Wrapping it up

That truck stop was even cuter by daylight. A couple of inches of snow didn't hurt, either.

I woke inside a picture postcard. Most pleasant. And since I didn't get parked until the wee hours of the night, I couldn't drive until late in the morning. So I could get out and stroll around.

Winding footpaths. Picnic pavilions. A little pool with a waterfall fountain (a memorial garden dedicated to state road workers). According to the signs I ran across, there used to be a petting zoo, but they closed it down some years back.*

This is a rest area?

By the time I was legal to drive, the parking lot was slush, but the rest of the place was still nice. Duty called, though. So I went back to the last customer and picked up an empty trailer, then headed for Newark.

Eventually I got loaded and headed west. Didn't quite get out of New Jersey before I decided it was too dark to drive casually. Found a truck stop and parked in the (once again) gathering snow.

Now I'd better find a phone. This is my anniversary, y'see. Skipping the nightly "hi honey" call tonight would be a BAD idea.

G'nite.
-----
*Somebody decided they'd have to have a vet on-call, and the budget didn't cover that.

Looking around

I've never been in a charming rest area before.

Most of them are strictly utilitarian. I've been in a few that were nice. One or two that were scenic, after a fashion.* And a few that were downright impressive. But this one is...well, kind of cute.

The drive was tree-lined, with streetlights rigged to look like old gas lamps (with wreaths, candy canes, etc., at this time of year, of course). Until I saw the standard slab o'asphalt in the back I thought I'd made a wrong turn.

Once I'd parked,it was a bit more ordinary. But still pleasant.

Of course, it's in the middle of a small down in Delaware** and doubles as a park-and-ride for the commuter buses (lots of big cities around here), but still. A nice place to rest.

I can use it. I should sleep well tonight.

I spent eleven hours behind the wheel today. The legal limit. It would have been ten or so, but I had to take the Beltway around Washington, D. C. at 5:00 pm. By the time I'd dropped my trailer I had exactly enough driving time to get here.

Fortunately, "on duty" time isn't the same as "driving time." I don't lose driving time when I'm fueling. Or cleaning the windshield. Or the mirrors and side windows.

The windshield is important, of course. Even in the summer. But the other night I remembered how important the other glass is.

I was backing into a truck-stop parking space. At a certain point, one of the parking-lot lights suddenly backlit the thin layer of dried road salt, etc., on the right side window. Just like that, I could see where every droop of dirty water had tried on that window. And the back corner of my trailer simply disappeared. Marker lights and all.

Disconcerting.

I got it parked safely, but it was a waker-upper. These things are blind enough already. When I fueled today I spent some extra time on the glass. Closing the barn door after ONE of the horses got out isn't quite as dumb...
-----
*Most of the scenic ones aren't set up to welcome 18-wheelers, for some reason...
**Smyrna, Delaware, if you're interested.

Heavy thoughts

Waiting patiently in the night, a victim of post-Christmas catchup.

This is my third load since coming back yesterday. All of them were already late when I got the assignment. I might get this one to its destination on time, though. I'm 22 hours late picking it up, but there might be time to get it where it's going.

If I push. And if nothing goes wrong.

It could have been worse. I didn't really expect to get there till tomorrow morning. I was running two-lanes most of the way, and that usually slows you down seriously.*

This morning's load was a bit of a surprise. The bill of lading listed the load as weighing 47,000+ lbs. When it's that heavy you start worrying. I mean, the truck will usually pull it, but is it legal?

The tractor and trailer together typically weighs about 30-35,000 lbs. 47,000 lbs of cargo is enough to push some of the heavier trucks over the gross-weight limit.

Right now I'm in a Freightliner Century Class tractor. That's one of the lighter sleeper trucks out here. I was fairly sure I would be under gross. But with that much weight, balancing the load is a lot tougher.

Heart in my throat, I scaled the rig. And found it five tons lighter than I was told.

Five tons.

Do these people know what they're shipping?

Not that I'm complaining, mind you...
-----
On Interstates I hope to average 60, and plan for 50. On two lanes I hope for 45 and plan for 30. Little towns every 10 miles can slow you down a lot.

Seeing things

Backing into a dock, when four does dashed past me, up the hill to my left and into somebody's back yard.

Just like that.

This morning, watched a couple of geese glide in to a landing just outside the window. The catchment ponds people are putting in for the green crowd do have their uses.

I complained once that I spend a lot of time driving past things I want to see. But some of the everyday things do pop up.

The things you take for granted

The coffee was a dollar. The pastry was fifty cents. I paid a dollar fifty. Over the counter.

Apparently there is no sales tax in the Seneca nation. When was the last time you saw that?

I'm sure they get their pound of flesh somehow, but...

Omens?

Passed through Accident, Maryland this morning. Drove extra carefully.

Lights in the darkness

I'd forgotten how spooky one of the big sirens can be.

I'm in a fairly small city in the Appalachians. Apparently it's small enough to have a volunteer fire department. With one of the old air-raid type sirens to summon the faithful. Urgent and plaintive and oddly beautiful.

I don't envy those who answered it. It's below freezing already, and lows in the teen's are in the forecast. I'm already looking forward to waking up shivering, starting the truck, and waiting for it to get warm enough to sleep in. Then doing it again in a few hours.

Getting here was good for working up a sweat, though. Two lanes over the mountains. Hairpin turns on a road a foot wider (per lane) than the truck. Not the worst I've driven, but scary enough. Especially in the dark.

When I wasn't being terrified I was enjoying the scenery. This is about the only time of year you can enjoy scenery in the dark. Come around a pitch-black curve and There! In the distance! A multicolored spray of brilliant dots, sprawled over what seems like half an acre--and is, sometimes. Flickering or winking or glowing steadily--or maybe all of the above. Firefly season for men, in the depths of winter.

Christmas lights seem more impressive to me out here. In the city, rich people's displays seem (usually) a bit--tame. Orderly. As if they hired someone to put the lights up (which maybe they7 did) and the contractor did too neat a job. The lightshow equivalent of McMansions.

The less affluent displays are friendlier, but--well, CRAMPED. Fitting a properly exuberant set of Christmas lights on a city-lot-sized front yard makes it look like work. Or something.

But out here...Half an acre of lights in the middle of a mile of blackness. Or a candle in the window--the only light you can see. Or something in between.

Always a pleasure.

Your weight and fortune here

Got home tonight. I wasn't quite sure I would.

My pickup yesterday was scheduled for late last night. By the time I found a safe place to park it was past midnight. So it was 10:30 this morning before I got started north.

When you're looking for a place to park in the middle of the night, truck stops are iffy. My company had a terminal in this city, so I spent the night there. They did have--one--space when I got there. What they didn't have was a scale. So the first stop I made this morning was at a truck stop, to weigh the load I picked up last night.

Uh-oh.

I've talked about the weight rules before This time I had no problem with gross weight. They hadn't overloaded me. But they had loaded most of their product in the nose of the trailer. Even with the fuel tanks 3/4 empty, I couldn't get enough weight off the drive wheels to pass a DOT scale with confidence. On a Freightliner Century Class--one of the lightest full-size semi-tractors out there.

Mind you, I was something like a hundred miles from the next DOT scale. By the time I got there, I would probably have burned off enough fuel to be legal. But I was supposed to drop this load off at my home terminal before I went home. And if I could barely get a Century Class to pass a weight test with near-empty tanks, how would the next guy get it across a state line?*

So I called my office. After some thought they said come on home. They knew who would be taking the load the rest of the way. They'd told him there was a problem. He'd said he'd handle it.

O-kayyy.

So I started north. Not fueling, lest I make myself irreversibly illegal.

There are three weigh stations on the Interstates between Jacksonville, Florida and Atlanta, Georgia. The first two let me pass. But the third was too far ahead. And you can only trust the fuel gauges so far. After dithering for nearly a hundred miles, I finally stop and fueled up. Twenty whole gallons. More than that I was afraid to buy.

Then I drove on, wondering if I'd been too generous at the pumps. The last weigh station was about thirty miles ahead. This gave me entirely too much time to figure the weights and fuel-burn rates in my head, and get a different answer every time. (You may have deduced before now that I'm a second-guessing kind of guy.) But at last I saw it ahead of me. I held my speed, thinking light thoughts. Closer. Closer.

And the little box on the windshield beeped cheerfully and the green light blinked. I yet live.**

An hour or so later I pulled into the terminal and dropped the trailer. I'm only a day late for my home time. Oh, well. It could have been worse.
-----
*You've seen those weigh stations. And we know where they are--they're marked on the trucker editions of most road atlases. But the one place you can almost guarantee you'll find one is on an Interstate close to a welcome center...

**Many states have installed equipment in the road near their weigh stations that will weigh the truck as it approaches the station. You can subscribe to a service that lets you mount a transponder in your truck to talk to that equipment. If your truck is light enough, you'll get a signal that basically says, "You aren't the overweight truck we're looking for. You can go about your business. Move along."
If the weight is at all marginal you'll be signaled to pull into the station, where they'll check you out with the more accurate scales there.

Fog and other slow goings

Spent the morning in a fog. Literally.

It's an occupational hazard when your road goes through the mountains. Like they told you when you were little, fog is a cloud that touches the ground. When the ground is way up high...

And in the dark it's especially fun.

I was lucky this time. Visibility never dropped below a hundred (or so) yards. I never really had to slow down. But it's still a little off-putting to sit in your vague white bubble, watching the taillights go by and dim out.

I was out of the fog by daybreak. That's when things really slowed down.

I've talked about stop-and-go traffic and how I stay sane dealing with it. But that's usually a city thing. Out in the country, if you have a traffic problem it's usually because of construction or accident; and you either slow down (but keep moving) or your stop altogether.

This, on the other hand, was honest-to-goodness move-half-a-mile-and-then-stop-again stuff.

My best guess was that I finally got tripped up by that rockslide from a few weeks back. The one that's closed I-40 between North Carolina and Tennessee for the foreseeable future. I-77 is one of the main detour routes for that mess. And the fact that most of the traffic went south on I-81 when I went north made me feel so intelligent...

A while later I felt even better. An electronic sign at the state line said “COFFEE BREAK AT WELCOME CENTER.” Always willing to consider free food (or even free coffee), I pulled in.

I almost couldn't park. The truck pull-through's were mostly full—of cars. Overflow from the “regular” spaces, apparently. Lots of people going to Grandmother's house, I guess.

But they were generous enough to leave a couple of spaces for us poor truckers. And the nice people in the tent had cookies! HOMEMADE cookies! Not exactly an orthodox Thanksgiving dinner, but a nice start.

New things...

There's been a certain amount of franticness this week. Interspersed with endless delay. Of course.

As a result, I don't have a whole lot of time for typing up adventures just now. I've been home a couple of days, and I go out again this morning. I'll try to make it up to you next week.

Meanwhile, I'll mention one experience: Parallel parking.

Yeah, we do that too. And it's as much fun as it sounds. I learned the maneuver in driving school and never used it again. Until late last week.

The customer had a fairly small parking lot behind a fence. Just past that lot was a dead-end street. I suppose they plan to put a building there some day. But right now they use it to hold trailers they can't fit in beside their loading docks.

Which means a long line of trailers along one side of a fairly narrow "street." And the only open space was right in the middle of the line.

As I said, I learned the maneuver in driving school. More or less. With a much shorter truck.* And a trailer seven feet shorter. A flatbed. So you could see over the top of it. This was much more interesting.

But I did get it in there. And there may be room behind me for a yard tractor to get the trailer in back. It took me three tries to get my tractor out of the line without hitting the trailer in front. But I did get in in there.

Warm glow of pride...

-----
They wouldn't use a sleeper for that kind of teaching, now would they? It had a back window, too...

Mood piece

US23, through the Appalachians. Ohio, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina.

Little pockets of cloud in the hollows, looking as if you could throw a net over them and keep them for your collection--until you get a bit closer and they thin out, almost vanishing as you come alongside. Layers of cloud sliding by the hills beside you, dimming the remnants of the fall color behind them like spun-sugar bridal veils. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?) And then you realize one of those veils is above you, just as you drive into it.

You chuckle a bit as you pass the signs that say LIMITED VISIBILITY WHEN LIT (they're not lit). You can see the signs. Barely.

You leave the fog behind quickly enough. Climb through it, actually. And at length the drizzling rain takes over. You notice the difference in the colors as a different bit of weather softens them. And you wish you were a painter.

Hope you don't mind all the travelogue stuff. I could dwell on the route I was ordered to take (through TWO fairly hefty business districts, expensive parked cars inches from the trailer's back corner as I wove through the not-quite-straight thru lanes).

Or the stoplight that changed at the perfect moment and left me riding the brakes (ABS jerking away) to a stop 16 feet into the intersection. (About a 2-second yellow it was. Good thing it wasn't a 4-way...)

Or the temperature gauge suddenly climbing into the red as I climbed one long steep slope. In the rain. In fifty-degree weather. With less than half my rated load. And then doing it again, a few miles later. (The fan never kicked in either time. Looks like this truck's going in the shop when I get back...)

But why dwell on all that when I have cloud-veiled slopes, and mountaintops, and gorges, and man-made valleys (blasted through the living rock to make a way for me) and--well, you get the idea. I'm just not in a mood to be in a mood. Not with all this to look at.

No deep thoughts. Not this time. So there.

Crash diet

I haven't had an Orange Crush in--what? Forty years?

Maybe. For some reason I lost my taste for the things long ago. But caffeine didn't seem like a good idea just now, and a change of pace did. So...

Hm. Not bad.

Freshly showered, sipping on a slightly different soda. I am calm and comfortable now.

Less so a few hours ago.

I'd just picked up what the customer said was about twenty-one tons of something or other,* and here I was at the nearest truck stop, weighing the truck. That's important. There are very particular rules about how much the rig can weigh, and how that weight is distributed. To be specific, the steer wheels (up front) can have no more than 12,000 pounds on them, and neither the drive wheels nor the trailer's tandem wheels may support more than 34,000. A little arithmetic will tell you the whole rig may only weight 80,000. To carry more, I'd need a special permit.

Gross weight isn't usually a problem--this set of rules has been in effect for quiet some time, and the shippers are used to working with it. Distributing that weight takes a bit more work and worry.

The trailer wheels are mounted so they can be slid back and forth. Just retract a set of big thick steel pins and move the tandems to where they'll be under enough weight to balance the load. If things get hairy, you can move the "fifth wheel" trailer hitch on the back of the truck in a similar fashion--not fun, but doable.

So you go to a truck stop and pull your rig onto a great big platform scale. (Most truck stops these days have a fairly elaborate one that weighs each set of wheels separately, so you can get all four weights at the same time.) You call the fuel desk and let them know you're there. They confirm they have your weights. You pull off the scale, park, go inside, and pay the nice lady (you didn't think this was free, did you?). She gives you a certified weight ticket.

You look at it and sigh in relief, then get back in your truck and go on down the road.

Or you cuss a little, go back out, spend a few minutes adjusting the wheel positions, and try again.

Either way, you usually get things arranged fairly well without spending TOO much time at it.

Then there's today.

The customer's twenty-one tons was acting more like twenty-three. The truck was within 250 pounds of the legal limit for gross weight. I'd never been quite that heavy before.

But wait. There's more.

The steers were a little light. The tandems were a little light. The drive wheels were a good six hundred pounds over. And you can't adjust the weight in tiny amounts**--if I got the drives legal then either the tandems or the drive wheels would be overweight.

Oh, and did I mention I hadn't fueled the truck yet? There's another 800-1000 pounds right there.

Well, obviously I wasn't going to fuel. With luck, I wouldn't run out before I got to the customer. With care and luck I could balance the weight enough to satisfy the DOT--they do occasionally cut us a little slack, I'm told; and by the time I passed a scale house I might have burned enough fuel to be legal. So I rearranged the wheels as best I could and weighed the truck again.

Everything looked good.

Everything looked very good.

Everything looked too good.

I had weight to spare on all three wheelsets. That was not possible.

So I looked at the gross weight. Apparently about a ton of my cargo had evaporated while I was sweating with the wheel positions. Or else the scale was wrong.

I weighed a third time, on the other scale (this was a big truck stop--they had two scales). It agreed with the new reality. I still can't fuel (the trailer is nose-heavy--I can't move any more weight off the drive wheels to make room for fuel), but at least I'm legal.

I'll take what I can get.
-----
*No, I won't tell you what. See here for reasons why.
**Those pins I mentions snap into matching holes. As a rough rule of thumb, each hole represents 250 lbs more (or less) weight on the tandems and 250 lbs less (or more) on the drive wheels.

Two scares

Quick one tonight, I think. I'm sleepy.

Today I tested the brakes. City traffic at 50 or so, and the line of cars ahead of me suddenly slowed to zero. I've never had to stand on the brakes before. I'm not sure I did this time either--nothing locked up, and the ABS didn't kick in--but I came close.

A surging wave of stuff rolled into the cab--all the books, forms, logbooks, snack food, etc., that clutter up the floorboard. Surprising how much of it there was.

I was about ten feet from the bumper in front of me when the line began to move again. I would have stopped before I touched it. I'm not quite sure by how much.

I started over fifty yards back. On dry pavement. Half loaded.

The boring stuff about following distance was suddenly new again.

I'm glad nobody was close behind me.

*****

Later on I found myself paying close attention to my steering. I was on a country two-lane, and the truck kept trying to dart for the shoulder. Which almost wasn't there. Each time it did, the cab tilted a tiny bit to the right.

After the second or third time I started to notice the dips in the road on the right side. Like shallow potholes, but no missing asphalt so they were gentle and smooth. As if the ground beneath the road had given way under the weight of all the passing vehicles.

Almost always on an embankment. I feel so safe.

They're talking about rebuilding the road system, saying it's starting to show its age. They're also talking about raising the max weight for semi's to 96,000 pounds. Add another axle and we'll be fine. The roads can take it. Honest.

I did make it home for Halloween, if you're interested (see previous post).

Between various and sundry chores, a trip into the mountains so my wife could see the colors I've been mooning about the last few weeks, and letting a doctor poke and prod me (my DOT medical certification was about to expire) I've been kind of busy. But I did get sorta caught up here, too. Enjoy.

The Imp of the Perverse

I may be home tomorrow night.

My wife would like that. She loves Halloween, and she won't be going anywhere if I'm not there. Until yesterday I didn't think I'd make it, so I didn't mention the possibility to her.

Good thing.

I got up this morning and threaded my way through an unfamiliar city to my delivery site. Where I was told I didn't have an appointment.

An hour or so later they found it. Two hours after that they got me in a dock and started unloading. Took them maybe thirty minutes.

Then I drove for most of an hour on wet, windy two-lanes to the next shipper. They got me loaded in an hour. I smiled as I reported to my company.

They sent a message back. The weight on the bill of lading didn't match what they had in their computer records. And I wouldn't be allowed to scale the load until the discrepancy was resolved.

That only took another 45 minutes.

So I went down the road another hundred miles and stopped for fuel. The company pays for the fuel, of course. Just give the pump a taste of the company fuel card and punch in a few numbers (truck number, mileage, that sort of thing). Simple.

The pump said see the cashier.

The cashier said I was driving the wrong truck.

That one only took ten minutes to straighten out. But it was getting dark.

I like to read science fiction. Some of it is written by religious types. Some of them have a sense of humor. One of the cuter jokes I've run across in such people's works involves solemn discussions of a demon they call the “Imp of the Perverse.” The father of conspiracy theories. The enforcer of Murphy's Law (or so he claims). The one who whispers in your ear, “This can't all be coincidence, now can it?”

His goal is to convince you that some secret organization—or maybe the universe itself—is out to get you. That you're so important that Reality itself is being twisted around just to make you miserable.

On days like this, the Imp has a fairly easy time of it.

But I did get unloaded. And loaded. And fueled. And I drove through the rain and the gusting winds without killing myself or anyone else.

And I covered enough miles that I can legally drive the rest of the way tomorrow. As late as four o'clock I wasn't sure I'd manage that.

So I called my wife, to give her the good news.

She isn't picking up. Asleep, I guess.

Sigh.

Changes

I've spent a lot of time in the Appalachians lately.

The first part of my “straight shot to Indiana” took me through the Pocono's. Not terribly straight. I-40's worse crossing from North Carolina to Tennessee (or vice versa, of course). But any time an Interstate highway has a 50mph speed limit...

And entrance ramps with stop signs at the bottom...

But in time things leveled out. And suddenly I was gawking (all over again) at how flat things were. I'm not used to having a clear line of sight to the horizon. I've talked about it before, but I've been running the hills a while now. It's all new again.

Unboring. I like it.

How the rain can cure drowsiness

Yeah, the fall scenery got me again. But I've got an excuse.

I've been driving past parti-colored mountains for a while now. Obviously (to those who've been reading this) I haven't gotten blasé about it. But it's become familiar.

Today, though, it was up close and personal. Walls of copper and gold, sometimes closing in until it seemed I was in a tunnel decorated by a mad scenery painter. Even in the mist and rain it was beautiful.

When I got a chance to look at it.

After all, I was driving a tractor trailer on a two-lane road winding through the hills of New Jersey. In heavy traffic. In the rain.

If your heart is lazy, try coming around a downhill curve to find a line of traffic stopped at a red light below you. Carefully apply the brakes, and feel the surge as your ABS releases them again.

Watch the car at the back of the line come closer as your brakes catch and let go again. Try to comfort yourself by remembering that if they weren't doing that, be back of your trailer might be trying to pass you right now.

Oh, yes. You might also remember that this is the first trailer you've had in weeks with a working ABS.

Heart woke up yet?

It wasn't as bad going back. Uphill is less scary. Mostly. And I was loaded, albeit lightly. Weight in the back helps. But I used a fair bit of fuel, time, and adrenaline picking up this load.

Oh, well. It's what they pay me for, I guess. And tomorrow's a straight shot to Indiana. Interstate all the way.

Guess I'll rest up for it.

Parking-lot scenery

Hope I'm not boring you, the way I keep harping on the fall color.

It seems to have hit its stride, finally. A bit subdued this year, though. Or so it seems—that may just be the clouds and fog and drizzle. Maybe when the sun comes out...

It was still lovely today. And last night, I sat in the passenger seat and watched the color fade until the streetlights were all the light there was.

I don't get to do that often.

Usually I pull into a truck stop at the crack of dusk. In the summer there's more light, of course, but I still don't see much. Just acres of asphalt, dozens (or hundreds) of trucks, the pervasive rumble of idling engines, and the faint smell of diesel fuel and stale urine.

The scenery, generally speaking, is thataway. To see it, you would have to park nose-first, and back out in the morning. This is usually a Bad Idea.

I've discussed the perils of backing one of these things, especially backing it in any kind of a curve. Much of the danger involves visibility—seeing where you're going is a real challenge when all you have is a bunch of mirrors at greater than arm's length.

Now imagine doing it when you can't see out your side windows either.

Even in a car it's daunting. Think of backing out of a parking space at a busy mall, with delivery vans parked on both sides. You can't see anything until you clear their bumpers—at which time you're right in the middle of the lane.

Got that?

Now imagine your minivan is 75-80 feet long.

That's why we back into parking spaces. You can see to back in. You can't see to back out.

The only time you can park nose-in with a tractor-trailer is when you'll have an absolutely straight shot backing out. No row of trucks behind you. No cross traffic. Nothing you can hit, nothing that will hit you. A rare and glorious thing.

And it is glorious. Your cab is by your neighbors' back doors, far from passing eyes and rumbling engines. No need to draw the curtains—everybody that might see you is back there.

And if you're lucky, there's a view.

Like last night. I wasn't that lucky this time—I backed in the normal way, and before me is a vista of parked trucks. But what the heck, the drive here was gorgeous.

G'nite.

Odd facts

Where do you go with 20 tons of whiskey?

In Mississippi, apparently, you go to the State Police.

This is not something I ever though about before. As a lifelong teetotaler, I wasn't all that curious about the interstate transportation of spirits. So I was a bit surprised when I pulled into the parking lot of my consignee's warehouse and found that the parking lot was being repaired at the state's expense.

It appears that the State of Mississippi's “Office of Alcoholic Beverage Control” is the only wholesaler in the state for this particular product. Makes it easy to collect the taxes and keep dry counties dry, I suppose.

The things you learn on the road...

Miscellany

The last time I stopped at this truck stop I was glad to go again.

It may not have been the scuzziest place I'd ever spent the night next to, but it was in the running.

This morning it was more pleasant. Looks like someone bought the place while I was elsewhere, and they're trying to fix it up. The motel rooms upstairs have been stripped to the walls, and the fixtures in the bathrooms have been mostly removed. (The ones still in place make me understand why...) Lots of signs of the kind of violence that precedes renovation.

Downstairs, the convenience store and the restaurant have that earnest air that seems to come with a new broom used hard. The too-sharp corners and too-uniform colors that mark fresh coats of paint. New shelves in the store, new tables in the restaurant, and not quite enough of either to fill the spaces. You walk in, and your reaction isn't so much “Ah! Excellent!” as “They're trying hard. Hope they make it.”

And I do. Nice people. And the place IS much improved.

*****

A little later, I roll along. Blasting past a backhoe as it lumbers down the road, cell phone firmly pressed to the driver's ear.

Sigh.

*****

Had to stop and do some paperwork. My little book said there was a truck stop at this exit, but I couldn't find it. The only likely-looking candidate was a service station off to my left. Got there and saw a little convenience store, a set of gas pumps, and a teeny-tiny parking lot, with a little two-lane wandering off into farm-country limbo beyond it.

If I'd kept going I might have ended up anywhere. With no place to turn around. So I turned left.

Onto another two-lane to apparently nowhere.

I stopped the truck, kicked in the emergency flashers, and took stock. To my right, a tiny strip-mall, with a tiny parking lot and two tiny driveways to get to it. UPS could get in there, but not a lot else. To my right, a fair-sized church, with a fair-sized parking lot. With a fair number of cars in it.

Still, it was a fair-sized lot. Plenty of room to reverse course there, if I was careful. So I got out and hunted around for the church office. At length I found a desk occupied by your basic nice Southern church secretary. She asked me what she could do for me, and I explained my predicament.

Her eyes got bigger, and her smile did, too. And she said, “Thank you for asking!”

Going by her reaction, I have to assume this has happened before. And that they usually get taken for granted. Kind of embarrassing, really...

Ups and downs

Well, that was quick.

Yesterday the temperature dropped something like twenty degrees between dawn and dusk. It fell below forty sometime during the night. With clouds and drizzle.

Somebody muttered about freezing rain. That, at least, we were spared. But some of the mountains were white with frost this morning, as if they'd been dusted with fine sugar.

The rest of the hills were starting to color. I begin to see where olive drab came from—it's a crude approximation to the color the mountainsides are right now. Summer green just starting to turn to autumn reds and golds and browns, caught partway.

The real thing is much prettier, though.

Only half a day to drive today. My load cannot deliver before lunchtime tomorrow. (You ever hear of “just in time” inventory? I am caught in it...) So here I am in Kentucky, sitting and thinking and moving my pen.

I-40 between Asheville, NC and Knoxville, TN is a strange drive. A twisting winding roller coaster. Deceptive, too.

My father once told me of a mountain highway where he stopped to check his engine. It was laboring, for no reason he could tell. He opened the door and got out of the car—and almost fell.

The road ran steeply uphill, you see. But without a horizon to go by (at night, in all those hills) he couldn't tell.

That's how those houses work, you know—the ones built crooked on a mountainside, where balls roll uphill across the floor, and water leaves the tap at the weirdest angles. It's also why airplanes that fly into clouds fall out of them, if you don't have the right instruments and know how to use them.

You only think you know up from down. Without a clear view to a far place, you soon lose track.*

I wasn't anywhere near that kind of trouble. But I kept coasting faster on level ground, or losing speed downhill. Even in daylight.

A little spookiness does help the day go by...
-----
*Someone could probably write a sermon about this if they were so minded. I'm sure someone has...

(Sorry for the gap here. This blogging on paper and typing it up in my copious free time is harder than I thought. I'll see if I can get more caught up sometime next week. Meanwhile, here's four new entries (from October 8 to the "present"). Enjoy.)

Night terrors

For the third time in this career, I have known lingering terror.

All three times, the source was the same. I had to drive all night.

The first time, my trainer made me do it. Part of the schooling, of course. But there I was, alone in the dark (he'd turned in, and was back there in the sleeper). Driving through the cold fog, with another cold fog in my brain. Seeing the vaguely huge white boulders loom out of the fog and hurtling through them--sure each time that I'd find them all too solid.

When I pulled into a rest area, my trainer poked his head out and remarked that he'd expected me to give up a while ago. I said I would've if I'd had a place to stop.

The second time I had a load I couldn't deliver on time if I slept through the night. No hallucinations that time--but driving though rush-hour traffic when your eyes won't focus on the car next to you can be just as bad.

And then there was today. Again, a load that (due to mixups at the customer) I could not deliver on time if I slept first. As with the other times, I was perfectly legal. I had been off duty the appropriate amount of time and everything. But for me, having enough rest doesn't help at 5am--not if I've driven all night.

Again focusing was a problem, though that wasn't as scary this time. I was on an open highway, and traffic was light.

But falling into a dream for one or two seconds, then jerking yourself back to awareness and, with desperate care, planting yourself firmly n the middle of the lane again--that's terrifying.

Realizing that your last thought had nothing to do with what is around you. Seeing the next thought drift away again, and jerking it back frantically. Deliberately shifting your posture, changing your breathing, anything to keep from lulling yourself into slumber--only to find that each new rhythm is a new road back into the dream...

I started hitting every rest stop I passed. A quick walk would help a little. A snack would help more--elevating the blood sugar is not to be despised. But I was very glad to find the pace I'd chosen for my break.

And I took precautions. Tomorrow starts tomorrow, not tonight. They can't pay me enough to do that twice in a week.

Suddenly the drug problem becomes a bit easier to understand...

Short night's journey into day

The color in West Virginia hasn't caught up to central Pennsylvania yet. It's still mostly green. The reds and golds don't add to the brilliance of the hills so much as take the edge off the green. Now I know where the idea for olive drab came from.

Of course I didn't know any of this when I got started this morning. I couldn't see it.

Driving through rain can be kind of scary. I think I mentioned that yesterday.

Well, so is driving in the dark.

So is driving through the mountains.

So there I was, driving through the rain. In the dark. Through the mountains. With twenty tons of sloshing liquid in the trailer behind me. At least I didn't have to worry about my mind wandering too much.

That early on a rainy morning the real challenge is to see anything. Dry asphalt of any age doesn't really earn the name "blacktop"--it's more gray than black. But wet asphalt in the dark is practically invisible. And the painted lines on the asphalt don't show up as well wet as dry, either. Your high beams help, but you can't leave them on all the time. And other drivers have this disturbing habit of coming into sight just as you see that curve ahead. You know, the one you can't see any more when you switch to low beams.

This truck has driving lights. Brighter than your low beams, aimed downward so you can leave them on without blinding the oncoming traffic. Once you remember to turn them on the road gets a bit less scary. But you still can't see anything that isn't road. Driving though black mountains not-silhouetted against black sky.

Eventually you notice the sky isn't black anymore. It's more a very dark gray. The only reason you can tell is that the mountains are still black. With a little squinting, you can see silhouettes now.

Somehow that makes driving easier. Not much, but some.

Light gray, then. The silhouetted mountains become a bit more complex. As if there might be trees on those summits. You can't prove it, but you can believe it again. And if you look very hard, you can see the road.

And after a while, there are trees on the slopes above you, dark black on light black.

And a little later, they begin to take on shapes. You can tell where one tree stops and the next starts. Or at least you could, if you dared stare long enough.

Then, finally, there is color. Not much, yet. There won't be much, not today. Olive drab under gray clouds. Dim and dull and absolutely beautiful.

Things you don't do, vol 1

Rain without ceasing all afternoon.

Drizzle, downpour, and everything in between. At least once I had to slow down, lest I outrun my vision--the rain closed in until I couldn't see taillights a hundred feet ahead.

Could have been worse. I could have been hauling the other load.

I pulled into the dock this morning and went in to talk to the shipping manager. He pulled out a bill of lading and several other pieces of paper, and I sat down to read them.

I started to worry when I saw the first paper he wanted me to sign. It said I'd vouched for the way the product was loaded into the trailer--including the way it was secured and braced. Technically, I'm responsible for making sure a trailer is safe to move, but I usually don't have to swear on paper that I've checked.

So I looked at the bill of lading itself.

Then I looked at the placards I thought I was using for a writing surface.
Nope. They matched the bills. They were warning placards, and I was supposed to display them.

I was about to sign for a hazmat load.

"Hazardous materials" is a term that covers a lot of ground--anything from laundry bleach to high explosives (or worse). The federal government's rules for handling such materials on the highway fill nice thick paperback books. You can find one of those books in any commercial truck. At least you'd better be able to.

I have to have the book with me, but most of the time it's not very useful.

I can't haul hazmat, you see.

Carrying hazardous materials requires a special endorsement to your Commercial Driver's License. I don't have it. My company knows I don't. And they don't assign me loads that require it.

So what was I doing here, picking up fifteen tons of corrosive substances?

I explained the problem to the nice gentleman, who was no more interested in breaking the law than I was. He went through his files again and (whew) found the load I was supposed to carry. So I signed a completely different set of papers and went out to drive in the rain.

This load is noticeably heavier. But it's not nearly as scary.

Adventures in posture

Color has actually arrived now. Up north, at least.

I started running into it in Virginia, just above the North Carolina border. Just touches of red and rust and yellow, taking the edge off the green of the hills.

When I stopped for the night, just before getting on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the scarlets and golds were taking the lead. It's not "peak color" yet, even here, but it's worth looking at already. Another couple of weeks, maybe, and I'll owe my wife a drive through North Georgia.

I'm parked where I can see the hills, instead of acres of trucks. A rare thing, that--usually it isn't safe, pulling into a parking place nose first--but every once in a while you find a place where you can drive straight in and back straight out. Nice when it happens. It's almost dark already, so I relax and enjoy while I can still see something.

Relaxing has been a major part of my day today. It can be work, you know. Relaxing, that is.

Modern semi-tractor tend to have rather nice seats--very useful when you're sitting in them eight or ten hours a day, every day, for a week or more at a time. The seats in my truck slide back and forth, of course. You can also adjust the back angle, the height, and the firmness and shape of the chair itself (thanks to the truck's compressed-air system and half a dozen or so inflatable cushions in the seat). Very nice.

Complicated, too. It took me a day or two, when I started driving, just to figure out how to adjust the thing--there are half a dozen buttons down there. And I'm just now figuring out how to adjust it properly.

For most of my life, I've thought the most comfortable sitting position is more or less upright. To me, a recliner is for lying down. It's certainly not for driving.

I still hate lying back with my hands on a steering wheel. But after two years I've finally figured out that I get fewer backaches if I dial the seat-back a few notches back. I think it's because I can't put my feet flat on the floor if one of them is on the accelerator. And if your legs are stretched out, you have to lean back a little.

I figured that out today. That's what I was thinking about, when I wasn't keeping an eye on every other driver on the road, or sneaking quick glimpses at the colors around me.

The life of a trucker is an exciting one.

Staying respectable

The first fall colors are showing up in the north.

Nothing much yet--just a sudden flash or red or yellow in a sea of greens, every few miles--but it's there.

Nice to see. Not as pleasant to contemplate, in certain moods. Winter is beautiful, but if you have to live through it...

I was stopped by a state trooper in the predawn hours. Just a random check of my paperwork--Commercial Driver's License, truck registration, Bills of Lading, and so on. He gave me a warning about some lights that were out on my trailer--but only a warning. All in all, it could have been worse.

Ten or eleven hours later I delivered my load, more than five hundred miles from where I woke up. (I may have stopped at a couple of rest areas on the way. I'm not sure.) While the gentleman out in the warehouse was exercising his forklift, I was chatting with his supervisor in the receiving office. I mentioned the routine license check, and he grinned.

"Random, huh?" he said.

Seems they have a state police post just down the road, and he sees LOTS of routine traffic stops. And a large number of them end with someone spread-eagled on the fender while the troopers pull bags of white powder out of odd places in the car.

He had a friend in the State Police, and once he asked his friend how they decide which routine stop deserves more attention. I won't bore you (and educate drugrunners) with the details he mentioned, but it gave me a greater appreciation for the 'AMERICA'S DUMBEST CRIMINALS" books I picked up over the years.

I suppose it makes sense. Breaking the law to turn a quick buck may not require stupidity, but it probably does attract the lazy--including the ones who don't want to work their brains too hard. The criminal equivalent of those people who don't mind helping someone in Nigeria launder his money for a commission.

Not me. Honest, smart, and poor, that's what I am.

Pulled out of the warehouse, ran a few miles down the road, and got the running lights fixed. Just a fuse, it turned out.

Glad of that. I can't afford a fine. And for all I know, they look for truckers too lazy to keep their trucks up, the way they look for cars driven by people too lazy to look like legit travelers. Having my trailer roof peeled back by people looking for foreign substances might slow me down a bit...

Small disasters

Almost didn't have a entry today. Then I blinked, just before bedtime.

Or the lights did. Many times.

There are about half a dozen emergency vehicles in the truck-stop parking lot, not a hundred feet away. A motorcycle cop is standing guard on a bunch of trucks in ire-engine red. Floodlights on a post, people scurrying in various directions. A good-sized trailer just pulled in. I think the markings included "hazmat."

Vehicle fire? Lethal fumes from some unfortunate tanker?

No. Somebody's fuel tank is leaking.

All right, it's not as silly as it sounds. My truck has two diesel tanks, 120 gallons each. Some of these trucks have bigger.

Can't laugh. But I think I'll go back to sleep.

Peace and quiet

The breeze is cool, in the odd moments when it gets through the cab windows. Not a lot of scenery—this truck stop actually is in an industrial district—but at least it's been cloudy and more or less cool.

It's hotter in the truck, of course, for the usual reasons. Not too hot to stand, but warmer than the air-conditioned spaces nearby. So why am I here?

Quiet.

It's a relative thing—a big diesel idles about six feet from the open window beside me, for instance—but it's the kind of quiet I need. And it's out of reach at every other seat within walking distance.

Most truck stops fall into one of two categories, and I have one of each right here. One type is described by some of the competition as “fuel-and-get-lost.” Take a convenience store, add diesel pumps, bring in a fast-food joint. Put in some showers, stock some trucker toys and supplies. If there's room, have a big parking lot in back.

And that's pretty much it. If you're lucky, you might find a table to sit at.

The other type tries to offer a bit more. A real sit-down restaurant. A lounge. A TV room. A real arcade. Maybe a movie room, and real shops. Some have barbers and massage therapists and even clinics. One chain tries for something like a hotel convention center.

One thing neither type has a lot of, though. Places where you can just sit and think.

Like the rest of the world, truck stops have apparently found distraction is more profitable. The “fuel and forget” places may not have a place to sit at all. The “trucker malls” may have a dozen different rooms. But where there's a seat or a table, there's usually a TV. You might can choose* between news, sports, and sitcoms, but silence is usually not an option.

For someone like me, who almost can't tune anything out, it's kind of tough. That's why I'm here, in my truck, rejoicing at every breeze that deigns to come thought the window. How can my quiet thoughts compete with Jim Carrey, Denzel Washington, a room full of Major League Baseball fans, or Jennifer Anniston?

A truck idling next to a warm cab works better. At least till I'm done writing.

And maybe napping. Talk to you later.

Why I got home late tonight

I 85 southbound, in the Carolina countryside. Sunny and bright, after a hard rain. Jewel-sparkles in the grass on the embankment to my right. A nice-looking brunette running her fingers through her hair, as she stretches beside her car, about fifty yards ahead.

Yeah, you read that right. She's standing beside her car. It's not moving.

Neither are any of the others, as far behind me as the eye can see. To my left, children and little dogs romp in the median. People stand around talking on their cells, or to each other, or staring myopically at their Blackberries(tm), thumbs moving frantically. And a few hundred yards ahead, a sea of flashers, red and yellow and blue.

A few miles ago, the rain was so heavy I had to slow to 35 just to keep some road visible ahead of me. Carefully sliding past all the cars and motorcycles huddled under the overpasses. It cleared a trifle about the time I stopped for fuel, and I thought the slow part of the drive was over.

But here I am, safely stopped in the middle of a long skinny parking lot. And about a thousand feet ahead (the CB passes the word) a car is sandwiched between two large trucks. Both southbound lanes are blocked by the wreck. Both northbound lanes are blocked by emergency vehicles.

And, having nothing better to do, we get out of our vehicles and make guesses about what's going on up there.

#####

Well, it can't be good.

The northbound traffic is moving again, sort of. The big rescue truck blocking both lanes has moved on. Two ambulances and a medevac copter have come and gone. One ambulance didn't bother with the siren. Or the lights. That is suggestive.

A truck passing northbound said he saw indications of a fire. Hope not. Things are probably bad enough up there already.

Southbound is still sitting. I just heard the police behind me are turning cars around and sending them back up the shoulder to the nearest ramp. They don't do that if they expect it to clear up any minute.

Looks like I'm here for a while.

#####

Finally moving. I was near the head of the line, only a couple of hundred yards back, so once they cleared a lane I wasn't too bad off.

Passed the crash site. Fire-retardant foam all over the road. That's probably what the northbound driver saw. No sign of an actual fire, though.

The original report was right, it seems. Two trucks--trucks, not semi's. I can't tell if they're small commercial trucks or the largest box vans you can drive without a CDL. One's a rental, the other belongs to a company that might or might not need a commercial vehicle. Not that it matters. They were quite big enough.

In between them is a ball of metal. That's the only way I can describe it. A giant might be able to bowl with it. I try not to imagine what the passenger compartment looked like. I didn't see space for one.

I keep going. And try not to think too much.

#####

The northbound traffic was back to normal about seven miles past the crash site. No idea how far things were backed up on my side of the road.

A guy is on the CB for another five miles or so, warning people about the backup. I'll let him do the talking.

#####

I was supposed to pick up a load about noon today and take it to my terminal, then take the weekend off. I expected to be home about 5:00.

The customer didn't have the load ready until about 3:30. It happens. I was slightly annoyed, but what the heck. I'd still make it by bedtime.

I just got to the terminal. It's about 10:30. By the time I get the truck cleared out for the next driver it will be past midnight. My wife will not be pleased.

I've seen the alternative. I'll live with it.

#####

Small addendum:
I recognized one of those trucks. It was fueling at the pump next to mine.

Place I've stopped: Tamarack in West Virginia

(Time at home is a precious thing these days. I spend less of it than I like in front of a computer. But my notes are still here, and I'll get them up soon as I can. Honest. Think of this as a promissory note.

(Oh, and you might check the back entries as well. This one was written on August 18, for instance. And the entry for July 18 got on the blog just before this one...)

I was ready to stop and enjoy a break. So of course it started raining.

I was on I-77, working my way through the West Virginia mountains, and Tamarack was coming up. For me that's a special occasion. I believe I've mentioned that most of the places I'd like to spend time looking at are far away from the nearest truck stop. But the West Virginia Turnpike has a service plaza at the Beckley exit. Just park, cross a street, climb some stairs and a parking lot, and there you are.

Tamarack (or at least the part I visit) is sort of like a permanent crafts fair. A big circular building, with a bunch of workshops behind picture windows where craftsmen ply their trades and matching gift shops/galleries where you can buy what they make. I always make the full circle, but I'll admit it--there's one place I always stop.

One of their workshops is taken by a husband and wife, instrument makers who specialize in bowed psalteries. When I stopped by today, the husband was showing a family one of his rarer creations.

Well, all right. It wasn't HIS creation.

Seems a school in the area had planned to put on a play about a class full of kids who wanted to protest a budget cut in their music department. So they (the characters) made their own instruments and put on a show. They (the people putting on the play) had come to the Tamarack instrument makers for pointers, and the gentleman in question had suggested something a little more ambitious than the usual improvised rhythm-band stuff. He'd designed a bowed psaltery they could make out of two pieces of (it looked like) maple two-by-four and some cardboard.

The kids had built them. They'd learned how to play them. And one of them had brought this one back to him, temporarily. It needed tuning.

I got to try it. The tone was nice. Especially considering how little time and money had been lavished on it. Not something you see every day.

The rest of the place was fun, too. I'd planned to make a quick tour, in and out just to say I'd done it. I ended up spending a good 45 minutes. If I hadn't been well ahead of schedule I wouldn't have dared stop.

As it was, I hurried back across the parking lot, down the stairs, and climbed back into the truck. A few minutes later I was headed for North Carolina once more.

And a few minutes later it began to rain again.

Still here. Or is it "I'll be back"?

It's been an interesting time here at Lake--um, I mean at home. Between my tooth, my wife's cataracts (and all the follow-up visits--those doctors really like to know everything), and three or four days of sitting in a garage waiting room, I have been easily distracted. But I do have a bunch of notes--some on paper and some in audio files. When I get back I will see how well I can transcribe.

Meanwhile, it's midnight. And I'll have to get up at five to get the truck going in time for my first stop this week. Wish me luck...

Oh, yeah. That CB thing.

Today was my first day on "my" "new" truck.

Yeah, the quotes were deliberate.

It isn't really MY truck. I share it with two other drivers. We take turns with it (see "slip seating" for details).

And it isn't really a NEW truck. In fact, it's the oldest one I've driven. Luckily, that isn't too old. I work for a company that likes to keep their equipment fresh. A 4-year-old truck is fairly ancient for these people. But what the heck--it runs.

And it's got a refrigerator!

And a microwave!

And a TV with a DVD player!

(It also has an inverter* to power them all, but you don't typically enthuse about that--it's not something you use as such. Out of sight, out of mind...)

Oh. Yeah. It also has a CB. This is less of a big deal than you might think.

I grew up with CB. My father had one back in the Stone Age, back when the set had TUBES and the owner had a LICENSE! (Offers for museum positions will not be considered. Very seriously. Today.)

Back then it was supposed to be a cheaper alternative to the commercial radio system that big delivery, taxi and et-cetera companies used. And even then nobody used it for that. At that point the users mostly fell into two categories--the wannabe hams that didn't want to learn Morse code but did want to skip-talk across the country, and local clubs that basically used it for back-fence gossip.

Then came the 55-mph speed limit, and the CB as an anti-speed-trap weapon. Smokey and the Bandit. Etcetera. I was too young to live that experience, though I listened to "Convoy" just like everybody else. Sounded interesting.

Eventually there came a backlash. All the people who'd seen Smokey and the Bandit and The Dukes of Hazzard and listened to C. W. McCall two million times horned in on channel 19, to the point that the real truckers got kind of tired of it. I distinctly remember driving down the road one day and hearing some poor soul try to strike up a conversation with a trucker. "I ain't your 'good buddy,'" was all the answer he got.

I didn't have one when I started driving. Someone had pity on me at some point and gave me one he didn't need.** A few weeks later someone stole it. I didn't have the money to replace it.***

I haven't missed it much.

It would have been useful at times, of course. When you're backing into a truck-stop parking space, it's nice if the guy behind you can tell you you're about to back into him (though the editorial comments from everybody else can get old). And when the traffic comes to a dead stop on an interstate in the middle of nowhere, somebody ahead of you will likely tell you all about it.

But more and more, what you hear is self-appointed comedians, self-appointed political pundits, and people who just want you to hear them cuss.

So I usually leave it off.

Or I did. I've been listening more lately, for a completely different reason.

Y'see, there's an art to making out what somebody says when the bandwidth is low, the noise level is high, and he might have put some reverb into his mike to sound sexier. I never quite learned it as a child, and now it might be an asset to my livelihood. So I leave the radio on and try to make out what they all are saying.

Conspiracy theories at sixty miles an hour. Ain't it great?
-----
*inverter:
A device that takes DC from the batteries and turns it into house current. Thus you can run down the batteries pretending you never left home.

**which tells you how cheap the things are getting these days..

***which, I suppose, tells you how broke I am...

Adventures in dentistry

I'm typing this between frantic bouts of packing. I'm supposed to go out tomorrow, for the first time in two weeks.

Two weeks ago was the day I got up to enjoy my first day of home time and discovered that one of my teeth was coming apart. The next day I got a dentist to look at it. A week ago they finally took it out.

I believe I talked a while back about truckers and drugs. Painkillers and Commercial Driver's Licenses don't mix. So I had to spend a few more days getting to where aspirin and/or reasonable facsimiles thereof were enough to make me feel good. And a few more days waiting until they could put me back in a rotation for a truck.

Two weeks. With no money coming in.

Over-the-road truckers, in general, don't get paid vacations. Or paid sick time.* The assumption is, you're basically a contractor, getting paid by the job. No salary as such. No vacation time as such. No sick time, as such.**

Because of the way my particular division of the company is set up, I do get a guaranteed minimum salary. Sort of. But not when I'm not working. I'm going to have a lot of catching up to do.

Just so you know. If this is a career you want to pursue, try to have a little bit of savings on hand.
-----
*Some companies offer it. They tend to be picky about who they hire. They can afford to be.

**I do have health insurance. This is not an anti-capitalist screed. Just so you know.

Vignettes

There's nothing quite like carefully backing into a dock, trailers parked close on either side--and hearing a loud hollow metallic noise.

It turned out to be a yard dog* four docks down, backing under a trailer. Or was it a forklift clanging across a loading ramp? In any case it wasn't me. But your heart takes a moment to get the message...

***

I still think Summer Shade, KY should be something more...something. In a movie it would be.

Oh, well. Skullbone never had a pleasantly scary feel, either....
-----
*YARD DOG:
A truck driver who specializes in moving trailers from one part of a warehouse complex or terminal to another. Also, a semi-tractor specially built for such work--usually more maneuverable, having more visibility, and equipped with a hydraulic lift that allows the driver to move a trailer without raising its landing gear.
See also, YARD JOCKEY, HOSTLER, SPOTTER

I got off I-65 in Kentucky this morning at exit 53. Right in the middle of Mammoth Cave territory. As I pulled up to the traffic light, I could look across the road at the Dinosaur Museum. Right there on the right.

I had to turn left.

My heart is broken.

I've passed that exit a dozen times or more in the past year or two, reading the big sign and admiring the (I think) T-rex near the entrance. Huge brow ridges. And stripes. And built before all the experts decided they really walked like birds, so it stands up straight. I wonder how they've changed their literature...

I've thought similar things about other places I've driven by. Like the Ave Maria Grotto. Paradise Gardens. Ghost Town in the Sky (and Guntown Mountain--basically the same kind of place). The Creation Museum. Patti's 1880's Settlement. Pedro's South of the Border.*

And a hundred others.

I used to subscribe to a little magazine called Wonder. One of the featured writers did reviews of side-of-the-road tourist traps. Even then I wanted to do that.

Someday, maybe.
-----
*At least I saw that one once. In the off season. When most of the attractions were closed. Sigh.

Adventures in blackmail

I'm sitting at a table in a truck stop restaurant, waiting for my bacon cheeseburger and bowl of chili. I might get dessert later.

I'm being forced to do this. Really.

One of the more tedious things about this job is the end of the day. Sooner or later you have to park and sleep. And your choices usually boil down to:

1. Your company's terminal in Whatever City
2. A truck stop
3. A rest area
4. Someplace else

The company terminal can be nice. But the company doesn't have a whole lot of them.

(The waitress just brought the burger. The cook forgot the tomato. Hmph.)

After a pickup at the end of the day, an understanding customer can be a beautiful thing. But like many beautiful things, they're kind of rare. And most of the ones you find tend to close up shop sometime during the night. If you need to get up at 03:00 to, ah, deal with an urgent problem, you may find the, um equipment unavailable.

A truck stop is usually the best choice. They have a parking lot, 24-hour facilities (usually), stores, a restaurant (generally overpriced, but what the heck), etc. I have a little book that lists thousands of them and how to find them. It's probably the most useful thing I carry.

(The waitress brought the tomato. The burger is nice. The chili not so great. I've had worse, though.)

Rest areas are often the second choice. They don't have all the facilities, but I don't usually shop or eat out anyway. Restrooms and a parking place are plenty for me. And rest areas are often quicker to get in and out of (being as how they usually have their own off- and on-ramps). But more and more states are threatening to chuck us out of their rest areas at night. I haven't looked very hard at why. The fact is bad enough.

(Ordered dessert. The explanation is coming. Really...)

Which leaves "everywhere else." Off- and on-ramps, deserted gas stations, department-store docks (hoping the police assume you're delivering them in the morning), whatever. I've managed to avoid this so far. I don't trust my luck enough to bet my license and my livelihood on it. Much less my life.

Call me a wuss. I don't mind.

Now. To the present. There are several spots (especially in the Northeast) like this one, where none of the options come easy. No rest areas, or "NO OVERNIGHT PARKING" signs and enthusiastic policemen. No generous customers. No company terminals. And I still don't want to gamble.

That leaves truck stops. But they're rare here, too. Rare enough that some of them get away with charging you to park.

Te usual ransom--ah, arrangement, I mean--involves a choice--pay a flat fee, buy a certain minimum amount of fuel, or spend a certain amount in the store and/or cafe.

My company decides where I fuel. I don't impulse shop, much.

So I eat out.

It costs too much. But it's better than paying rent on a piece of asphalt, two strips of yellow paint, and several potholes.

(Dessert wasn't bad either. If I were rich I wouldn't mind this so...)

Truck stop ecology

Another little thing: Every once in a while I see birds flitting from truck to truck at a fuel island or truck-stop parking lot. They perch on the grille of a recently parked semi-tractor, poke around near the radiator, and then hurry on. It puzzled me at first, until I realized just what a buffet table my radiator and grille would be, to some of our winged friends.

Well, why not? It's not like I have a use for those bugs.

Apparently a semi-tractor can be useful to creatures other than ourselves. Most encouraging...

Eighteen-wheel drive, and other wonders of modern navigation

One of the more amusing aspects of GPS navigation popped up today (not for the first time, but hey...)

My route through North Carolina yesterday took me up I-74. Which doesn't exist--just ask my GPS.

I have not yet tired of this spectacle--looking at the navigation screen and watching myself drive at sixty-plus mph across open country. Just kick in that eighteen-wheel drive and go!

All right, so I'm easily amused...

The interesting variation came with the new and improved GPS software recently installed in our company fleet. There really are some improvements to go with the new annoyances. For example, I can now override the display and tell it how I want to see myself. One of the modes I can choose is a simple "Where am I?" function, with zoom-in and zoom-out options. In this particular case, I discovered that I-74 does exist--but only if you zoom in all the way. If you expand your awareness to about half a mile, the highway disappears.

Normally the glitches are a bit less entertaining. I'll enjoy the ones I can.

Sundries

Fresh strawberries at the South Carolina Welcome Center.

I found a small basket of them by the door. Apparently a local supplier put them there to attract tourist attention. Things like this do happen occasionally--the chance of it happening makes welcome centers a favorite quick stop of mine.

No need to be greedy. I took two. They were delicious.

***

Delivered a load in North Carolina. Picked up another one from the same customer. Plenty of miles this week. Good news.

Bad news: I don't stop at Pedro's tonight.

Some time back I stopped at an uber-tourist-trap called Pedro's South of the Border. At the time it was well past the tourist season, and almost everything was closed. Ever since, I've been wanting to spend a night there when the other rubes were visiting too.

I haven't even driven past it since, until today. The vagaries of the truck driving life. And I won't be wandering through there this trip either. Business is too good. Sigh.

***

Went way out of my way to find a scale this afternoon. The state weigh station was about ten miles up the Interstate, and the nearest scale on that Interstate was about fifty. So I took a two-lane to a small truck stop the gate guard told me about. Made sure I was legal and moved on.

Less than a mile up the road I was flagged down. The state DOT had a portable scale set up, right there on the highway. Apparently this is also a popular route for just-plain-dodging the official scales.

I passed with flying colors. Tried not to look smug.

Some rest stops are more equal than others

If you have a tractor-trailer, you might want to avoid the I-20 Mississippi Welcome Center in Vicksburg.

If you're in a car it's another matter. The Welcome Center overlooks the Mississippi River, with a bit of the Military park overlooking the Center. I wanted to stay and walk around. You might, too.

But if you're in something big...

I avoid Welcome Centers in the middle of cities most of the time, anyway. Paducah, KY has a nice one, but even there it's more trouble than it's worth if you're in a hurry. As with a truck stop, you have to take a real exit ramp, then get on a real street, then find a parking place--and then do it all again when you're ready to go. Fine if you're going to spend a while stretching and browsing at the brochure rack, but not for a quick pit stop.

Vicksburg is like that, but more so. The entrance is at a stoplight. Which is fortunate, because it's a right turn. A tight one.

There are parking spaces lined out for about ten trucks. Or, more likely, RV's. Fairly small ones. There was one truck parked in the lot, and I was a little worried about getting out past him. Five trucks, and I would have been terrified.

I only stopped because I had, um, urgent business. Next time I might just tough it out.

But if you have a car, you might like it there.

Adventures in economics

Stopped at a truck stop to deal with, um the usual emergency. Stayed a few minutes to call my wife. There was a guy sitting at a table next to the only working phone. (I believe I've mentioned what cell-phone ubiquity has done to pay-phone ubiquity).

He congratulated me on having a load. Nothing new there. Sitting waiting for somewhere to go wasn't that uncommon before the present unpleasantness. So I prepared to offer the necessary sympathy while waiting for the missus to pick up.

As it happened, his story was a bit more involved.

A fair number of owner-operators jump though the legal hoops that allow them to act as their own freight brokers. Some of them then end up buying extra trucks and hiring people to drive them. Basically create a two- or three- or however-many-truck fleet. My new acquaintance had been hired by such an entrepreneur.

About three days ago he'd been at a dock, waiting to be loaded, when someone knocked on the door. With papers.

Seems his employer's truck and trailer were being repossessed.

He'd been sleepng in the TV lounge here for two nights now, and was looking forward to one more. Come tomorrow, a friend is suppoed to be passing through, and will give him a ride home. He is meditating on what he'll do to the guy he was working for.

I read the other day that about 450 trucking companies have gone out of business in the past year. Experts said that wasn't going to help the freight shortage much, because those 450 companies hauled less than 1 percent of the freight in the country. Apparently a lot of them were sort of like the principals in this little drama.

It's the people on the margins that take the first hits, in war or recession or anything else.

There are advantages to being a corporate drone, I guess.

Saw a bear today.

On I-75, south of Chattanooga. Well, NEXT to I-75, really. Good thing, too.

A black bear came out of the bushes and cautiously started toward the shoulder of the highway. Then he saw a forty-ton monster roaring toward him at enourmous speed and hurried back into the brush. Sensible of him.

Never saw one in the "wild" before. That odd, seemingly-clumsy gait as he ran off. I've seen it in the movies, of course. But it's different when he's really there...

A slightly less pleasant little thing, though not a new one.

I tried to call my wife tonight. Found five phone booths. Two phones were missing, the other three out of order.

I'll have to explain tomorrow, somewhere. Hope she'll understand. Sigh.

More Little Things

(Once again I find myself catching up. This blogging in a composition book is more work than I thought. Sorry for the dry spell...)

Crossing the Atchafalaya Basin, on I-10 in Louisiana, means driving over what amounts to a bridge thirty miles long over a seemingly endless swamp. The water's high right now, which makes it look more like a lake--except for the trees with water up to the lower branches. Pretty, still.

And it occurred to me how much more of it I'm seeing this way. In a truck cab, it's as if I were sitting on a kitchen chair bolted to a car roof, looking down on everything. Guardrails hide little from me anymore.

I've thought before about how handy that is in heavy traffic, seeing far across the sea of stopped cars and anticipating the next slow movement--but I'd forgotten the tourist thing.

I used to ride Greyhound between Nashville and Atlanta in my youth; and I remember now how spectacular it was to round the curve on I24, high above Chattanooga, and see the city lights spread across the valley.

In a car you can't see it.

Posters and parking lots

(Once again I find myself catching up. This blogging in a composition book is more work than I thought. Sorry for the dry spell...)

The thermometer continues its yo-yo act. As long as the temperatures stay more or less tolerable I'll try to stand it. (Actually, I'll have to stand it anyway, won't I?)

Delivered a load this morning to a smallish building with one dock. Took a bit of backing around to get in, but not as bad as it could have been.* They got their stuff. I pulled out, parked, and did my paperwork. Then I looked around to see how I'd get out.

Ah. Over there. Just back up a few feet, turn hard right, then curve left.

So I put the truck in gear and started back. At which point I heard a frantic beeping.

My foot was on the brake before I consciously recognized the sound (there is something to be said for conditioned reflex). As the rig jerked to a halt I was searching my mirrors. At length I noted a tiny sliver white that peeked shyly past the corner of my trailer.

Apparently a delivery van had slipped into the dock space I'd just left and parked while I was drawing lines in my log. If he hadn't seen me start to back...

I've talked before about how blind we are in these things. So much so that one of the posters you see all over just about any trucking company's drivers' lounge has some variation on the following slogan.

Safety is our

Get
Out
And
Look
!

Not quite as tiresome as it used to be...
-----
*Like this, for example.

The promised boring lecture on following distance

(Once again I find myself catching up. This blogging in a composition book is more work than I thought. Sorry for the dry spell...)

I was driving down the Interstate this afternoon, wondering what I might write up for you today, when I suddenly found myself paying attention to the cars ahead of me. That's because one of them had suddenly crossed three lanes of traffic and cut right in front of me.

Seems some brilliant soul in the left lane had just slammed on his brakes so he could use make an illegal U-turn across the median (using one of those cut-across lanes that are supposed to be reserved for emergency vehicles). When he'd slowed down to almost nothing, the car behind him had frantically slowed down and changed lanes. Slowing down and jerking the wheel over at the same time can be a Bad Thing.

Apparently the driver lost control, because he came careening through the traffic, cut across my bow, and ended up on the right-hand shoulder before he could get the beast going where he wanted it to.

He got in trouble because he wasn't keeping his distance. He survived it, in part, because I was.

Anything moving at anything approaching highway speeds is going to take a while to stop. An eighteen-wheeler is worse than most vehicles that way--forty tons takes a lot of stopping. If you want a chance of surviving a surprise, you give yourself room.

Used to they talked about counting car lengths. They eventually accepted that most of us can't measure the road in car lengths, so they switched to time. By the time I was driving, the standard I heard was to stay one second behind the car in front of you for each 10mph. In a truck that's considered way too optimistic. We're told to stay at least six seconds back, no matter how slow we're going.

You can't always do it, but it's definitely a good idea to try. Today it kept me from running over an SUV. I had time and room to let him slide past me. It made the rest of the day a bit more pleasant.

There. It's over. That wasn't too bad, was it?

Little things

Like how I get nervous changing lanes to the right when the road is curving to the left, and vice versa.

See, when you turn one of these trucks, the tractor is no longer directly in front of the trailer. Which means that, on one side, the trailer is now blocking your view of the lane beside and behind you. Moving into that lane is now a matter of hoping nobody's moved into your new blind spot. Such fun.
***
Like the art of staying in the center of the road. When the driver's seat isn't anywhere near the center of the truck.

When my father was teaching me how to drive, back in the Silurian Epoch, he used to get on my case about that. Called me a "mailbox driver." I kept trying to put myself in the middle of the lane. And most of the car was to my right. People walking on the shoulder of the highway would have been nervous, I suppose.

I had to learn that all over in these vehicles. They're wider even than the Pontiac dreadnoughts I learned to drive so long ago. I have to consciously remember that my seat is supposed to be near the centerline.

And that's before I check the mirrors to see where my trailer wheels are.
***
Like rubber rubbing on steel.

That's what made me think of this today. I heard a faint noise during my pre-trip inspection and started poking around at the back of the cab. And found where some nameless mechanic had cable-tied the trailer air lines to the frame of the cab, in such a way that they were constantly rubbing against the sharp edge of a steel mounting block. I was able to patch the hole well enough to keep it drivable (at least until I could get to a shop), but if I hadn't noticed...

As you may have figured out by now, there aren't a lot of little things on one of these trucks.

What you don't think about

(Once again I find myself catching up. This blogging in a composition book is more work than I thought. Sorry for the dry spell...)

Morning in the country.

Thunderstorms last night. Cool and windy and sunny this morning, with puffy stretched-out clouds marching across the sky (they certainly aren't strolling). A farm house a mile or two off, brilliantly white as a patch of sun picks it out on the top of its hill. They've got a flagpole, and the flag is up. I can barely see it, but the wind has it straight out and dancing--it catches the eye even at this distance.

A train's passing by, not 50 feet away. At speed. I've lived in the city enough to forget how fast they go out in open country. And how scary they are at speed, close up.

I'm at a place that seems to manufacture compost and package it for big-store gardening departments. Nicer than a lot of factories, out here, field and woods all around. A pond for geese in the middle of the "plant." Not even a dock. They push a ramp up to your trailer and the forklift climbs it with the goods.

The fellow in the truck ahead of me (we're waiting in line) is new to the business. (Odd feeling, thinking of others as newbies...) Told the lady at the desk he was still getting used to the variety. "How much there is going on out here," was the way he put it. I hadn't really thought about that. How much of our commerce--and the things that make our lives what they are--we don't think about.

I've seen garden soil in WalMarts and Home Depots and the like. Part of the background. I've even taken a deep breath in the Garden Department, and enjoyed the aroma of fresh soil. But I never really thought about where they got it. And I never imagined a peat-moss/compost "factory" outside a small town in Illinois, with a line of trucks waiting for the rolling ramp and the forklift, trains passing on one side and the geese circling the pond on the other, the farmhouse white on the hill in the distance, the flag waving beside it.

I wonder who else noticed. Got to thank that newbie.

***

Another name for the "I wonder 'bout that town" list: Peculiar, Missouri.

Paying attention

(Once again I find myself catching up. This blogging in a composition book is more work than I thought. Sorry for the dry spell...)

I embarrassed myself this afternoon.

I was on a two-lane road just outside a small town, trying to decide where I should look for a truck stop (they're thin on the ground in these parts). As I pondered this I noticed several cars pulled over in the oncoming lane, and idly wondered if there was a day-care center or the like letting out nearby.

As I went on, I noticed other cars pulled over beyond them. Widely spaced for a waiting line. Odd, I thought, and went back to planning my night's sleep.

Then I noticed one of those pulled-over drivers glaring at me. His gestures were not obscene, but they were emphatic.

What was his problem?

I checked my mirror. And swung onto the shoulder of the road. And the fire truck hurried past.

I didn't hear the siren until the truck was even with the cab. Soundproofing in modern trucks is pretty good. But if I'd been watching my mirrors I would have seen him.

There may be people who can drive, talk on a cell phone, listen to their favorite song, polish their nails (sorry, ladies) and go over their plans for tonight's date, all at the same time. I don't believe I've ever met one, but I'll entertain the possiblility. I know, however, that I'm not one of them. When I'm driving, I have to drive.

(For those of you who've been checking the blog lately--I've had some trouble finding time at home to update. These brief notes were written more or less on the dates given, but it took me a while to get them typed in. I'll try to do better...

Passed a pickup towing a trailer today. The trailer had a logo (and pictures) for a most interesting product:

The Tombstone Hearse Company

Apparently a real biker can have a real biker's funeral now.

Just thought you might like to know...

(For those of you who've been checking the blog lately--I've had some trouble finding time at home to update. These brief notes were written more or less on the dates given, but it took me a while to get them typed in. I'll try to do better...

Picked up a trailer in the dark this morning. Thought I'd checked it over pretty well. When I stopped to fuel, I looked it over again, and found one tire had a bald spot the size of my hand, worn down clear past the first steel belt. All the tread gone. A blowout waiting to happen.

I mentioned once that you can back one of these rigs in a complete circle without moving the back wheels. What I didn't mention is that doing that is a good way to grind the tread off those back wheels, if you're not careful. I presume that's what happened here.

We're legally required to inspect the truck and trailer at least once a day (the company requires us to do it twice). This is one of the reasons...

(For those of you who've been checking the blog lately--I've had some trouble finding time at home to update. These brief notes were written more or less on the dates given, but it took me a while to get them typed in. I'll try to do better...

A storefront in a strip mall, advertising itself as a "GAME$ OF $KILL ARCADE"*

Gee. I wonder what they do in there...
-----
I didn't have time to find the coding for the ancient "cents" symbol. But the last word had one...

(For those of you who've been checking the blog lately--I've had some trouble finding time at home to update. These brief notes were written more or less on the dates given, but it took me a while to get them typed in. I'll try to do better...

Snow in Georgia. In April.

The rest of the way north, fine. But Georgia?

All right, it was just flurries where I was. But it's the principle of the thing...

Yo-yo dieting

(For those of you who've been checking the blog lately--I've had some trouble finding time at home to update. These brief notes were written more or less on the dates given, but it took me a while to get them typed in. I'll try to do better...

Hail tinkles.

When the pellets are small, it's not a scary sound at all. Kind of like a kid dropping marbles. I might be able to sleep through this if it doesn't stop before I'm done writing. We'll see.

Somebody took over the big-screen TV in the truck stop lounge and spent the evening playing crazed action-adventure flicks. One of them was TRANSPORTER 2. Gosh, I wish I could drive like that. Not that I would, mind you, but...

And I want that car. At the very least, I want to know who painted it. The things it went though without the finish getting dulled, much less scratched.

But most of all, I want the tractor-trailer that almost ran over him. Because it didn't. The driver saw him rolling toward the McGuffin in the middle of the street, and slammed on the brakes. And the truck stopped. Right there.

Just in case you didn't know, tractor-trailers don't stop like that.

In fact, one of the things you have to worry about every time you pick up a load or drop one is getting used to the new brake situation. Empty, your rig weighs (typically) about 35,000 pounds. Fully loaded, it can be up to 80,000. There's nothing quite like pressing gently on the brake pedal as the intersection comes up to meet you--and realizing that the gentle push that would have stopped you smoothly with an empty trailer isn't doing much to slow down the extra twenty tons or so that's back there now.

Going the other way is just as bad. You press a little too hard--and the (nearly weightless, it seems) trailer's wheels try to lock up. And there you are, with your tractor slowing down (too quickly) in a straight line, while the trailer is doing its best to pull a bootlegger turn behind you. Adjust your braking technique FAST, please.

And if you don't have a trailer at all? Well, I've seen pictures of a tractor on a test track with the brake pedal to the floor. It was doing a nose-wheelie. Well, actually it was starting a front somersault.

I haven't seen an "after" photo. I think I'll pass.

(For those of you who've been checking the blog lately--I've had some trouble finding time at home to update. These brief notes were written more or less on the dates given, but it took me a while to get them typed in. I'll try to do better...

Sat for two days this weekend. Then drove all night.

Hill-country two-lanes in the dark. That was fun. No cloudy white rocks in the road, but having to consciously order your eyes to focus as you look around in morning rush-hour traffic can be downright terrifying. If I hadn't already picked out a place to stop I would have been looking hard for one.

Bit of a scare

The good news for today is, I didn't kill anybody.

There was about a two-second timespan when I thought I was about to. I was passing an abbreviated entrance ramp on a section of Interstate that was heavily under construction, when a motorcycle slid casually out into the lane in front of me. He'd been doing about 40 to my 55 when he started to merge. He decided that was a fine speed to continue. And he didn't even look behind him before he swung into the traffic.

I think the sound of my air brakes got his attention. I was about twenty feet behind him when he finally looked back, looked forward again, and casually started accelerating. By that time I had almost slowed down to his speed. My heart started back down to normal speeds about ten seconds later.

I'm glad my trailer was empty. On a wet road that could have been dangerous (less weight on the back means more chances for a skid), but here it just meant less weight for the brakes to fight. I don't think I'd have overrun him if I'd been fully loaded, but I'm just as happy not testing the theory.

And I do wonder. Was I that hard to see?