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.