Distracted driving: Not exactly a trucking story...

I'm at home right now. So it's hard to come up with good trucking stories in the present tense. But a trucker does drive, even at home. So...

We've had a little bit of a rat problem at the house lately. And the wife doesn't like killing the cute little things. So I set a live trap when I'm home. And when it catches something, I take it to some properly deserted place, far far away.

I was engaged in this pleasant task today, driving sedately through town (and out the other side) toward an empty lot which will remain nameless, when I had to make a quick stop at a red light. A block or two later, I heard a rustling in the back. Looking back, I see the clutter in the seat. And the trap.

Empty.

As best I can tell, the trap rolled over when I hit the brakes. And when it's on its side, the mechanism that keeps the trap doors shut doesn't engage any more. I actually figured that out at the time, but it was kind of a background thing. I wasn't really thinking about trap mechanisms just then.

I was thinking about driving with a live rat rummaging around in my floorboard.

Things worked out. I even managed to pass a police officer looking fairly nonchalant. He didn't look at me twice, anyway.

Being a truck driver has given me a certain amount of practice driving safely while distracted. Did it help? I don't know. It didn't hurt, anyway...

Sunday go to meeting

I may make it to church again.

Got my load info late last night. It doesn't pick up until tomorrow. So I have too much time again.

Shower. Shave. Leisurely breakfast. Then an equally leisurely run to a truck stop near the shipper. I've got over a thousand miles to cover before Wednesday morning, so no sense in delaying the first 50. But that's all the miles I CAN make today.

That being the case, I asked someone at the truck stop last night. He said he knew of one church within walking distance. If you call a mile or better "walking distance." I do, so I've got somewhere to go this morning.

***

Attended Mass at the Catholic church that two different people told me was the only church I could theoretically reach on foot. Nice enough place. Pretty young lady in white, all ready for her First Communion, with her family fussing over her the way you might expect. She took it well.

Took another route back. Passed a Baptist church on the way. A little more my style. And I think it was closer. Sigh.

But no matter. I did get to church. No complaints.

***

Got back to the rig, drove the 40-50 miles to a large truck stop within striking distance of my pickup tomorrow. Walked through the beginnings of rain to the main building. Where I found three earnest men and two earnest boys in the main corridor. All in suits.

I ended up being the entire congregation for the service they'd come to hold in the TV lounge. The earnest boys teamed up to make sure I had a Bible and a hymnbook. The youngest and most earnest of the men preached the sermon. Burger King as a metaphor for the lure of the world. ("Have It Your Way" and pay the penalty later...)

I'm not laughing, by the way. He didn't do a bad job of making his point. Just giving you an idea of what you can see when you're out here.

All in all, a fairly restful day--as a trucker's day goes. Which, of course, means it wasn't an especially profitable one. But I can handle that once in a while.

Drop and...and...and...

There are days when I almost understand what drives a painter crazy.

Northbound through the Appalachians, and there's color. So much of it. Too many shades I don't have names for.

And that's just the greens.

The afternoon sun changes things. Shadows change the texture of the hills. The trees seem to pop out of the hillsides as if I were driving a ViewMaster(tm).

Remember ViewMaster's(tm)? The binocular-looking 3-D picture viewers? If so, did you ever notice how even the photos of real places gave you the uneasy feeling you were looking at models? 3-D was their big selling point, so they emphasized it. They spaced their cameras much further apart than your eyes could ever be. Everything was TOO three-dimensional, as if you were a giant, or the mountain was made of plastic and six inches tall.

Mountain sunsets in spring can have the same effect sometimes. Spooky.

Nice relaxing day. Unfortunately. I got to my destination early in the afternoon, dropped the loaded trailer--and discovered they had no empties. And no idea when they'd get one. There were at least two other trucks from my company parked out front waiting for one. Joy.

So I told my dispatcher. He canceled my next load. Hard to load a trailer I don't have. And I sat.

Three hours later, he found me another load. Right where I was. They didn't have any empties, but they did have loaded trailers going elsewhere. So back I went, past the gate and into the huge parking lot. There I found the trailer I'd been assigned. Hooked up, pulled out--and nearly ran over a nice elderly couple driving aimlessly through the secured trailer lot.

There they were, sitting in their middle-aged Chrysler, neatly dressed, rigidly erect, driving solemnly in circles like an American Gothic car commercial. I braked just in time. I don't think they noticed.

A hundred or so yards down, two yard dogs blocked their path, and one of the drivers got out to ask what they needed.

By the time they got back to the gate I was on my way out. I never did find out what they needed. Or how they got past the gate guards...

Trucks haul a lot of things

Three examples...

***

On a South Carolina Interstate, I passed a flatbed stacked with palmetto trees. The tops were cut off and the roots bagged,the trunks stacked like logs on the trailer.

I presume they're meant for planting somewhere. I hope they're hardy things.

***

At a truck stop I looked across the street and saw a car hauler full of Geek Squad patrol cars. A dozen or so PT Cruisers, all ready to go rescue poor computer owners like me.

***

In the evening I parked in another truck stop's parking lot, about three slots down from a yacht.

Sloop or cutter. Not new, but in good shape. Fin keel, but not a modern one.

The Aquila, out of Baltimore.

***

Not deep, but hey...

Wisdom for the day

This one will be mercifully short.

Lovely day, across Tennessee and Kentucky. Mountains and hills, bare trees but dogwoods in full flower. Then plains with some kind of purple-flowered tree, lining the road. Then Indiana, hills becoming plains and the ever-growing windmill forest.

Now I'm stopped, an hour from Chicago and over six hundred miles from where I started. I'll be up before four in the morning if I'm to make my delivery on time (the new and improved “on time,” that is—I just found out what it is).

I'm wiped. But rational.

So. I'm waiting for a shower. When they have one I'll take it and then fall down.

Meanwhile, here's a little something I saw on the back of a passing truck. Maybe a company motto.

(Rough quote)

A professional driver is one who stays out of trouble, and helps the other driver do the same.

Made me sit up and watch my driving for a good hour. Maybe more.

The rest area/Welcome Center in Clearbranch, Tennessee, is kind of nice, once you get used to the smell.

It's very new. The mortised, squared logs are still sharp at the edges. The stone walls are likewise pristine. You can still see the gridlines in the recently-sodded grass around it.

Inside, the newness is even more obvious. Everything's spotless and shiny and fresh. The rocking chairs have not been sat in enough to start molding themselves to the average human bottom. They haven't even started losing their varnish yet. I was almost afraid I wasn't supposed to sit in them. The fireplace they were arranged around had obviously never seen a fire.

The view is impressive, too. This stretch of mountaintop Interstate is still trying to decide if it's spring, but the mountains are lovely. Of course, it's hard to find an ugly piece of scenery in the Appalachians, but still.

Didn't see a lot wildflowers yet. Might not have noticed anyway. The nose wouldn't at any rate. The truck parking area has a perfume all its own.

Overheated brakes.

Don't know whether people push their trucks too hard or if jake brakes are still too new, but even at this hour the sharp aroma of hot brake linings lends a certain sharp edge to the evening experience. As soon as one set cools down the next truck gratefully comes to a stop and adds its own contribution.

It could be worse. It was, for at least one driver. A flatbed I passed half an hour ago, on a downhill slop, riding my jakes for all they were worth. I looked back in my mirror a little later and saw him. And the huge cloud of smoke that followed him. One of my neighbors here at the rest area says he passed him shortly after I did. Rolled down the window to tell him how bad his brakes were.

“I know!” was the answer. My neighbor said the driver looked terrified.

I don't blame him.

I-40 on the border between North Carolina and Tennessee is an interesting drive anyway. But you can't make it now. Last year a major rockslide blocked the whole thing, right around the border. They're still trying to clear it. Meanwhile, you detour up I-26 into southern Virginia, then back down I-81 to Knoxville. Not as many curves, but more hills.

And more miles. When I told my boss I could make it to Chicago by tomorrow night, I didn't take those hills into account. Nor did I (or my boss) consider the size of that detour.

Hope they aren't going to be too disappointed.

Another of my neighbors has a very different brake problem. His trailer brakes locked up and he can't get them to release. He's driving a car hauler, on its way to an auto show in Pigeon Forge, if his trailer will ever roll.

His cargo?

• A late-sixties Ford Falcon.
• A 1930 Ford Tudor coupe.
• A 1940 Ford two-door sedan.
• And three Mustangs. Two of them are Mach 1's.

All of them properly “improved,” of course. He had quite an audience for a while, until it got too dark to take pictures and ogle.

And suck in your gut a little...

South Georgia. Green with splashes of white—the dogwoods are out in force.

Spent much of the day on two-lanes, past pecan plantations and other big flat farms, or passing through tree-lined passages that sometimes seemed tunnel-like.

Rounded a curve at one point and saw a police car at the crest of the next hill, all blue and flashing. A line of cars backed up in front of him. A tractor-trailer pulling clear off the road behind them.

The driver of the semi got out and waved at me. I stopped well short, in case he was telling me I'd have to pull some fancy maneuver. He came over, and I learned I was right. He said he thought the police car was escorting a wide load. That's why he'd pulled off onto the shoulder, to make room for whatever was coming.

Sounded good to me. So I pulled off the road, too.

The shoulder was wide and grassy and solid. You don't see that very often, on back-country two-lanes. The usual foot of crumbly gravel next to the two-foot drainage ditch could have been bad. It occurred to me that the police car may have stopped everybody here because of that. I hope so—always nice when somebody does something sensible.

Then I didn't have to wonder about some of this. Here it came.

It was a double-wide modular house. Or maybe triple-wide. Whatever it was, it took up the whole highway. Literally. A man was walking in front of the semi-tractor, waving it left and right, as the rig slowly weaved to avoid the mailboxes.

Then it stopped to let us by.

I suppose it would be a lot easier for us to slip by the house than for the driver and his flagman to try and slip by us. But I was even more grateful, as I crawled along, for that wide grass shoulder and the near absence of a ditch.

That was the exciting part of the day. All I really needed, anyway.

A day in the life

My first 90-degree day for the year.

In South Carolina it's all flowers and full spring greenery. Pretty driving.

I could have been in a better mood for it. My satcom had flaked out while I was sitting in the terminal waiting for my load assignment. By the time I'd figured out it wasn't sending or receiving messages and wasn't telling me anything was wrong, it was too late to get to the shipper. And the shipper and my employer didn't get together quite soon enough to let me know the wouldn't load me late. So I was harried as I drove down here and disappointed when I arrived.

And hot. Let's not forget hot.

There weren't any pay phones within walking distance of the only truck stop in the area. That's getting more and more common. But a nice fellow at the Waffle House down the street loaned me his cell, so my wife knows I'm alive.

Kind of embarrassing. I mentioned that I didn't have money for a cell phone contract. He thought I meant I didn't have money at all, and offered to buy me a meal. Turned out he was a trucker himself, home for a few days and knew what it was like to be days from home with no cash.

Free food is good, but false pretenses do something to the taste. So I corrected the impression. He still insisted on buying me a cup of coffee. And he and his wife and I talked awhile. Trucker stuff, you know—which companies are worth driving for, lousy roads we have known, the latest brilliant ideas in motor vehicle regulation, etc.

At one point he said something about how we should just stop driving for a week, and let the country see what they were risking. I said I doubted it would ever happen—if the independent truckers were able to act collectively to that extent, they'd already be in a union. The lack of organizers is one of the things they like about this job, I opined.

Deep stuff. You know.

At length his wife took the car home, he bobtailed his tractor behind her, and I walked back up the hill to my overly-warm truck. The truck stop didn't have a place to sit inside, so I went to bed nice and early and tried to read myself to sleep. Didn't work.

So I wrote this. Now let's try it again.

Hey, Andy! Where'd that tree come from?

Spring is still working on Pennsylvania, but down in Virginia it's getting out-and-out green.

It's almost there in PA—so much red tinting it looks like fall through, uh, those amber-tinted driving glasses that don't have a major brand name. But cross the Alleghenies, and the temperature goes up ten degrees and the green is everywhere. The trees still LOOK bare, but the green tint has taken over from the red. The hills know what color they are now.

I'm on a stretch of US-220 that's gone full-house limited access. Signs proclaim it the “future I-73 corridor.” This section could lacks only the name change. But it's a 40-mile roller-coaster ride, even now. I find myself thinking of what driving through these, um, hills when it was all two-lane.

Remembering an episode of Andy Griffith, of all things. As I recall, the Sheriff's office somehow got hold of a motorcycle with sidecar, and Barney got massively excited. He started running a speed trap at the bottom of a steep hill just outside Mayberry, ticketing every trucker that broke the speed limit getting a running start to climb it. Within a week everyone in town was spending their nights awake, listening to roaring diesels, as an endless string of backed-up 18-wheelers took turns climbing that hill at a walking pace in low gear. Andy finally had to take steps.

As a kid, I didn't really understand the problem...

At about that point in my musings, traffic slowed to a stop in front of me. The Future I-73 Corridor had become a parking lot.

Not as bad as some. A tree had fallen across the highway, blocking both lanes. If I had to sit in a highway going nowhere, it was kind of nice not to wonder if anyone was dead up there.

About half an hour later they'd cut the top of the tree out and opened the left lane. By that time it was too late to legally get to the terminal I was bound for. So I found a truck stop (was surprised by it, actually. Another three seconds and I would have missed the turn) and settled in.

Nothing deep here. Just driving and musing and resting. Think I'll concentrate on that last part now.

G'nite.

Quiet Sunday

For some reason nobody felt like loading my truck on Easter Sunday. So I went to church.

A kind soul at the truck stop pointed toward the nearest town last night. So this morning I cashed in a shower, put on the most presentable clothes I had in the truck (don't ask), and walked about--half a mile? A mile?--to find a place to worship.

Not my denomination, but when you're walking through a completely new town looking for a church door, it doesn't pay to be too picky.

Little church. Nice people. Lovely weather. No complaint.

*****

Walked back out after lunch. Coming out the first time, I saw a building I daydreamed a little about. A squat, two-story stone house with a pagoda roof. The lower floor was tall, the upper floor all windows.

From the look of it, it had once been the railroad equivalent of a control tower. Now it was a ruin, the wood slowly rotting away while the stone shell sat there. I found myself imagining spending boatloads of money to move it somewhere and put in an interior. On a hilltop, maybe, with that wall of windows (three walls, actually—only the back wall was more or less solid) looking over some valley.

An office and a living room, maybe. I read something once that advocated putting day space upstairs and sleeping quarters on the ground floor (for fire escape if nothing else). This building would be perfect for that.

Since I couldn't buy it from the railroad, I just came back with a sketchbook. No great work of art, but it was a nice quiet way to spend a bit of afternoon.

Someone at the church had said he had a relative who'd tried to talk the railroad out of it. They weren't interested. Too bad.

* * *

After I finished playing artist I got a bit closer. Then I understood.

It would be a truly luxurious 1-bedroom cottage. But it was built in 1918. In reinforced concrete, cast in place. If I were to buy it, I'd probably have to hire a Green Lantern to move it.

But what a bachelor pad...

* * *

And thence to a playground. Little kids running all over the slide doing stupid things and laughing like idiots. One older girl on her bike very much on her dignity. I wonder what she'd have been doing without witnesses.

Ah. Youth.

And it's downhill from there...

So. You're coming down a hill. Your speed builds a bit, and you don't always notice it. Not until the car in front of you gets closer. Quickly.

You tap the brake, trying to keep your distance—the last second is not the time to even things out. You glance at the speedo. 5 mph over. Not that bad. So why are you closing so fast?

You look around. The fellow up there must have let off the gas for a reason, right? And that's when you see the police car.

Oops.

5 mph over on a downhill slope isn't a big deal. But if he wants to make it one he can. And you did slow down. Sign of guilt, right?

Sure enough, he pulls out of the median and swings in behind you.

This is a big thing. A commercial driver lives or dies by his record. With the company. With the police. You've gotten two tickets in the past two years, and you've spent close to a thousand on legal fees and such, keeping your DMV record more or less intact. There really isn't a minor ticket if you're a trucker.

Well, nothing for it. Here he comes.

And there he goes.

The lights come on three cars ahead. Apparently somebody was paying less attention than you were.

You can breathe now.

I said you can breathe now!

That's better.

Roller coasters ain't what they used to be

The red glaze is still on the mountains.

At this point the painter's done a bit of daubing--there's more texture. Individual trees with an almost-invisible color that just suggests the shape to come. As if the artist was playing with a cotton ball.

From the Arkansas flood plains through the hills and plateaus of Kentucky yesterday, and over the West Virginia mountains today. And I do mean "over."

One does see the country, at least.

I don't remember taking this stretch of Interstate before. The really interesting part was the 13-mile stretch of 6% downhill grade.* Occasional level spots, but mostly downhill.

That's more of a slope than it sounds. When I was young, the trip down would have involved a slow, careful, crawling pace and the sharp smell of overheated brakes. Even if the load was fairly light, like this one. The runaway truck ramps would be a source of gratitude even if you didn't have to use them this time.

Now? I dropped two gears and flipped two switches. One activated the jake brakes. The other set my cruise control at 45.

Then I just sat there. Every time the speed got close to 50, the cruise control engaged the jake. When the speed dropped a bit, it turned the jake off.

I never touched the brakes at all. I didn't have to.

"Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas" was based on a real incident. Not funny to the people involved. And not that atypical at the time, I understand. I've been taught how to avoid that kind of accident, and how to deal with it if the brakes do overheat and fail. But I've never even been close to having to deal with it for real.

Spoiled, we are.

-----
*For those who don't drive jeeps or 18-wheelers, a "percent" in this context means the percentage of a 1/1 slope. On a 1% grade, for every 100 feet you drive, you've gone downhill a foot. A 100% grade would be a 45-degree downhill slope.

When you ______, you make an ___ out of _ and __.

What a difference two weeks can make.

Last time I took I40 through Arkansas, the trees were still almost winter-dead. Just that faint glaze of color (mostly red) that says the buds are starting to swell.

Now the trees are definitely alive. An occasional burst of white punctuates a vista that seems to still be deciding what color spring will be. Looks like green is winning out as usual, but the other colors are still making their claims. We'll see how it comes out.

Had to run the air conditioner today. Last week I needed a jacket and hat still. The times they are a'changing.

I brought 45,000 pounds of something-or-other into Arkansas. It almost got stopped before I left Georgia.

Scaling a load costs money. The people who have truck scales charge you to use them. As a general rule, expect to spend $9, plus another dollar each time you have to try again. My company reimburses me when the load is heavy enough, but if your bank account's thin it's still scary.

The load started out in North Carolina somewhere. Before I got it, it had passed weigh stations in three states. Obviously it was all right on that score.

Obviously. But overweight fines are scarier than scale tickets. So after a bit of dithering, I went to a truck stop and scaled the load.

The drive wheels were about 400 pounds over. With the fuel tanks only half full.

This, I thought, was bad. I'd looked the trailer over before I took it, and I'd taken a quick glance at the wheel position. Looked like the tandems were all the way forward already. And if the previous driver hadn't scaled the load, then the wheels probably would be all the way forward.*

But what the heck. I went back and looked again.

And lo! The wheels were almost all the way back. I had three holes** to play with! I was saved!

I still didn't have enough leeway to fuel. But I could get to the customer, if I was careful. I could live with that.

Just goes to show you--oh. I already put that in the title.

-----
*The further back the wheels, the more weight on the trailer and the less on the trucks drive wheels. And the longer the wheelbase. And the harder to get the rig around corners...

**The holes the locking pins mate with. Moving the locking pins one hole will (as a rough rule of thumb) move about 250 pounds from the trailer wheels to the tractor's drive wheels.