On the Road (again)

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Chicago, Illinois

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.

Friday, February 1, 2008

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

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.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Austintown, Ohio

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

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.”