Parowan, Utah

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Williamsburg to Hagerstown

I picked up the beer today. Drove from Ashland to Williamsburg and then had to go through Anheuser-Busch's byzantine rigamarole.
1.) Weigh in, full truck and empty trailer.
2.) Check in with guard.
3.) Pull Forward to have guard check empty trailer.
4.) If clean, drop trailer in rows 1 or 2. If dirty proceed to trailer sweepout area, sweepout trailer and then drop trailer in row 3
5.) Procedd to entrace gate for Bobtail weight. (again this time with no trailer? what is the point).
6.) Get trailer assignment from guard.
7.) Proceed into the plant to find trailer.
8.) Hook up to trailer, brace load with straps, adjust tandems (rear wheels) to best guess of where the right position is for legal weight distribution.
9.) Proceed to exit gate.
10.) weigh trailer
11.) If overweight on axle distribution, return to the drop yard to adjust tandems.
12.) return to scale (repeat steps 10-12 until legal (12,000 on the steer axle, 34,000 on the drive axles (combined) and 34,000 on the trailer (tandems) axles.)
13.) Get papers.
14.) Have guard seal trailer (a seal is a little plastic strip that might well be a deterent to theft but anyone with fingers (or teeth) could break it. I suppose the purpose is more proof of non-tampered-with-ness.
15.) Leave.

all this took just 90 minutes!
This beer doesn't have as much room (it is in cans Busch and perhaps Busch light) to slosh around but it is stil heavy as balls (43,000 pounds) and on the crppy roads of Virginia knocked me around quite a bit.
The Busch plant is quite a place. Smelly in that malty with a hint of hops sort of way. steam billowing out all over the place train tracks leading in but not coming from anywhere (perhaps they used to bring in all the barley by train but no longer).
Enormous.
I got through DC just fine this time and then up to Hagerstown where I delivered (am presently delivering) mercifully just before the Appalachains get into full swing. (Heavy loads are very slow going up hill and very fast going down and so are a bit frustrating and nervewracking, alternately.
The next load will take me to Cockeysville, north of Baltimore, to pick up and the to Terre Haute, Indiana to deliver. What could it be! every time the quallcomm (the satellite comunications device) beeps it's like Christmas!