamn things in the United States where we could, I don’t know, pay people a living wage to do skilled work that, at the end of the day, they could be proud of. Then they (we) would have money to buy other things made by Americans and we could get this effing economy out of the shitter. But it’s just an idea.

(I’m not doing a good job of not ranting, but it is what seems to be coming, so I’ll let it come)

I hauled potato chips to Canada. (The kind with interesting flavors like “All Seasoned” or “Ketchup” that they (apparently) make here but only sell there. I brought back from Canada a bunch of John Deer “Gators” Those sort of all terrain golf carts that landscaping folks often ride around on. (I don’t have a problem with buying Canadian goods because they have more or less parity when it comes to wages. Besides vast oceans do not separate us from Canada, only vast stereotypes.) It is interesting to me that going through customs with a truck load of goods is much easier going into Canada than it is coming out, though perhaps not surprising. While I was waiting for my paperwork to be processed I sat in a truck stop in Fort Erie, Ontario and a friend who lives in Buffalo joined me for dinner. It was good to see you Jamie.

I hauled Corn Oil from Archer Daniels Midland (Supermarket to the World™) In Decatur Illinois, a town that calls itself The Soy Capital (in institutions such as Soy Capital Credit Union) in deference to ADM’s main business, the processing of Soybeans. Just doing the lord’s work. (That oil was going to a Mexican food company in Atlanta that makes, among other things, tortillas.)

I was given a short load from the operating center in Atlanta to downtown Atlanta. I had to drive underneath a building and back into a dock through an obstacle course of concrete support pillars. It was a delivery of furniture and other various home décor to a “Merchandise Mart” type place. A place that functions as a show room for hundreds of décor manufacturers (?) I don’t know who goes here and buys stuff. It is one of those situations that is so hopelessly “businessy” that I do not intend to comprehend it.
Once I was docked many of the small strait-truck drivers (or just strait truck drivers?) came up to me and were amazed at my ability to dock this behemoth truck in this little dock.

On my way to Texas, however, I stopped in Lafayette, Louisiana to have lunch with a friend who always knows where to have lunch. We went to the Creole Lunch House which, true to its name, is a house in which a creole lunch is served. I had stuffed bread, a sort of cross between a calzone and a maid-rite loose meat sandwich if the meat in a maid rite was delicious. The ady behind the counter insisted that i have more food than i was eating. It was delicious, Thanks Rachel.

I took a that load to Sealy, in east Texas where I sat for over two days before getting another load. Only to head 400 miles up the road into Arkansas and sit again for a day. Freight in the mid south is slow my friends, avoid it.

After delivering a load of Sears crap to Wilmington, North Carolina and getting entirely too drunk with an old friend who works at UNCW I was sent up to Henderson, North Carolina (entirely sober) to run Wal*Mart frozen food runs for three days. My day would start at about 1pm when I would pick up a reefer (refrigerated trailer you single minded drug addicts) loaded with deliveries for 2 or 3 Wal*Mart or Sam’s Clubs in Eastern North Carolina and Southern Virginia, I’d make these deliveries and return to the Distribution Center. This would be a pretty sweet gig if I lived near the dc since I would be home every night and still making a decent amount of money. Seeing the backroom of a Wal*Mart is an enlightening experience. A complete mess, total disorganization, in stark contrast to the militant organization of the supply chain up to this point. I wish I had taken a picture, but they probably wouldn’t have let me.

I took Dog Food to New Jersey and Imported Beer (Heineken) from Elizabeth (NJ) to a distributor (Blue Ridge) in Waynesboro (Virginia).
Tomorrow I will take domestic beer (Miller) through the house (meaning I will keep the load while I go home) for thanksgiving.
And I’ll give thanks cause, I hope by now you see, I have a lot to be thankful for.

Love's

2008-11-09T18:30:00.000-08:00

Last night after a slog through the North Carolina/ Tennessee mountains with 43,500 pounds of newsprint I pulled for the night into a Love's in Dandridge (the pic above is of a Love's in Lufkin, Texas). Two or three cop cars were pulled in at that jaunty 'no time to park-looking official' angle, lights whipping silently.
The CB chatter was what you would expect. "What is goin on at the Love's?!" "oh boy, three bears at the love's, somethin's goin down."
I finished my daily paperwork and got my dinner ready to be taken in and microwaved and then headed in (with a bit of excitement).
By the time I had made it in, although, most of the to do had been done. In the hall way between the Love's store itself and its appendage Subway a couple employees were mopping the floor in front of what I'll call the "fancy stuff" case.
A lot of truck stops have gifts presumably for truckers to buy to give to their perennially neglected families. These would be nice if the gifts were interesting or unique or place specific but they aren't. They're all the same, frightful dolls (often with questionably 'sensitive' racial characteristics, remote controlled semi-trucks, etc... Some of the "nicer gifts", big eyed child figurines, swords and knives, anything made of crystal (aka glass) are put in a locked glass case.
As I was microwaving some baked beans I asked a passing clerk what had happened. She was older and painted in make up and spoke in a clipped southern mountain accent roughened by cigarette smoke.
"This guy come in here try to break into that case so those two fellas behind the counter tackled him down to the ground. Says he was just tryin to get somethin for his kids. They all say that. See we gets a bonus if nothin gets stole, if nobody takes nothin, so those guys they tackled him. He broke the lock on that case, he broke it. He was tryin to get them two swords out the bottom of the case. For his kids, yeah right!"
"Does this happen a lot" I asked.
"Yeah, mostly this time of year."
"Oh cause of the holidays?"
"Yeah, all this time of year. We already had 4 in the last month."

!

They must have to scout for these cashiers at high school football games.

Olyphant to Maine with Digis

2008-10-26T07:45:00.000-07:00

I was sent up to Olyphant, Pennsylvania to pick up a trailer and move a truck. The driver who had picked up this load, as he was ready to depart, required the services of an ambulance and hospital. i found out later from the folks in shipping that he was complaining of chest pains. His truck, which I had taken a key for in order to move it was dusted like a fine snow with cigarette ash.
When I asked the shipping clerk what it was that was in this trailer He said "Scrap digis." in response to my quizical look he added "scrap plastic." Whatever.
I took these up to Biddeford, Maine to a tiny little factory tucked in the northern pines. Inside I found a nice young guy willing to give me a tour of what they do at Sagoma technologies.

What I had been carrying were empty unused "Digipacks" those things that hold the discs in a set of dvds, long pieces of cardboard with cd trays glued to them that can be folded up onto themselves. They were from a live aid set (like this picture) that must have been overprinted or discontinued.
What they do in maine is separate the trays from the cardboard and send the cardboard off somewhere to be recycled. Meanwhile they melt down the plastic and make new cd/dvd trays in various styles including new digipaks. When I was there they were assembling the trays for the third season of Weeds.
Once I was empty I headed over to a small gas station where I parked and headed across the street to a shaw's to get some comestibles. While there I saw this alluring sign:

mmmm.
I sat for a bit longer before being sent up the road 12 miles to Scarborough to pick up pallets headed to South Holland (near Chicago) Illinois.

Orientation

2008-10-26T07:30:00.000-07:00

Orientation, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, went like most orientations do. Long and drawn out. I finished tests and assignments first and thus spent a lot of time sitting around waiting for the next thing to start. My roommate was a pleasant jovial fellow from Hazleton, PA. He had worked local/regional for many years trucking into NYC with mattresses and delivering auto parts throughout the midatlantic. He would be working the Northeast regional accounts and get home every weekend. As with many he had come to Schneider in search of better pay and more consistency. It's easy to sit back as someone in my position, to think "the economy's tanking? I don't feel a thing. But as I return to the trucking industry the signs are everywhere. Smaller companies are shutting down, bigger companies are cutting corners. Schneider, known in the industry for providing full training to drivers with no experience or CDL is now hiring almost exclusively experienced drivers and I think, at this point, has almost completely discontinued its training program (temporarily, I hope. I think it is one of the best in the industry for those that can handle its manic pace.)

Recruiters had told us all that We might get a truck by thursday afternoon and have a load by friday. Thursday came and went and then friday and it became clear that there were not enough trucks for everyone. I think the reason is this: Schneider hires drivers at a rate that more or less matches the rate at which drivers quit. If enough drivers don't quit in a given week then there are not enough trucks and given the current (potentially psychological) recession drivers are probably less inclined to leave a steady job than they might otherwise be.
They sent us away for the weekend.
I headed to NYC since getting home via public transport is impossible and the train from harrisburg to nyc costs only $45.
I had a fine time in New York, perhaps for the first time since I was a little boy, perhaps because I spent the majority of the time in Brooklyn.
On monday, as I was dining with an old friend at his office in columbus circle I got a call that i had a truck.
later that evening I got back into Carlisle and moved into my truck. Its a little old, with 600k+ miles on it but it'll do.
The next day I readied the truck and then got my first load, a pick up, a rescue of sorts, near Scranton.

On the Road again (again)

2008-10-15T15:42:00.001-07:00

Back on the road and with the big orange, Schneider National.
(This is a wrecked trailer I saw while walking around the yard, I wasn't involved and the posting of this image is not meant as any sort of comment on Schneider National.)
I'm in Carlisle, Pennsylvania currently, attending a 4 day orientation which is painfully dull. I should be out of here by Friday, god willin and the creek don't rise.

Keep on coming out for wacky tales of this winter on the road.

Epilogue: The Drive Home

2008-07-27T06:30:00.001-07:00

So off I drove eastward in this gas and oil guzzling beast of a machine. The day was hot and pale yellow as so many texas days are. I-20 led me into Louisiana where green began to hang but the sunlight was no less harsh. I hadn't decided how to get home yet but I figured east was a good start.

I crossed the Mississippi at Vicksburg, a great swampy swath before the river and then hills up from the banks. Before I hit Jackson I found the exit for the Natchez Trace Parkway. I had taken this parkway a few years ago a some friend and her sister who were moving from Asheville to St. Paul and wanted to tour the south before resigning herself to the north. We had visited New Orleans and were headed up river and took the Parkway from its southern terminus at Natchez to this point near Jackson. Along the way I recall an episode in which my friend was feeling unwell so we stopped by the side of the road to allow her out of the car. She hurried to the edge of the woods and after a while her sister suggested i take her some water and a towel. As I stepped out of the car I thought to myself, my this ground is soft (I was not wearing shoes since it was so hot) and within a few seconds, my feet burning with over stimulation, I realized I had stepped into a fire ant nest. So here I am jumping around manically brushing ants off my feet and legs while my friend, crouched by the side of the words, wonders what could be more important than her well being.

So I had seen the southern part of this well groomed road with its wide verges and dark woods draped, like set pieces, in spanish moss. And now I figured, if I was going to take a drive, I would take a drive on roads that prohibited semis, and i would see the northern part of road.

The road itself runs along the route of an ancient path through the southern woods. The path was blazed by Native Americans from foraging paths trod down by large game and was later used by the military and the postal service, serving as an important link between the well connected "north" (Nashville and the areas north and east) and ports on the Mississippi river (such as Natchez).

The way the road looks now, with wide cleared, neatly mowed verges belies its origins as a narrow path through a dark and forbidding wood. But it makes current travel by car a pleasant journey with no commercial development and few at grade crossings. As you travel north the woods get less dark, less heavily junglish and occasionally the forest opens up to wide meadows with ancient wooden barns. I headed to Tupelo the first night as darkness fell and checked into a motel 6. It was 10pm and the air had cooled all the way down to 88.

I woke up not to early the next day and stopped by the Wal-Mart to pick up a case of oil for this thirsty (read: leaky) truck. I headed north again on the trace, swiping a corner of Alabama and entering Tennessee. I got off the parkway to fuel up (and oil up). I had wanted to continue further up the trace to Grinder's Stand, the site where, on a fall day in 1809 at the age of 35 the perennially depressive Meriwether Lewis either shot himself or was murdered. An interesting end to the life of a man who traveled to the Pacific when Europeans of the east weren't even sure where it was exactly.
Anyway, I took a wrong turn out of Collinwood and ended up in Lawrenceburg and kept heading east toward Chattanooga.

I made a slight detour north to Lynchburg to see something I had always wanted to see, the distillery where Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey is made. As you enter this very cutesy town you can see the barrel houses holding millions of gallons of whiskey dotting the hills above the hollers. The day was getting pretty steamy and the cool visitors center where I waited for the tour to begin was pleasant. I highly recommend the distillery tour. It is a full tour of all aspects of the distillery, up close and personal, not from a distance and not a tour of some mock up. It's the real thing. You can stick your head in the fermenting vats or the charcoal filtering towers and that combined with a walk through the highly aromatic barrel house will likely leave you a bit lightheaded. Besides it's free. The only catch is that, hilariously, The distillery is in a dry county and as such you can not buy or consume whiskey on the tour or anywhere else in the county however you can buy "Commemorative Bottles" that are sold to be collected but they are only marginally more expensive than a bottle at your local liquor store and the whiskey inside is, I assure you, completely drinkable.

Out of Chattanooga I followed the Ocoee (site of the 1996 Olympic Kayaking events) up torturous curves and spitting rain into the Smokey mountains, a place it always seems to be raining, and a place I don't mind the rain. It seems to add to the atmosphere. (It is after all, like the Northwest coast, a temperate rainforest receiving over 6 feet of precipitation per year)

Night fell in western North Carolina and eventually I got to Asheville where I shared some of my commemorative whiskey with friends and then headed to a bar to dispose of the rest of the evening.

In the morning I waited for my friends to wake and then took them out to brunch in Asheville before headed out towards Greenville (NC) in the eastern part of the state to visit another friend who also disposed of some of my commemorative whiskey.

In the morning I headed north and a bit east towards Chesapeake, Virginia, part of the Hampton Roads/Norfolk glut of shipping and military complexes at the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay. Here I did my last bit of trucking, stopping by Kerneos, a cement importer, to pick up some calcium aluminate cement to be shipped to me to build the bread oven. The truck sagged a bit but made the trip across the 17 mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. and up the long DelMarVa peninsula and up the driveway back home. The clouds from earlier in the day had cleared and it was a cool blue day.

This will be the last entry in this blog. Thanks for reading.
I'll now direct you to my blog documenting the building of my brick oven
and the beginnings of a bread business.

Closeout

2008-07-26T09:16:00.000-07:00

So I woke up in the morning and untarped my load and helped some other drivers untarp their loads and when I was empty I sent a message saying I was so and another saying that, even though i was in Dallas, I intended to work for another week until the quit date I had specified a week earlier (giving the customary, though in the trucking world somewhat unheard of, two weeks notice.)
A few minutes later the Quallcomm beeped and the message said:
"Mark, unfortunately we have to accept your resignation now since we don't have a lot of freight booked into texas right now and probably couldn't get you back by next week. Besides we need your truck in Sunnyvale [at the terminal for new hires finishing orientation.] Go back to the terminal and check in with Daniel. OK?"

This was a bad note to end on. I had planned two weeks because it would take me right up to the time that I am to head to Minnesota to cater a wedding and the money would tide me over. Now I would have a gap and not enough money to buy all the brick for the oven. What a pain in the ass.

I headed back to sunnyvale, packed up the truck, got thoroughly sweat, handed my keys in and left.

Back to the eastern shore, back home, back to real life, I hope.

Slow Week

2008-07-22T19:59:00.000-07:00

So from Winston Salem, in keeping with the deja vu theme, I headed over to Elizabethton, Tennessee to pick up more metal building parts destined for the northeast, Robbinsville, New Jersey namely, a suburb of Trenton, if Trenton has suburbs, per se.
The building parts weren't due until Monday and it being Friday and Winston-Salem being less than 600 miles from Trenton I would take these through the house. I am glad that the route could justifiably take me through the house otherwise the shortness of this weekend load would have really frustrated me.
So after another pleasant weekend at home I tootled up to Robbinsville and delivered the building parts to the inside of a big empty warehouse in an industrial park. Apparently the building would eventually be built a few miles from here but the crew who were supposed to be preparing the site had fallen behind but they were forced to take delivery of the building anyway. What an added expense for when the site is ready they will have to truck it all out again.
It was the crew that unloaded me that made the "grizzly adams" and "chuck norris" comments made famous in the previous post.
From there I waited (waited!? no way!) the rest of the day before getting a load to pick up in New Jersey and deliver to Laredo but as soon as the assigned it to me they took it away like dangling $100 bills in front of your face and then snatching them away (or more like $780, in this case). Not long after I got another load, a pick up in Sunbury, Pennsylvania (central PA) with a delivery in Aurora, Illinois. This one as well giving me about a day's worth of extra time (even though it wasn't the weekend.) I would get to see my friends in Chicago but, while I love seeing friends and family I was also, as it turns out, trying to make some money in the mean time. I spent the time in Chicago biking around eating good cheese and sweating a lot and then delivered the load in Aurora, it was fibreboard insulation from a company called Celotex. To explain I will quote a poster in their shipping office"

Want Structural: Use OSB
Want R-value: Use foam
Want both: CELOTEX

(that, i am sure, is perfectly clear to all my building contractor readers.)

Then it as more waiting (yes!) before getting a load to pick up the next day (waste of time) in Joliet at a company called Johns Manville who makes a similar product to the one I had just hauled from Celotex, though it seems less structural. The delivery was to Dallas. To Dallas a week before I had requested to be there.
I stopped for fuel at the Love's in Rolla (atcha boyz) Missouri and found that my fuel card had been "turned off." Evening dispatch turned it back on for me but something was getting fishy.
It was the weekend again and I got to Dallas on Saturday afternoon and tinkered about with the truck I had purchased. I replaced the window motor and changed the oil and cleaned up the battery whose corrosion was becoming an issue. The next day I drove the pickup to a big confusing mall whose directory listed two stores I wanted to check out, a camera store and a book store. Both had closed and were boarded with festive anticipatory plywood.
I needed a drink and some cheese so I stopped in at El Chico, a chain trying to wrest the "mediocre mexican in a drab atmosphere" crown from ChiChi's. I ordered a beer and found myself in an odd corner of the blue laws of the United States.
Before bringing me the beer julio brought me a small piece of paper about 6"x3". Three quarters of the sheet was a carbonless copy form and the remaining quarter was a detachable buisness card sized card. Julio handed this to me and asked me to fill it out without an explanation. When he returned and i asked him what the deal was he explained that we were in a dry county and since we were in a dry county any establishment that wished to serve alcohol had to be a "private club." In order to order a beer at this restaurant I had to "become a member" of their "private club" I had to fill out this card which would be good for thirty days at this restaurant only. If i went somewhere else i would have to fill out another card and on and on. For anyone who was worried i can assure you that prohibition is not over, it has just gotten stranger. This New York Times article explains the whole thing nicely.
Then I went to the movies. I'm not sure how I got there given the absurd complications (at least to this outsider) of the Texas frontage road system (explained in a previous post). I watched Wall-E, a beautiful little movie and then thought that, given that I paid $9.25 to see this movie (and it was before 6pm) I was owed another movie. I haven't snuck into a movie since I was 13 and snuck into Indecent Proposal with some friends who were equally excited by the promise of lasciviousness. (We were disappointed), I was less disappointed with The Dark Knight which, though at times was very loud and somewhat disjointed in its quest for special effects gold, was thoroughly entertaining. It was surprisingly easy to sneak into this movie and I think I could have continued to sneak into movies all night but i was tired and drove back to the terminal where I hopped in the truck and drove over to Spec Roofing Wholesale where I would deliver in the morning.

Beardo

2008-07-14T13:44:00.000-07:00

I haven't trimmed the beard in almost 2 months. A guy at this place where I unloaded today called me "Grizzly Adams" and then likened me to Chuck Norris. Me thinks it's time to trim this beard

Deja vu

2008-07-12T15:20:00.001-07:00

The drive up into the Poconos was a challenge, a fun challenge, the perfect extended obstacle course to scare the pants off a CDL candidate. It made me realize how far I have come from those first lurching days in Green Bay.
I had spent the previous night in Scranton. Although it was almost 2 hours from my final destination in the hinterlands of Northeastern PA, it was the closest truckstop. I awoke early and headed out into the beautifully hazy morning mountains. The Poconos are technically not mountains but rather a deeply eroded plateau geologically not part of the Appalachian mountain chain. They are related to the adjacent Catskills, essentially two names for the same geological feature. Regardless of the nomenclature the back roads are hilly as hell.
After turning off US-6 the road narrowed, lifted and plummeted, careening through bucolic valleys and to the edges of glacial lakes. The last turn was onto a wide dirt road. Branches brushed the tops of the cab and then a sign “Camp Nesher →” I turned in tightly revving the engine up a steep narrow dirt road thinking of the sleeping campers and this undoubtedly unusual morning. Another driver was there already we had both arrived before the construction crew.
The camp looked classic summer camp run down buildings and a lake with all sorts of brightly colored things floating in it.
The crew soon arrived and quickly unloaded him and then me and informed us there was a way to get out by continuing strait which was a relief since turning around would require some doing. Once I was unloaded I headed out the track rounding a corner and heading down a hill where I saw a bus stuck on the curve from the road into the drive. The driver motioned frantically at me to stop as if I were a freight train. I was still a good 100 yards off and moving at 10 miles an hour.
From the road the lane took a turn up hill (the hill I was headed down) and the tow hooks on the rear of the bus had snagged on the asphalt of the road. She was fully blocking the southbound lane but traffic could squeeze by in the other lane. I tried to do what I could to help her but she was already on the phone to her company explaining the situation. “There goes my safety bonus” she grumbled as she sat on hold.
I realized there was nothing I could do and decided I needed to back back up the driveway and turn around in the construction site. This was tricky but not impossible and as I beeped into the site the crew looked at me. I explained that there was a bus stuck in the drive and they immediately jumped into the forklift and a pickup.
“You got the chains?”
“Let’s go!”
And they were off like that. I turned around to head back to Scranton. About half way there I got a message to head up to Oswego and pick up some coils to take to Winston-Salem. Déjà vu all over again.
I turned north onto more hilly Pennsylvania mountain roads headed toward I-81. Winding out of town a long line of cars snaked slowly up a ridge. I couldn’t see the head of the line but I figured it was a slow moving truck. At the ridge crest the cars turned into a cemetery. Men in military dress stood at attention. The cars crawled to top of the hill under a grey Pennsylvania sky to put another dead boy in the ground.

I made it to Oswego to find a long line in the driveway of the Aluminum mill. Who knew what the back up was but it took forever to load the same load it had taken me less than an hour to load the previous week.
Again to Syracuse where I biked to the mall to try and find some 220 film for the medium format camera my sister had lent me. No dice, they barely had any 35mm film, how quickly things change.
The next day a long one down I-81 which must have a higher percentage of hills than any other interstate. South through the river valleys of central New York then crawling diagonally over the successive crests of Pennsylvania’s comb like Appalachian ridges. Flat for a while from Harrisburg to Winchester as the mountains retreat to the west. They return and you climb up and into the Great Valley of Virginia, snug for a while with the Blue Ridge (an outlying eastern ridge) to your left and the Valley and Ridge (the main body of the Appalachians) to your right. Around Roanoke you head up into the mountains proper and things are really hilly. Leaving I-81 and heading south on I-77 toward Mt. Airy, NC presents a fantastic vista of the Piedmont (literally “foot hills” as you tumble out of the mountains and realize just how high up you were.
Now I’m here in Winston Salem, sweating and waiting again.

Through the House

2008-07-12T15:13:00.000-07:00

More goddamn waiting.
I sat behind the Shell in Boucherville all day and then Angie sent me a message telling me to get out of Canada. Drive down toward Champlain, New York and let her know when I got there.
I did, I headed down to the border. It's easy to cross when you have an empty flatbed, essentially the same as in your car. I kept going down I-87 to Plattsburgh where I found a small truckstop in the woods.
I had noticed a mall with a bookstore a bit up the road and I figured I’d bike up there. After my Montréal expedition I was thoroughly exhausted and my legs were resistant to this 5 mile jaunt.
I wandered about the book store and then the mall, unfortunately disinterested. I got back on the bike and stopped at a little c-store on the way back to the truck (there were a number of them, New York’s northwoods loves the middle of nowhere corner market.)
I bought a Saranac Lake sampler pack. Someone there is thinking of people like me. Back to the truck where I proceeded to drink and enjoy the cool of these northern latitudes. I did not enjoy the large mosquitoes.
I waited most of the next day with nothing before I sent an exasperated message. I had requested to be home for the weekend. The July 4th weekend. It was July 3rd, a Thursday. If I didn’t get something today I would sit here all weekend, a three day weekend.
Finally they sent me a load that picked up in Oswego, a four hour drive across the Adirondacks. The pick up wasn’t supposed to be until Sunday. Sunday! I was seriously bummed. I decided to head over to see even though I had been to this shipper before and remembered not being able to load early.
The drive was spectacular. Through the heart of the really incredible parts of the Adirondacks, a mountain chain geographically unrelated to the Appalachians. Black brooks foaming white over ripples of rocks in the shade of heavy northern pines. Towns bustling with summer weekend activity, people in their brightly colored synthetic and highly performance oriented clothing.
I got to Oswego and checked in. I could load early. This was the best news ever.
Onto my truck were quickly put two enormous Aluminum Coils. Thin aluminum headed to Winston Salem to be made into beverage cans by Rexam. Not so quickly I chained and tarped them. These things are a bitch because the aluminum is so soft and can not get the least bit wet or it will stain and not even the slightest damage is tolerated since people put these things so close to their face.
I finished tarping, chilly with sweat in the Lake Ontario evening and drove to Syracuse where I fueled up and spent the night.
The next day I drove to Maryland dropping my trailer before making it home in time to see fireworks through the hazy rainy weather. Before I got back on the road I decided that this would be the last trip. 3 and a half weeks then to Dallas to pack up the new (pick-up) truck and head home to get this bread business started for real (right after I get back from catering a wedding in August)
On Sunday afternoon I drove down to North Carolina. The july fourth return traffic was horrendous. Essentially from DC to Richmond was one big jam. (that’s like 100 miles). I was exhausted and crashed for the night short of my goal. In the morning I headed to Winston Salem and delivered the coils waiting not too long for my next load. Over to Star Buildings in Elizabethton, Tennessee, a place I had been twice before. A lopey drive through the Appalachians, an easy pick up, Some metal building parts destined for a Jewish summer camp in the depths of the Poconos.

Oh, Canada!

2008-07-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

The load in Norman was at York, who make big air industrial conditioners and the pick up wasn’t until midnight but even so They didn’t start loading until 1:30 and then, once they had loaded the trailer, from front to back, they realized they couldn’t fit the last one on and so they had to take something off. The something they had to take off was the thing in front and so they unloaded the whole thing and reloaded it finishing at 4:00am. I pulled out and went to sleep, I would strap it all down in the morning.
I did that and when I went out to get the bills there was some problem, and it was Saturday so the problem was taking even longer to figure out. Eventually it was figured out but it certainly took a while.
I took the load through Tulsa and stopped by the office to make sure all my paper work was in order to head into Canada. When you take a load into Canada one of the easiest ways to do it is a system called PARS. Pre authorized release system or something like that. Essentially you affix a bar code sticker to the bills and fax them to an independent broker at the border where you are going to cross. They work out the paper work, figure out who owes what in customs and inputs the info into the computer. When the trucker gets to the border they only need to scan the barcode, check out your id and, if everything checks out, on you go. It worked out that way this time and crossing the border was a piece of cake.
I crossed at Detroit-Windsor. Detroit is bad enough already but they have decided to rip up pretty much every mile of interstate downtown at the same time and this really makes the whole place feel like a post-apocalyptic mess. I crossed the Ambassador Bridge over the Detroit River (Detroit is French for “straits” and technically the river is a strait connecting Lake Huron to Lake Erie (via a not so great lake called Lake St. Clair.) and as I entered Windsor, Ontario an air of civility fell over then land. Don’t get me wrong I love America but Canada feels different and that difference feels like civility.
You must traverse some surface streets in Windsor before finding the 401, southern Ontario’s main highway that connects Windsor to Toronto and Montreal. It would be a long slog up this road to Quebec but it felt shorter because of the kilometers. When you are used to miles, kilometers fly by.
I stopped at a Pilot to get some food intrigued by how foreign candy wrappers that you are unused to appear. I got some potato chips that I remembered from the last time I was in Canada. They were just Ruffles but the flavour was “All Dressed” (or in French “Assaisonait” or “seasoned”) I don’t know what is on these but they are very tasty.
In Ontario all the signs are in English and then, just down the road is the same sign but in French. This seems like it would cost a lot (Quebec solves the problem by dropping the English altogether.) Some of these signs are humourous to me. Par Example: there are many signs that warn of the penalties for various traffic violations. They list the violation and the resultant fine and points on your license. In Canadian English they call these “Demerit Points” which is funny enough but the French is “Points d’inaptitude” which really cracks me up.
The highway through most of Ontario is pretty unremarkable, very flat at first (its just a lake away from Ohio, really not that exotic) then there’s Toronto, a big city, but not overwhelming, like Chicago. North of Toronto it gets pleasantly woodsy looking more like upstate New York which is, of course, right across the St. Lawrence. The Thousand Island area is evocative. You can never really see the river or the islands but the land hints at its beauty, and its mayonnaise, ketchup and relish mixture.
Crossing into Quebec changes little (but everything gets more French) I stopped at the centre de bienvenue (not actual what it is called) and was greeted with the traditional Quebecoise tourist welcome “Bonjour, Hi.” A charming French boy tried to help me find a carte bicyclette de Montreal but to no avail.
Turns out I didn’t need one. Montreal’s bike paths are ubiquitous and while not particularly well signed, they are extensive and not hard to figure out.
I had parked in Boucherville across the river from city proper behind a Shell station that seemed the only place to park around here. I hopped on my bike and headed toward Montreal. This would have been far enough to bike into the city but as it turns out the bike path from along the east bank of the river into Vieux Montreal is quite indirect. It heads south along the river for about 10 miles from the point where I joined the trail. At one point I got off the main path and headed toward a marina which was the head of one bike path who’s sign implied that the path continued all the way to Quebec City, 440 km northeast.
I found the proper path again and continued south (to the point that I knew I was south of the downtown). Finally the path crosses the river on the Pont Victoria onto a little island (Montreal itself is an island but this was a much more bitty island) and on this island is a park and at the north end of the park is an amusement park. The bike path goes north on this island for a couple miles before crossing onto the île de Montréal. At this point however you are on the far side of the port and so must go south a couple miles to get around the bottom of the port and then its back north again to get into the heart of Montréal. All told this ended up being over 15 miles (25 kilometers) and I was beginning to lose hope since I knew I had to get back somehow and trucking does not keep you in the shape I was a few years ago when biking 70 miles in a day was totally do-able.
But it was totally worth it. Old Montréal is incredible. Not Europe not America but a little of both and something altogether different. Big buildings built of a stone that looks like really nice concrete create windy canyons of streets lined with restaurants and galleries and in the dying light, as the yellow glow from the windows began to become apparent the whole scene was really something. Oh yeah, and it was Canada Day so the whole place was mobbed.
I wandered about in wide eyed amazement, pleased that this was the 2nd time in a week that I had been in awe of a place. Three countries in a week isn’t so bad, especially when your continent only has three countries.
The darkness closed in on the festivities and fireworks began to pop in the distance and I consulted the phone to try and find a way to get across the river without the 15 mile return trip. I headed up over the ridge out of old Montréal surprised to find a sprawling modern city just over the crest. I found the subway and headed down only to be shoed out by bilingual cops who informed me no bikes were allowed in the Metro on Canada Day.
What in the world was I going to do. I was exhausted. I was right beneath the Pont Jaques-Cartiers near the aromatically malty Molson Brewery. I looked up at the towering bridge. If I could cross this bridge I wouldn’t have to make the zigzags to cross the river cutting the trip in half. I had to head pretty far west to find the point at which the bridge began its rise above the streets but when I got there I found that there was in fact a bike lane, Quelle Chance! I had not encountered this bike lane earlier since the bridge makes an equally gradual descent on the east bank and I passed under it right on the river where it still towered high above me.
I tore across the bridge with inexplicable energy and then bombed down the other side stopping at a convenience store called “Couche Tard” of which I passed no fewer than 20 on my return through the suburban streets of Longuieul.
I got to the truck and ate my chicken salad sandwich and gulped water. Chicken Salad here seems to be a chicken and mayonnaise paste between slices of bread. It’s pretty tasty.
I slept like a baby and woke in the morning where I delivered the air conditioners to more brilliantly bilingual Quebecers. The receptionist greeted me with “Un livraison?” I knew what she was saying but even in my brief hesitation she switched to English. The air conditioners were unloaded quickly and I returned to the Shell station to see what would happen next.

Dallas Breakdown

2008-07-12T14:52:00.000-07:00

I cruised into the truckstops on the south side of Dallas about midnight. I knew that these places, like those on the south of Atlanta or east of LA and truckstops near cities everywhere had a tendency to crawl with illicit activity, primarily prostitution and drug dealing. It was also late and my chances of finding a place to park were slim. As I maneuvered through the Flying J people scurried around the lot like rats, one dude jumped up on my running board clinging to my open passenger side window.
“hey man you looking fo a girl?”
“no, man I’m looking for a parking space.”
I started to drive off requiring him to dismount.
I found a spot. Not a real spot, but a spot where people could get around me, at the TA on the other side of the highway.
The next day I woke and showered and came back to the truck. Still no load. I moved the truck into a real spot. I waited.
I did a crossword, or maybe six.
I tried to read. It is miserably hard to read when you are waiting for something. When trucking you are almost always waiting (or driving) and so, while it may seem like a great job for reading time, it isn’t. I get most of my good reading done at night before bed, like everyone else.
I waited some more.
I was getting exasperated.
I had spent a night in Laredo waiting, I had spent the better part of the next day in Laredo waiting. I had driven to Dallas and spent the night and the waited some more. It was 2pm. I was loosing hope. It was also Friday and the likelihood of getting a load on a Saturday (at least with this company) is nonexistent.
I cracked.
I wanted to quit. I was so done. How could I go home? Melton has a terminal in Dallas, I’d leave the truck there. How could I get rid of my stuff? I could sell some over the CB, but there would still be too much to walk or bike with, or even take a plane, especially with these baggage fees. I could buy a car!
I looked at the Dallas Craig’s List. There was a beater ’84 F-150 for sale for $900, I could do that.
I drove to the Dallas terminal. Not sure why. I got a cab to go check out the truck.
The guy selling the truck was a little unhinged I think. He worked on the oil rigs near Amarillo. He worked for 14 days at a time and then had 14 days off. He was selling the truck because he had another kid on the way. He said it needed a new starter solenoid, which he repeatedly pronounced “sodenawd.”
We drove to AutoZone to get it rather than wait for his mom to get home (he didn’t have any money for this $10 part) He installed it in the parking lot. When he drove the truck he scared me, though it did prove that the engine and brakes were working well enough.
Then we had to go to the DMV to get a title since he didn’t have one. Apparently he had bought the truck only a month before and the dealer had not yet got the title to him.
That process was surprisingly smooth and in 25 minutes I had the title in hand. I asked him how much he wanted for the truck.
$900
what about $750?
$800 and it’s a deal.
Deal (I didn’t really expect to pay $750, I suppose this is at the core of the bargaining art)

He cleaned his junk out of the truck and handed me the keys. My phone rang.
“Hey its Angie” [my dispatcher] “I got a Canada load for you.”
(sweet, what do I do with this pick-up?)
“It picks up in Norman [Oklahoma] tonight and delivers on Monday”
“sweet, where in Canada?”
“oh don’t make me say it, Butcher-vull.”
“Oh yeah Boucherville, Quebec. Sweet put it on me. I’ll be back at the truck in 45 minutes.”
The seller looked at me, “goin to Canada huh?”
Yup.

I drove the truck back to the terminal. I could leave it here until I did quit, whenever in the next month or two that would be. Then I could have them route me here and I could put my stuff in it and drive it back to Maryland. And now I would have seriously useful vehicle for these building projects.

I parked the truck and took some pictures and then headed up the road to Norman.

Laredo y Nuevo Laredo

2008-07-12T14:38:00.000-07:00

The load of steel was headed to Laredo. 1100 miles almost due south of Norfolk, NE and so I spent the next 2 days watching the northern plains become the southern plains. The land of the Sioux become the land of the Comanche. People don’t think of Texas as the plains (which is to say I didn’t used to) I think because it is relatively more populated than the plains to the north. After crossing the Red River on I-35 from Oklahoma one quickly encounters Denton then Dallas-Fort Worth, Waco, Temple/Killeen, Austin, San Marcos, and San Antonio in (relatively) rapid succession, east-coast style.
After San Antonio everything comes to an abrupt end for a 150 mile cruise across the baking chaparral to Laredo.
I got into Laredo in the early afternoon. Good I thought, since I would be able to deliver my load a day early and then have n advantageous spot on the board and get out of the hellish oven that is south Texas. In all fairness the weather this time around (while above 100) was not so bad since there was a firm and constant breeze and the humidity was quite low.
As it turns out there was a hang up with my paperwork, the shipper had neglected to include on the bills the name of the forwarder (the facility in Laredo at which I would leave the trailer for a Mexican carrier to pick up.) I would not be able to deliver until the morning.
It was comfortable enough outside that as the sun began to get low in the sky I figured I’d head out for a bike ride. Initially I headed south unsure what I wanted to see. Maybe just to the mall or into downtown Laredo to see what it looks like where they don’t allow trucks, but peering down a long strait avenue I could see an enormous Mexican flag billowing in the soft blue breeze and I new where I was headed.
Downtown Laredo is certainly a different world than the Rubik’s cube of trucks and warehouses that make up the north end. Mostly commercial boulevards, not unlike those in San Antonio or Phoenix or LA terminate near the river having become quiet streets of medium height Spanish buildings, stucco and heavy shady trees, open squares and pleasant spaces.
There are two border crossings in downtown Laredo, one for trucks and cars and the other primarily for pedestrians. I found the latter and paid the fifty cents toll, walked my bike up and over the bridge, over the Rio Grande, a great green ditch in this semi desert and into another country.
I’m not sure I was prepared for how different it would be. First of all, although I was allowed freely to enter Mexico without so much as a check of my documents, there were heavily armed guards everywhere. AK-47s cradled in arms shock me, an unreal object, as intense as if the soldiers held corpses.
Once past this however, the scene becomes classic Mexican. The world is more colorful. Horses pull rickety but brightly painted carts. City buses are old school buses painted solid and scrawled with soap in the windshield “#4 Walmart.” Open squares with great shade trees, farmacias selling prescription drugs at 80% discount. Everywhere fruit and juices and ice to stave off the heat that persists from March to November. And people. People everywhere, walking.
After about an hour of wandering around in wide eyed amazement I headed back toward the border. Urchins tried to sell me cheap leather or beaded jewelry. Their technique, in lieu of a facility with English (apart from “meester, you like”) was to follow me for a few blocks.
Crossing the border back was not bad, though certainly not like coming into Mexico. I never seem to be able to communicate on the level with customs and immigration. I’m never sure what they are saying or implying, and they always seem to think that I, bicycle in hand just walking out of Mexico, am up to something.
I biked back to the terminal stopping for some Gatorade and then some carne guisada which was tasty.
The next day I finally delivered my load (the shipper had returned the faxed bills with the words “EXIT LAREDO” on them, if that’s all it takes…) Then I waited some more.
I waited most of the afternoon before Laredo gave up. Not a lot of freight headed out of Mexico, not enough, at least, to keep up with the freight coming in and so I, and a lot of other waiting drivers, were deadheaded to Dallas, 400+ miles north.
I drove it all that night, getting in by midnight. It felt like nothing.
The air was cooler but much more humid and much less pleasant.

Kansas Mississippi Texas Iowa Nebraska Texas

2008-06-27T08:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-27T08:19:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-21T15:26:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-20T10:13:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-20T07:10:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-10T07:52:00.000-07:00

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.

South Texas Heat

2008-05-18T17:43:00.000-07:00

So I got these big coils of braided steel wire. I got em in Gallatin, Tennessee and they are going to Mexico. I'm in Laredo. The high tomorrow is supposed to be 103.
I drove to West Memphis the first day and then to Buffalo, Texas the next. In Buffalo I took a walk on a lovely early summer evening. A sluggish creek. A field of cattle all looking at me.

On the way south today I stopped in Kyle, Texas in hope of scoring some pie at a place I had heard on the radio had great pecan pie. Boys with signs pleaded with me to pull into the ridiculously small DQ parking lot and have the truck washed for their fundraiser. The pie place was closed. It being Sunday.

I stopped again in Dilley, Texas. I had stopped here before. I wrote an entry on the town at the time. A few weeks ago i was paging through my old entries looking for comments I might have missed and found a disappointing one, in response to this entry, which you can read. It is unfortunate that the internet has, in places, become a place for anonymous, unjust, and unnecessarily mean criticism. Everyone wants to be Simon Cowell. The poster made a number of assertions that were untrue and I was pleased to find upon my revisit that, at least in my perception, I was factually accurate. I added a picture to support one of these observations.

Before this load I took some metal building parts from Laurinburg, North Carolina to Chattanooga, Tennessee. On the way there I had a lovely, though at times hair raising drive through the rainy foggy north Georgia Mountains. The metal buiding parts were going to be an addition to a plant that was making towers for wind turbines. Completed ones were lying around outside.

Hurricane, West Virginia

2008-05-13T19:33:00.000-07:00

More coils of steel. These are sleek and black and being taken from a mill in Monroe, Ohio (between Dayton and Cincinnati) to a place that makes "wood framed upholstered furniture" in High Point, North Carolina (between Winston-Salem and Greensboro.) I am guessing that the steel will be cut into strips and made into springs for the chairs, of the recliner sort, i am thinking.
It is astonishing how much steel is being moved around this country. I guess this is the price we pay for having left the stone age.

I took some minor roads from Monroe over to Chilicothe. Perhaps too minor, sometimes very hilly and curvy and small but a good workout (not a physical workout, per se) and a good reminder that driving can not always be a mindless cruise down the interstate. In a car, these are the roads I would seek out. curving up and around hills and down into river valleys. ribboning through fields of wheat while your organs slosh around in your body. Good times
Now I am relaxing in Hurricane, West Virginia the origin of this seemingly out of place name is expained by wikipedia as such: "Hurricane was named after Hurricane Creek. Hurricane Creek was, in turn, named after a group of trees at the mouth of the river bent in one direction. A party of surveyors commissioned by General George Washington noted the site appeared to have been struck by a hurricane, so they named it so."
hmmmm.
The weather is not threatening. it's cool and today was a welcome sunny change from the monsoon that I had been in throughout the weekend.

One easy week, from Maryland to Asheville

2008-05-03T07:03:00.000-07:00

I left the house on Monday morning to go to Sparrows Point, an enormous steel mill in Baltimore's outer harbor formerly owned by American steel Giant, Bethlehem Steel. As the sparrow flies it is about 25 miles from my house, right across the shimmering Chesapeake, but semis don't fly and I don't care to find out if they can float so I took the roads down to the Bay Bridge and back up to the city.

The William Preston Lane [former governor of the Old Line State] Memorial Bridge, as it is more formally known, is a twin span 4.5 mile bridge that was, when it was built, the longest bridge of its type in the world, it is part suspension and part truss and very high so as to allow cargo ships to pass beneath it and cause panic attacks to those above it. It is the only crossing of the middle bay (another bridge crosses the Susquehanna at the northern end of the bay, and a 17.5 mile bridge/tunnel combination connects the Virginia part of Delmarva to the Virginia Beach Norfolk area near the mouth of the bay. It wasn't built until the 50s and up to that point the eastern shore was relatively isolated connected to the Baltimore/ Washington side only by ferries and passenger steamers. It was probably similar to the present system of ferries that like Seattle to the Sound Islands and Olympic and Kitsap Peninsulas. Many people think it would be nice if it were still isolated and, once you get away from the bridge, it pretty much is, especially if you go north to where I grew up.

Most of the traffic that crosses the bridge east bound heads south to the snooty getaway spot in Talbot County (Easton, St. Michaels, Oxford, many politicians, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, e.g. have houses here) or to the more proletarian beaches on the southern peninsula, Rehoboth in Delaware and Ocean City in Maryland. Until the bridge was built there were great amusement parks and victorian resorts along the eastern shore of the bay, especially in Kent County, directly across the bay from Baltimore and easily accessible by regular ferry service. The resorts of Tolchester and Betterton are pretty much dead now but there's an ironic twist.

The bridge at present is horribly packed in the summer with people going to or from the beach. The state wants to build another bridge with three options: 1.) a third span where the present two are, connecting Annapolis to Kent Island. (This is problematic since there is little room to add approach lanes on either side (we are dealing with islands and peninsulas here, at present packed with businesses on either side of the road)) 2.) a span further south connecting Calvert County to Dorchester, problematic since a span through Dorchester would plow through some extensive and significant wetlands and 3.) a span to the north, from east Baltimore to Kent County, right into Tolchester where once there was a great amusement pier the evidence reduced now to some curious paint on the crushed concrete that lines the banks. An amusement pier that was killed by the bridge to the south, whose congestion now threatens to destroy the county as a whole, turning what is an astonishingly rural appendage on the eastern seaboard into another burger boulevard. That would be bad news, if you ask me.

Anyway, I picked up two big coils of tin plated steel or some such things and had to secure and tarp them in the rain. By the time I was ready to go I was completely soaked and looking like a drowned rat. I changed and took off for Paris, Texas, the Paris of Texas to a Campbell's Soup plant so large that they had their own can manufacturing facility. The noise in the plant was deafening as huge presses stamped out and shaped pieces of sheet tin, the air smelled comfortable, in a soupy sort of way.
From there I was sent to the north side of Dallas to pick up 4x8 sheets of 2" thick foam insulation. The wind was ceaseless and the act of throwing straps and tarps over this load looked more like a three stooges routine than work.
That went to North Little Rock to a building supply store on a seedy street beneath a grey sky.
Another quick load assignment, this one to Malvern, Arkansas to pick up giant reels of cable from General Cable, a business so big it has no need for a fancy name. As you leave the highway and head toward Hot Springs the land suddenly bursts into swells unknown to travelers of I-30 headed to Texarkana.

I headed east and spent the night 40 miles east of Memphis. A beautiful evening, the air warm and breezy and easy to relax in.

These are headed to The City of Monroe, North Carolina, to maintain or expand their electrical infrastructure.
The delivery is not until Monday and I am spending the weekend in Asheville with some friends who went to college with my sister. Nice to have a weekend. and I'll be back in Chestertown next weekend, easy as pie.

sweet god when will this end

2008-04-24T17:58:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-11T21:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-11T20:51:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-02T18:34:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-02T17:53:00.000-07:00

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.

Halliburton and Drywall

2008-03-27T15:42:00.001-07:00

From Alliance I headed to Canton and picked up some steel at a plant by the name of Timkin. The load was 5 pieces of steel rod 9.5" in diameter and 20 feet long. They were headed to Duncan, Oklahoma. To Halliburton!
Halliburtons actual business, aside from war profiteering, is providing equipment for oil field exploration and extraction. So you can see why a war in the middle east might be in their financial interest. The steel rods, I would imagine, might be used to fashion the shaft for a oil drill.
The company has its origins in Duncan, in the southwest corner of the main body of Oklahoma. I delivered and waited the rest of that friday for a load. Then I got a message from my DM (driver manager) telling me I should just drive up to Oklahoma City for the weekend. I did so, although there was not a whole lot to do there either.
From the Petro on the southeast side of town I walked a few miles to the part of OKC known as "Bricktown." There is a canal, whether it has any purpose, historically or otherwise, I do not know, but now it gives the 16 screen theatre and the Hooters a very nice frontage.
The Bricktown Canal, OKC

As it happens it was St. Patrick's Day weekend and there was a parade. This parade had the feel and audience of a parade in a much smaller municipality, say one of abour 6,000 people rather than half a million. It was charming.
I drank some beers at a few places, The Bricktown Brewery, who made beers that looked good but tasted thin and Tapwerks, a great bar that has over 100 beers on tap. Then I saw Juno, which I liked a lot better than I thought i might. The next day I drank more and watched Bank Job which was not very intriguing which is not great for a bank heist movie.
Southeast OKC

On Monday morning I got a load assignment to drive down to Duke, which is really in the southwest corner of Oklahoma (not far from where i was but kind of a hike from OKC) where I picked up a load of sheetrock (or wall board or gypsum board or drywall or whatever you call it) destined for Sioux City, Iowa.
I don't know why this material has become so popular. If you have ever worked with it (I put drywall up in the laudry room of my parents basement) you know that it is garbage, cheap crappy crap that is terribly difficult to cut accurately and is very fragile (come on, haven't you ever, surprisingly easily, put your fist through a wall?)
I took it to Sioux City where I enjoyed a walk up the Loess Hills to a mall that I remembered from my cross Iowa bike trip and spent the afternoon in a Barnes and Noble and delivered in the morning. The very cold morning. The tarps were stiff and frosty. This cemented my decision to not continue driving into next winter. I really got to get this oven built.

Trash

2008-03-27T15:20:00.000-07:00

A Hill of Garbage in Ohio

I drove down to Stamford, Connecticut and picked up some garbage (Garbage!) which I took to a landfill in Ohio (Ohio!). Why the garbage from an outlying New York suburb needs to be taken 400+ miles over the Appalachian Mountains to Ohio is beyond me. This was perhaps the most depressing load I have ever taken.
The Jamaican lady at the "Transfer Station" in Stamford was irritated with the hispanic guys who loaded the plastic wrapped bales of garbage onto my truck. They did not do their job to her liking.
The landfill, outside of Alliance, Ohio (near Canton) was big, but not bizarrely so. I checked in at the gate and then was told to pull to the side and take off my straps. Then I had to drive up this wet god awful hill of trash (it had rained/was raining and everything was disgusting) and then back up to the spot where they would unload me. It was very muddy. It was a thick and chunky mud, made of water and trash, and was, disgusting, up to the hubs disgusting. The driver of the excavator had to rest his bucket on the back of my truck so I could get enough traction to get up the hill. He then used the excavator to knock the bales of trash off the trailer and a bulldozer pushed them towards the edge, Seagulls swarmed like gnats. The air was foetid.

As I swept the triler off I glanced down at a DanActiv lid and wondered if she ever thought her yogurt lid would end up here.

The Seagulls in Alliance.

Baltimore to Boston

2008-03-27T13:46:00.000-07:00

Okeedokee,
A quick rundown of the last few weeks so that I will feel caught up and hopefully keep on track from here on out. Seriously.
I left the house quickly. I had been ready for a load for a couple days but nothing was coming through wince it was the weekend. Sunday afternoon I received a call. There was a driver who's clutch had gone out. Could I go over and pick up his load, which had been towed to a lot in Baltimore and take it to Boston? of course I could.
I drove up to Kennedyville and picked up my trailer from where I had dropped it at the lot next to the volunteer fire department. and looped over the top of the bay and down into baltimore.
Baltimore, i am pretty sure, has the shittiest streets of any city in the developed world. but what do you expect, really? So I wind through East Baltimore and eventually find the tow yard, beneath I-95 and the gate is locked. I get out and look aound for someone, looking over my shoulder, feeling like I'm in an episode of "The Wire" (which I have never seen) and then the guy shows up, unlocks the gate, i drop my trailer and
pick up the loaded one, full of rolls of roofing materials, and head out.
I drove through the night, an awful night, midnight in new york city and there is still f-ing traffic across the GW bridge (which costs $40 to cross as a semi, thank god for company paid e-z pass) and then, north of the city i stop at a rest area and get some coffee from the burgerking. The first thing the wide hispanic woman says to me is "No Burgers."
Crawling into Waltham at 3am I park in the lot of the builders supply yard and go to bed. In the morning I drop the first delivery and then drive up to Woburn (ridiculously pronounced Wu-Burn (when I say Wu you say Burn, Wu, Burn, Wu, Burn))
After that delivery I had to take a long break and so I caught the train into somerville and ate too much indian food with some friends. Then I got a cab back to the truck, a freeking expensive cab, but one that went 90mph on I-93.

The Rest of that Week

2008-03-18T18:05:00.000-07:00

So up I went to Warrenton, Missouri to a place that fabricated steel parts most specifically for Trailers. There is a persistent insistence amongst drivers that flatbed truckers are either (or both) scared of or bad at backing. This comes I suppose from the idea that
a flatbed truck does not have to back into a dock to be loaded and in fact can often be loaded by forklift from the middle of a parking lot. While this is sometimes true it is just as often true that a flatbed truck must back into some sort of doc to be loaded, and most often it is a tighter situation (since it will still be loaded from the side) and even more often it requires backing into a building which is difficult because the light differential makes it essentially a blind procedure. Often you see flatbeds avoiding backing in a truck stop, especially late at night, because a flatbed's trailer axles are spread apart (as opposed to dry van trailers whose axles are next to each other). Because of this flatbeds must avoid the tight turns since as the turn tightens the spread axles basically drag along the pavement and can cause severe tire damage or, in extreme cases, the trailer can torque itself into capsizing. So to those van drivers who insist on propping themselves up because they prefer their no talent lazy ass job I say fuck off. (Can I say that)
This back was one such back into a tight slot in a building.
The metal pieces they then loaded were wavy, corrugated, i guess, sheets about 25 feet long and 2 feet wide and perforated with 1 1/2" holes at regular intervals. They loaded 15 bundles in three layers in the center of the trailer in a matter of minutes. I then pulled out of the building and put the straps on to secure them to the trailer and then tarped the whole thing. It was not very big (but maxed out the legal weight) and I only needed one of the tarps to cover it. (The two tarps together could cover a load that was the full length and width of the trailer and as high as legal (9'6" from the trailer bed or 13'6" from the ground.) Then I used some of the 100 bungees I was issued to secure the tarp and I was off. And that only took two and a half hours. I hoped that it would get easier.
As I made my way into St. Louis the rainy greyness was turning to freezing rain/sleety greyness and I was looking forward to getting further east and south and back into the rain.
I chose a path that stayed on the interstate until Lexington, Kentucky and then headed southeast across the mountains and into Virginia. This was probably a mistake since the load weighed 46,000 pounds and the hills of Kentucky got some steep roads. it was slow going but I got there and delivered and again, in a matter of a hour or two got another load.
this one picked up in Roanoke the next morning and delivered to Clifton, New Jersey, not far from NYC.
The next morning I headed up to the grandly named Steel Dynamics in Roanoke and picked up, you got it, steel, in 20 foot long bars (3/4"x3") and angle iron (or like two of the previous pieces joined along the 20' side at a ninety degree angle). I drove into a building (strait in no backing) and a huge crane on a track that ran along the ceiling loaded the bundles from the many stacks onto my truck using an apparently very powerful magnet. The following pictures are of the bundles of Steel at Steel Dynamics in Roanoke, and their back lot full of scrap.

I drove these up to Jersey, spent the night at the receiver (a not in a particularly nice part of the state, as opposed to the nice parts of the state. Which is to say it wasn't Princeton or Cape May.)

In the morning I drove into the receiver's building Denman and Davis, a steel supplier to builders in the NY/NJ/PA area, and was unloaded, this time with simple chain hoists, and then had to back out of the building because they refused to open the door in front of me. My DM (driver manager) than told me to go home for the weekend. Three and a half hours down the NJ Turnpike, across the Delaware Memorial Bridge and down into Kent County once again.

First Load

2008-03-18T17:37:00.000-07:00

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.

The Rest of Orientation

2008-03-16T11:22:00.000-07:00

The point of this orientation is, as I mentioned earlier, to fulfill the requirements of the FMCSR Sec.380.500-380.513 which typically takes about a day and a half. Topics covered included: Safety, Logging, Hours of Service (the number of hours you are allowed to work in a day, week, etc..) Benefits, and so on and so on. The safety section was especially memorable with lots of pictures of horrible accidents. Then we learned that flatbed trucking is, in fact, after Alaskan Crabbing and Logging, the third most dangerous job in the country and to go with that many pictures of people horribly mangled by not using the proper safety equipment. Lots of compound fractures and bungee hooks in eyeballs.
The second half of the week consisted of load securement training. Learning how to use straps and chains to attach things to the truck bed so that they do not fall off and get damaged (or hurt people.) We also learned how to cover things with tarps so that they do not get wet or dirty in transit. All pretty basic. After many weeks of inactivity the five of us were exhausted after this first day of pulling chains and throwing straps and crawling up onto and under trailers. This is great, it is exactly what I wanted.
On Friday, after being given an assignment to tarp a large and bizarrely shaped piece of machinery on a truck bed out on the backlot, we were taken over to the main building where we got paid for the week (in cash!) and were taken to our trucks. They were all spiffy and cleaned and had all the paperwork we would need sitting on the front seat. This was pretty sweet. Melton's trucks are mostly late model Kenworth T-600s. Mine is a 2007 with about 135,000 miles on it. (it's a baby) here:

and the interior. (leather baby)

After getting settled in my truck I headed over to Lowe's to pick up some of the things I would need like a few hand tools an extension ladder and nails and whatnot. Sometimes securing freight can be a bit of a puzzle, another plus in my opinion.
Then I settled in and waited for a load.

The Scam

2008-03-16T08:12:00.000-07:00

At 6:30 I woke up, much to soon, and made it to the lobby where the hot breakfast consisted of a steam table with biscuits, sausage, eggs, and gravy, pretty good for the econolodge. The bus from Melton arrived. A short blue bus. It looked nice but sounded rough. It reminded me of bussing to middle school. There were only 5 of us in the class. That would be nice.
The bus driver was also the orientation leader or teacher or whatever. A skinny young guy from all over the place who let it be known he had just gotten over a nasty divorce in Dallas. We went through the first part of the orientation. i don't remember what it involved, all of these things are pretty much the same since it is required by the FMCSR (The Federal Motor Carriers Safety Regulations) that all new trucking company hires go through an orientation that covers all the things that it should.
At one point the orientation teacher who I'll call Paul asked if any of us had received any odd phone calls at the hotel last night. Another guy and I said that indeed we had. Paul said that people had received these calls last week and they were trying to figure out what they were about.
After the first break, about 2 hours in one of the other students said he had gotten a call from his parents saying they had been contacted by someone from Melton about wiring some money. I checked my cell phone which had been turned off. There were 4 messages from my parents.
I thought that was odd.
I listened to the last one first.
"Well" my mom said "I've done it. I've wired you $650 dollars to Western Union in Myrtle Beach."
My heart was racing. I called her back. My dad picked up the phone.
"Dad, you didn't send any money to anyone did you" I said, knowing that they had but hoping otherwise.
"yes, mom did."
"oh shit. it's a scam, it's a scam."

Apparently what had happened was this. The fellow who had called my room the previous night was on a fishing expedition. In the preceding weeks or months he had fished the info from recruiting about what hotels in the Tulsa area Melton used for orientation. Then the night before he called the hotel and asked the front desk attendant, identified himself as Mike from Melton and asked to speak to the last recruit who had checked in. He spoke to the other guy in class the first time he called and got me the last time since I was the last to check in.
From me he got emergency contact info and got my cell phone off so that I would not be reachable the next morning.
The next morning, just after he knew orientation had started, he called my parents claiming to be from Melton and telling them that since I had some solid experience they had decided to put me out on the road with a trainer. I was en route to Myrtle Beach but needed to pay for some insurance that they would reimburse if I stayed with them for a few months. I would need to have the money in Myrtle Beach so it would need to be wired there via Western Union. For transactions under $1000 dollars WU does not require ID but only a password that is set by the sender. This guy told my mom that the password should be "Melton." Nevertheless she specified upon sending the money that I would need to show ID. Now either Western Union did not follow through on this request or "Mike" had a fake with my name on it. By the time we realized it was a scam the money had been picked up.
It sounds absurd in retrospect just as the timing and questions of the call I received in the motel the previous night does but at the time this guy preyed on the fact that my mom cares about me and wanted to make sure I got off on the right foot with this company.
I have to give credit to Melton for working hard to right this situation which is still in limbo. My mom has given statements to Western Union and the police in Maryland and South Carolina. Melton has tried to get the attorney general of South Carolina to investigate this on the basis of insurance fraud. Nothing has yet been ironed out. With Melton, my parents, and even the police Western Union has been completely uncooperative.

The Bus Ride

2008-03-16T07:47:00.000-07:00

Sweet God in Heaven that sucked.
The last time I took a ride on the greyhound I was headed from Sioux City, Iowa to Seattle, Washington. I had this big plan post college to bike from Iowa to Washington. I got across Iowa before being crushed by the lonesomeness. I rode up to the bus station in Sioux City packed my bike into a box and boarded the bus at midnight northbound to Winnipeg. Transferring in Fargo for the west bound bus to Seattle was perhaps where the company lost my bike. So that trip was sort of shitty. But not as shitty as this one!
Maybe it was the time of year or the part of the country or the economy but during the entire 40 hours of that northwesterly ride I had an open seat next to me and so the bus was not so bad. This ride, 34 hours from SanBerdoo to Tulsa I only had a seat open next to me for three and a half hours from Indio to Phoenix. That was no fun. No fun at all.
There was a woman behind me, a young woman, who sobbed uncontrollably for the first third of the trip. Her "boyfriend" much older, very crazy looking, he walked with a cane, was not helpful. At midnight in Flagstaff I think he tried to run away from her. but they boarded the bus just in time to head towards Albuquerque.

Finally the bus arrived in Tulsa. I called the motel and they sent the shuttle driver. A young guy who seemed like a really stoned Terence Howard told me he liked Tulsa enough, especially the riverwalk down towards Jenks.
I checked into the hotel and went upstairs and ordered a pizza. I was, you can understand exhausted.
The pizza arrived, I ate it, The phone rang.
"Hi" the man said in a thick southern accent. "This is Mike from Melton. Just wanted to check in with you and see how things are going before orientation tomorrow."
I told him things were fine.
"Well that's great, I just wanted to call to ask you to leave your cell phone in the motel or turn it off before you come to class tomorrow. We had some problems last week with people interrupting class."
Sure, I said.
"and one other thing. We're missing some info about emergency contacts from your file. could you give that to me now."
Yeah, I said, and gave him the info for my parents in Maryland.
"Great, see you tomorrow morning, don't forget to leave that cell phone at the motel tomorrow."
Yeah ok, I said, very tired. It was quarter of ten, that seemed oddly late for such a phone call.

Back into the Southwest

2008-02-22T22:47:00.000-08:00

In San Bernardino, in the hotel you might remember from the origins of this here blog. Tomorrow I board a bus for 2 days to Tulsa, Oklahoma to begin orientation for my new job. Here are some pics from the past couple days coming back into the southwest.
North of Moab, Utah

Chimney Rock near Cortez, Colorado

Shiprock, Northwestern, New Mexico

San Andres Mountains near Las Cruces, New Mexico

Wind Farm near Palm Springs (here is where the cool ocean climate meets the hot desert climate through a tight window called Tehachapi Pass creating, as you might expect, heavy constant wind.)

It's amazing what a little rain will do for Southern California

Salt Lake City, Utah

2008-02-22T22:39:00.001-08:00

In the Tabernacle with my tourguides

The Salt Lake Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints

A Power Plant on North Temple St. SLC, UT

The Utah State Capital and the Wasatch Range

The Palouse

2008-02-22T22:30:00.000-08:00

The Palouse is an area of richly undulating treeless hills primarily in Southeastern Washington but extending into Idaho and Oregon as well. they are a huge area for growing barley and lentils and in the summer the hills shimmer in green and gold. Deep primary contrasting and otherworldly beautiful. In the winter they are more monotone but no less wonderful. (Have you seen the bizzaro Robin Williams/LL Cool J movie "Toys"? They filmed the outside scenes, the ones on the impossible green treeless hills, in the Palouse.)
The Snake River at the Washington/ Idaho Border

Pasco, Washington

2008-02-22T22:19:00.000-08:00

I’m not sure that there is any state that is so different from one end to another (except adjacent Oregon or huge Texas/California) as is Washington. Pasco is not even in the same universe as Seattle. Out here in Central Washington (usually called Eastern Washington since that would be anything east of the Cascades, a mountain range in the western side of the state.) I feel like I am nowhere, or in a whole new place that no one has ever been before. (That being said I am at a Flying J and therefore someone has been here before.) Allow me to describe…
After driving across the basin and range of Idaho, beautifully frosted with snow (snow really brings out the best of the west, it takes the drab taupe hills and adds shine, depth and contrast, fucking gorgeous) I entered into Oregon, another state with a split personality. Up toward Baker City I climbed into the Blue Mountains where a thick and gauzy fog settled and, indeed, froze on surfaces, an exceptionally fine glazing of ice, turning everything into crystal. Horrible, treacherous, crystal. Fortunately that ended and I shimmied down what is called Cabbage Hill toward Pendleton. This is one hell of a down grade for an interstate. Switchbacks! Full on switchbacks on an interstate. Across the Columbia and into Washington or possibly the surface of Neptune. The hills swell in impossibly huge gestures, like being at sea, the waves, unbraking, rising in all directions, making one feel quite little indeed.
There are no trees.
(traveling west on I-84 looking at where I will be momentarily, i.e. an interstate switchback)

There are vineyards. All the big Washington state wines are grown here. Columbia Crest, Snoqualmie, Chateau Ste. Michelle, Hogue, etc. The long summer days (we are pretty far north here) combined with the warmth and then drastic cool at night along with well draining (i.e. shitty) soil and easy irrigation make it pretty ideal for viticulture, especially white wine grapes.
The Columbia Crest Vineyards south of Prosser, Washington

Up and over a huge swell of a hill (I only call it a hill because it is so gentle) and you are out of the Columbia River Valley and into the Yakima River Valley and their respective AVAs (American Viticultural Areas, the US equivalent of the French Appelation d’Origine Contrôlée such as Côtes du Rhône or Beaujolais.) Once over the hill one thing becomes very obvious, Mount Adams, The second highest point in Washington. A 12,000 foot stratovolcano in the Cascades. Then another thing becomes obvious. Mount Rainier, the highest volcano at over 14,000 feet. It doesn’t look as impressive from here because Adams is closer. These are easily the most astonishing mountains in the lower 48. From the Yakima Valley (at around 1000 feet) they rise over 11,000 feet. From Seattle you are looking at them from nearly sea level (when you can see them through the rain and fog). Nowhere else will you find this sort of differential.
After delivering my load of Fruity Pebbles et.al. to the Wal-Mart Grocery Warehouse I headed back east. I have a load to pick up in Lewiston, Idaho, just across the river from Clarkston, Washington, cute. I believe it is paper, uggh. (heavy). Tomorrow’s drive across the Palouse should be delightful. The load is headed to Laredo, Texas although I won’t be able to take it all the way there since I have to be in California by Friday in order to catch the bus to Tulsa for orientation for my new job driving flatbeds. We’ll have to split it somewhere.
Mount Adams from the Wal-Mart grocery warehouse, Grandview, Washington

Snowville, Utah

2008-02-22T22:11:00.000-08:00

I-80 in Wyoming

Oh the plains of Wyoming. The first time I ever came into the country known as Wyoming was on an epic journey to Washington with my friend Robin. It was my first trip west. West from Iowa. We had come through the sand hills and badlands and then into Wyoming on I-90. I felt fairly certain that, had I not had the acclimatizing step of having gone to college for a few years in Iowa’s tallgrass prairie, I might have totally lost it in the emptiness of this most empty state. It is perhaps worth noting that my car was not working well. It ran but did not start, this may have added to my apparent agoraphobia. We continued that trip without turning off the car, all the way to Washington.
Wyoming this time around, having just had a fairly substantial amount of snow, decided, it seems, to start the job of plowing but not complete it leaving large swathes of the interstate, sometimes one lane, sometimes both, with just enough snow to be compacted into glacial ice making passage nerve-wracking. (Some of this might have to do with the nature of snow in Wyoming to “blow” i.e. not stay put, but still, this is not a new problem and I think Wyoming could figure out a solution, perhaps more of those charming snow fences.)
At the Flying J near Rawlins where I stopped midday for fuel there was no need for a plow whatsoever The semis would just tamp it down into a slippery mess for free.
Just as you are leaving “the equality state” (so named as it was the first to give women the vote, that and they beat the shit out of the gays) it gets interesting, or, to put it another way, just as you enter Utah it gets interesting. I-84 follows a river through there huge soft shouldered glass blue (because of the snow) mountains into the valley of the Salt Lake at Ogden. I wonder, when Brigham Young finally made it to this valley, after all the bullshit he’d been through and declared “This is the place!” I wonder what he thought once he got down to the alkaline shores and first tasted it bitter brine. That must have been a bit of a bummer.
I’m in Snowville just a few miles south of Idaho. There is snow on the ground and the place is just barely a “ville.” A number of widely spread houses, many trailers, with large fenced in yards, everyone has horses and dogs. The only businesses in town are one place with initials for a name, function indeterminable, two diners, and the Flying J by the interstate, where I sit now and pen this missive to you.

One of Snowville's two Diners

Cattle Grate, Snowville, Utah

North Platte, Nebraska

2008-02-22T22:06:00.001-08:00

Sunset in North Platte, Nebraska

Traveling southwest I past through the driftless zone, the area of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa that escaped glaciation and thus is starkly unflat as compared with the landscapes that give these states their reputation. The sky was unfailingly grey. Not cloudy but rather as if you had, on photoshop, used the little paint can to turn everything that was blue into light squinty grey. The dirty snow on the ground added to the effect greatly. I passed into Iowa, the landscape a grainy B&W repro from a bad catalogue of Grant Wood and through small towns whose own greyness brought to mind the town where I went to college and what an odd setting it was for a boy from the east coast. Now, however, I think of the Midwest almost as a second home, it is just that in being away from it for so long it strikes me as foreign but familiar.
The trailer that I had, filled with paper towels from Green Bay I dropped in a glaciated lot in West Branch, Iowa, the home of the eminently forgettable Herbert Hoover. It seems in thinking back on the presidents, we had a lot of eminently forgettable ones. A bunch of important ones at the beginning, then some like Polk or Jackson who we remember because they were gigantic pricks and then the occasional Lincoln. Into the twentieth century they become less forgettable as the specificity of history favors the recent. I wonder if George W. will go down as a eminently forgettable president or a prick. Time will tell, time will tell. Let’s this year elect us an unforgettable one shall we. (All that being said I’m sure Hoover was a swell guy and the folks from Iowa sure love their only native son to make it to the highest office.)
I picked up a different trailer from the drop yard loaded with cereal (including but not limited to Chocolate Honeycombs and Fruity Pebbles) and lumbered along eventually across the Missouri and into Nebraska, the flash of excitement tumbling down from the Loess Hills and into Omaha and then the flatness. Oh! The Flatness. Eventually I-80 joins the Platte River, one of the primary routes west in the days when manifest destiny must have been a really god damn exciting idea. (my sarcasm might hide the fact that, had I been alive then, I too would have found it really god damn exciting. So much so that even today I only feel good when traveling west. (or north)) Settlers followed the flat fertile valley, with water for drinking and trees for fixing broken wagons (we have all played Oregon trail, yes?) across the length of Nebraska before emerging out of the green and into the wide desiccated landscape of the high plains that collapsed in on them with its immensity and surely they must have thought, what the fuck have we gotten ourselves into?

2008-02-22T22:06:00.000-08:00

Salt Lake City

2008-02-19T11:12:00.000-08:00

hang in there dear reader, there are entries awaiting post as soon as I can
get near a good Internet connection. (I'm writing this on my phone)
in the slc now enjoying the cool mountain air and complimentary tours/
conversion attempts at the LDS compound. More on this next time.

Chicago, Illinois

2008-02-12T07:27:00.001-08:00

Oh Brother.
I'm in Chicago, it is Tuesday.
Too cold for diesel engines in this, presently, most inhospitable climate.
At this time the batteries are inside warming and and charging up and, hopefully,
when they are done, the truck will start and all will be well again.
fingers are crossed, wood is being knocked upon.
In the mean time, my insatiable reader, I offer some images from the sometimes windy, but terribly chilly city.

Warm Light (deceptive)

Serge and the Antelope

David in the Cold City

Not from chicago. a fast car in a warmer place. with that crazy iphone distortion.

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

2008-02-01T13:29:00.002-08:00

Its the 50th blog post! woot!
there is a song by a guy named Josh Ritter (no relation to star of Three's Company. Not that I know of at least) The lyric: "It's a long way to hell, it's closer to Harrisburg." But just barely. This was today as I made my way through the "wintry mix" of snow, sleet, freezing rain and, eventually, rain from a Wal-Mart DC near Clearfield to Palmyra, near the aforementioned Harrisburg. The route is US-322, a nice diagonal across the ridges of the Appalachians and down the Juniata river valley. The section between State College (perhaps the most imaginatively named land grant university town) and Lewistown is possibly one of the prettiest stretches of road in Pennsylvania. In freezing rain and sleet, however, prettiest=deadliest, and so it was a long day.

2008-02-01T13:29:00.001-08:00

Austintown, Ohio

2008-01-31T16:47:00.000-08:00

So sorry, it has been so long.
for a while i had a student. of late i am feeling a bit of the old ennui.
but now here I am at the TA in Austintown, Ohio where i seem to be quite a lot.
This has been a real shitball of a trip. I left home and immediately got into a fight with my dispatcher as to when i should be able to take time off and where and when i should take students or not. He is a new dispatcher to me and a real pain. He likes money because he can not like his job otherwise. Then I had a breakdown. I had just picked up a load of maxi pads and diapers that were to be recycled. They did not appear to have been used but were also not "new." (do you ever have those moments when you see something in a totally different and refreshing way? I just looked at the word "new" and then at all the other words and thought how wonderful it is that I can write words. That it is really a fairly complicated process, and, though i may not be the most eloquent writer in the world, just the fact that, fairly effortlessly, I can (quickly) touch these little buttons to make words that other people can look at and understand, to some extent, what i am trying to say, is pretty god damn fantastic.)
So I was going down the road with these questionably used sanitary products and I got on the highway and in the turn realized that my brakes were smoking. (!) I stopped for a little while, just thinking that this heavy load and the hilly terrain of suburban Philadelphia might have overheated my brakes, I carried on and the brakes continued to smoke, I pulled off onto the off ramp for PA-3. Crawling under the truck I realized that the brakes were fully set on two wheels of the truck even when they were supposed to be released, I won't go too much into detail here but suffice it to say there was not enough lining left on the shoes and the piston had pushed the S-cam to the point that it had rolled and stuck, keeping the shoes set fast against the drum. I needed new brakes and I couldn't go anywhere without possibly starting a fire underneath my truck. I called into Werner's Road Breakdown Department which has a habit of taking forever to process things, but this time would prove ridiculous. I sat on the shoulder of the off ramp from the blue route (I-476) to PA-3 for over 7 hours before they sent out a guy who adjusted the brakes temporarily so that I could drive to the nearest service station (a TA in Paulsboro, New Jersey) Once there I waited, again, on Werner for authorization over night, over 8 more hours before deciding that I had indeed been forsaken. i paid for the repair myself with a credit card figuring that I would get reimbursed later. Then i was off, I took the load to Cleveland and then picked up another load at Werner's drop yard in Girard, near Youngstown, Ohio. I got about 11 miles down the road before I realized that i was losing air. I stopped on the shoulder and inspected the line to the trailer realizing that it had been severed and in so examining it I had worsened the problem such that the truck was no longer movable. I called Werner and proceded to wait on the side of the road (not a "safe" place) for over 6 hours before help was sent. It was during this time that I began to look into alternate options. Assuming all goes well I have decided to stop working for Werner and start with Melton Trucking, a flatbed company, at the end of February.
Since my second breakdown things have been going ok.
I took the load that i was carrying to York, Pennsylvania and then picked up a multi stop Staples load with 5 deliveries in Florida. woot.
The stops were in Largo (near Tampa), Winter Haven, St. Cloud, Kissimmee, and Ocala.
(i fucking hate florida, especially the white trash dreamland around Orlando. Florida, essentially is a bunch of no talent cracker assholes trying to recreate the "glories" of southern California as some sort of cheap themepark-world, in a more hostile climate. It is ugly, profoundly so.)
After that I picked up a load of 7 huge rolls of paper (7 feet tall by 4.5 feet in diameter) in Fernadina Beach at an E-normous paper mill in the very northeasternmost corner of Florida. I took these rolls of paper to Norfolk, most likely to be put onto shipping containers and shipped overseas. Then I picked up some shitty import merchandise from Chesapeake, VA and took it to a Wal-Mart DC near Clearfield, Pennsylvania. Then I picked up a load of Automobile glass from a PPG plant near Altoona and took that to our drop yard in Girard, Ohio, its final destination is a Toyota plant in California. Then I drove here where today I took a nice walk and bought some beer and typed this. tomorrow I head back to the dropyard to pick up something headed back into PA. Lame. Here are some pichurs:
Savannah, Georgia
3 birds (some sort of egret?)in a Staples Parking Lot in Kissimmee
Smurfit-Stone Container Corporation, Fernadina Beach, Florida
A very Florida church Fernadina Beach, Florida
Signs from my walk. Austintown, Ohio

Petro I-70, Pennsylvania

2008-01-31T16:44:00.000-08:00

In this stretch of I-70 before the turnpike there is a Petro full of characters here are 3 (3 groups, 6 people):

In the lobby, adjacent to the entrance for the Asian Massage Parlor there is one of those games that you put quarters in hoping that they will fall where the rakes will push them forward into the other quarters and that those quarters, perched precariously on the edge will fall and you will end up with more quarters than you started out with.
From the Asian Massage Parlor out steps an Asian Masseuse, bored with, apparently, no takers. She perches over the machine and plunks in quarters. Her body arches with stressful anticipation. She coos and perhaps grunts a bit. She wins some. She returns to the Parlor to watch Asian DVDs.

The second: one a boy, perhaps 18 or 19. Attractive in a pale, fleshy Jack White sort of way. He stands behind the Sbarro’s counter wearing a Family Guy T-shirt and smoking (unsure of the legality of this in truckstops in PA). Meanwhile a tall slender middle-aged woman mans the main register about 15 feet away. She wears the sort of jeans that have a seemingly impossible amount of lower torso in them. Jeans you might call “Mom-Jeans.” She has short brown hair and big glasses. She looks at the Sbarro’s boy longingly.

A black woman and a white man, both with frizzy fans of hair extending from their skulls downward toward their shoulders, both wearing leather jackets embroidered with semi trucks. They were a couple, this much was clear, and there was a small boy, white, no African in him, who was their son. (I guess) The bought something and then headed out to their truck at the fuel pumps, the boy running ahead, reaching up to open the door and quickly perching in the drivers seat, gripping the wheel and twisting it back and forth, “driving.”

photos from the last few weeks

2008-01-20T13:38:00.001-08:00

Humphreys Peak near Flagstaff, Arizona

Cotton Fields and the Target, West Phoenix, Arizona

Wasatch Range, Suburban Salt Lake City, Utah

Near Boyer, Oregon in the Coast Range, OR-18

Oregon Coast, US-101 near Lincoln City

DHL Terminal, March Air Reserve Base, California

2008-01-20T13:38:00.000-08:00

Upper Midwest!

2008-01-14T14:21:00.000-08:00

sweet Jesus it is cold in Minnesota. (presently +5)
my apologies for not keeping up. I have had a student with me these last two weeks.
after returning from Xmas the first load was up to new York followed quickly by a beer load from Baldwinsville
(near Syracuse) to Albuquerque. the load was destined for Ontario, California (in the Eastern end of the LA metro known rather grandiosly as "the inland empire" but they wanted me to split it in ABQ but then no they wanted me to take it to Ontario but then no split it in Phoenix, and so that's what I did, stranded there for new years but enjoying a nice warm dry bikeride to the mall and some Thai food that made a mess of my panniers on the ride back. Then a student assignment. (I had told them I did not want any students but they did not care.) I was going to complain but saw that this guy was two thirds of the way through his training and therefore probably easy money. Turns out he was a nice enough guy too. Black and from Germany. The freight however has been sucking, even so we went from Phoenix to Vegas to SLC to Oregon to LA to Phoenix again (a real shithole where we saw a rollover accident happen. Thank god the girl in the SUV was fine.) then they had us deadhead over 800 miles to Ft. Collins Colorado to pick up some beer that we took to Omaha ad swapped that load with a driver who had a truckload of Cheerios destined for Cedar Rapids, Iowa and now up to Howard Lake, Minnesota to pick up something headed to Bolingbrook, Illinois near Chicago and BALLS is it COLD.

Milan, New Mexico

2007-12-31T17:10:00.002-08:00

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

2007-12-31T17:10:00.001-08:00

Kelleyville, Oklahoma

2007-12-31T16:54:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-18T19:46:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-18T18:51:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-18T18:29:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-18T17:48:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-18T17:44:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-07T04:50:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-02T13:27:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-02T10:56:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-02T10:13:00.002-08:00

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

2007-12-02T10:13:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-12T16:41:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-12T14:39:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-12T14:31:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-08T17:46:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-04T13:20:00.000-08:00

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

2007-10-12T18:02:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-27T19:44:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-27T19:16:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-27T19:01:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-27T18:52:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-27T18:41:00.000-07:00

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.