The Truck Stops Here

I've always had this morbid curiosity about truck drivers. I think it stems from this time when I was a little kid visiting my Dad's family in Kentucky. Somehow the conversation turned to the secret language truckers use to communicate over CB radio. I don't remember much, except that when they would refer to attractive women as "seat covers," as in, "check out the seat cover in that convertible." Why my mind decided to lock this away in my memory bank, I will never know.

Over the past week, I've had a chance to experience trucking culture first hand. We flew into Hartford tuesday evening. I was wedged between a man who smelled like balogna, which reminded me of jail, and a woman who was reading a book and periodically sobbing throughout the flight. My nosiness got the best of me, and when I caught a glimpse of her book I saw that she was reading White Fang. I haven't seen that book since my middle school book fair. Apparently it's a real tear-jerker.

When I looked to my left, I saw my friend Dan, who was to be my copilot during this cross-country trek, making friendly conversation with what I thought at first was a husky man with several tattoos. When we landed, I asked him what the deal was with his neighbor, and learned that it was actually a woman who operated garbage trucks for waste management. She had been venting to him about her problems with bed bugs, lamenting about how bad they itch. She said she thought she saw one in the windowsill at her last hotel, but it turned out to be a caterpillar, so she left it alone.

Dan sandwiched between his two best friends



Someone from our manufacturing company picked us up at the airport, and in the morning we left our factory in Palmer Massachusetts and headed for Cleveland. We drove a 26-foot box truck that refused to go over 70 no matter how hard I pressed the gas and groaned in protest every time we went up a hill.

Our windshield quickly became speckled with insects, and the grill of our truck started to resemble the butterfly exhibit in a museum.

We only stopped at truck stops during the first leg of our journey because we were so nervous to park anywhere else. Our truck looked pretty unimpressive beside all those semis, but in my mind we had earned the respect of every flannel-clad hillbilly that tilted a nod in our direction.

Dan was sick, and every time I cracked a joke and he started laughing, he would practically have an asthma attack. I tried to keep things somber, but it was hard when we stopped at places that actually found it necessary to post signs like this:



We spent the night in downtown Cleveland, after some confusion about where the hell in downtown Cleveland our truck would fit. We ended up just parking it in front of the hotel, where the tour busses go.

Somewhere between Cleveland and Sioux City Iowa we found this place where we could worship if we wanted:



Our second day we spent about 17 hours on the road. We spent three days in Sioux City exchanging 800 pound trash compactors at McDonalds stores. It was pretty anticlimactic besides when we were unloading one of the machines from the truck and it almost crushed Dan.

Our big night to unwind was Saturday. After we had finished exchanging all of the compactors and loading everything up in the truck, we went to a Casino in Sioux City that was shaped like a boat.

Dan had been trying to convince me all day that he was going to win thousands. He even told me that if he won over $200 he would give me 20%. I made the same deal with him. After losing $12 on video poker, I decided to try my luck with the John Wayne slots.....



I lost a couple more dollars, and then went to check on Dan. I didn't really understand how slot machines worked, but I saw Dan hitting "bet max" over and over, so I followed suit and sat down two machines away from him. On my first hit I won $75.00. I immediately cashed out and spent the rest of the night walking around feeling smug and secretly taking pictures of the patrons:



Dan lost some money, and when we got back to our room and realized we had forgotten our key, we played rock, paper, scissors to decide who would go to the front desk. He lost at that too.

We finally left Sioux City sunday morning. Our plan was to spend the night in St. Louis across the street from the gateway arch, but our truck broke down in this small town called Macon, Missouri. Within minutes, six rednecks had flocked to our broken down Penske truck like vultures to a rotting carcass. At first I thought they were going to rob us, but it turns out they just wanted to see if their pick up trucks would be able to tow our truck around the parking lot. One of them happened to be a diesel mechanic, and told us what the problem was before we could even get Penske on the phone.





They were friendly people, they really were. Penske sent a mechanic out and when he couldn't fix it, they sent us another truck. We sat around in the parking lot drinking red bull and talking to these guys for a couple of hours:



We found out our truck wouldn't arrive until about 2 in the morning, so we walked a mile to a hotel. It had a hunter's lodge theme, and was actually the best smelling hotel we stayed at all week. The lobby was lined with animal heads.



We reloaded all of the equipment in the new truck at 4 in the morning and, after coming to the conclusion that we were both pretty much over this road trip, decided to drive 25 hours straight through when we woke up monday morning. And that's what we did.