by Ed Miller
a Trucker’s
Tale
Wit, Wisdom, and
True Stories from
60 Years on the Road
a Trucker’s
Tale
Ed Miller
A Trucker’s Tale: Wit, Wisdom, and True Stories from 60 Years on the Road
Copyright © 2020 by Ed Miller
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Print ISBN: 978-1-948062-38-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-948062-39-8
Printed in the United States of America.
A Trucker’s Tale is dedicated to the millions of
truckers, both past and present, who have helped
America stay strong and free.
Contents
Preface
Part One: An Education
Part Two: Military Trucking
Part Three: College Trucking
Part Four: Characters
Part Five: Management
Part Six: Directions, Shippers, Strikes, and Baby Animals
Part Seven: Knights of the Highway
A Note on Safety
Photos
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Preface
Surely everyone knows that a fishing story grows each time it’s told. A minnow morphs into a largemouth bass after just a few beers in a bar full of new faces. You might have heard some awfully tall yarns spun by drivers, maybe at a truck stop lunch counter while you sopped up your eggs with toast and bacon. There’s the one driver who stopped along the highway to help a little old lady fix a flat tire. The third time he tells this story, the little old lady becomes a buxom blonde twenty-one-year-old. Perhaps by the fifth retelling, she takes him up on his offer for a ride.
I don’t have many tall tales to offer—the stories in this book truly happened to me or to truckers I know. Some names have been changed in a good-faith effort to protect the identities of the boneheaded, dim-witted, and off-kilter, or because I don’t want my ass whipped for telling the truth about those of you who might prefer to remain anonymous.
I’ve been part of the trucking world for sixty years, and I’m damn proud of it. I was born into a trucking family, and as soon as I could talk, I was pestering my dad to ride in his truck. Each time I asked, he would tell me that I could ride with him when I was old enough to climb into the truck without any help. I must have been five or six years old when I climbed onto the running board, the side step, and crawled up into his Mack B61. I’d known the smell of diesel since I was three or four, but the diesel smell from the B61 was unique, and awesome. In later years I would come to associate the smell with a flash of lightning—fierce, quick, and powerful. It burns the nostrils, leaves the tongue bristling, and makes your arm hair stand up. For me the smell conjures feelings of power and brings an adrenaline high. It’s a symbol of a journey about to be undertaken.
Several years ago, I was privileged to be the guest speaker at a dinner for the Maryland Motor Truck Associations’s annual Truck Driving Championships awards ceremony. The competition dates to 1955, and competitors are tested on their driving and inspection skills, knowledge, and professionalism. Winners qualify to compete in the American Trucking Associations’s annual National Truck Driving Championships. Anyway, I began my talk by asking how many of the several hundred truckers in attendance had grown up in trucking families, and the majority of the drivers raised their hands. I asked how many of their fathers told them to stay the hell out of the trucking business, like mine did, and damned near every driver’s hand was raised again. The room filled with laughter as we realized that not one of us had taken our dad’s advice.
I am sure my father offered this advice because he knew how aggravating the trucking profession could be. He understood the nature of trucking, that just when you think things are going great, unseen forces always throw the proverbial “wrench”—whether they are flat tires, lights going out, hoses bursting, bad weather, or those cursed weigh stations that all truckers hate. Most truckers have lived at the mercy of these tough breaks and know damned well that these events are going to continue dogging them. Evidently, we are all gluttons for punishment.
So why do we it? Non-trucking folks are always asking why we drive trucks if we complain about it so much, and it’s a fair question, but I say, let ’em scratch their heads and wonder why. You can’t understand trucking until you do it—the views, the lifestyle, the rush. Vacationers and businesspeople see some of the great US and Canadian landscapes while traveling, but only truck drivers get to enjoy the grandeur from high up in their cabs. While crossing bridges, the tall concrete walls and Jersey barriers prevent four-wheelers from having marvelous views of the lakes, rivers, or gorges they’re crossing. Truckers can watch the shifting landscape from their thrones.
Try to imagine the view a truck driver gets while driving across Staten Island at daybreak as he crests a rise in the highway. The sun, in all its enormity and fire, perched dead center between the two supports of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. I’ve seen views like you wouldn’t believe while topping the hill on I-70 West in Hancock, Maryland, about a mile before the intersection of I-68. Just after midnight, halogen highway lights glitter off the bare limbs of apple trees. It’s poetry, really. The whole orchard covered in sleet and freezing rain. An ice forest, etched forever in the mind. The road bears a certain beauty, sometimes most evident in the quiet hours and remote stretches that truckers are privy to every ride. Long hauls might inhere long nights and early mornings, but they also inhere access to a seldom-witnessed world.
Truck drivers also have bragging rights from having learned to persevere through rides that would paralyze other drivers. Imagine coming down Jellico Mountain, north of Knoxville, Tennessee, in a freezing fog so thick you can’t see anything ahead but a very faint ticker of white lines on the road. You can’t see what’s behind you, and you have your four-ways flashing to warn drivers approaching the rear of your truck. You can’t even pull over on the shoulder—you can’t even see the shoulder—but even if you could, you fear another truck will think you’re still traveling and hit you from behind. What thoughts race through your mind when you finally emerge from the fog at the bottom of the mountain, when you turn and see the four-inch-long horizontal icicles sticking straight back from your side-view mirrors? You wipe the sweat from your brow. You might even have to change into a new pair of pants. Maybe you add one last verse to the litany of prayers you offered the whole way down the mountain. (Truckers probably pray more in their cabs than in church.) But you survived, and you will next time too.
One of the first things a new truck driver learns, the lesson that’s most important, is how to navigate around some of the, shall we say, less experienced, four-wheel drivers we all know and love. Most drivers of four-wheel vehicles don’t think they’re doing anything wrong when they pull in front of a big truck just moments before traffic comes to a screeching halt. Perhaps they’re unaware that they did something wrong, perhaps they’re inconsiderate or blinded by road rage, but the action is careless and dangerous, and we se
e more of this behavior every day. Many four-wheel drivers seem to not notice trucks, acting as if four-wheelers are the only ones on the highway. I don’t think they realize when they piss off a truck driver, and I think they’d be aghast to know that truckers have several near misses because of their shoddy driving. Take my word for it when I say that it’s the four-wheelers causing mayhem on the road. Truck drivers are paid professionals, while many car drivers still need a hell of a lot more practice. Until all four-wheel drivers become proficient at driving, which we doubt will ever happen, truck drivers will always be the more responsible ones—ever mindful of that carload of kids who have the misfortune of having their mother behind the wheel.
Once, while traveling one of Ohio’s secondary roads to pick up a load, I arrived at an accident scene just after a trucker saved the lives of a carload of kids. Ohio state police had stopped traffic at the intersection, and curiosity drove me to get out of my truck to inquire what happened. The mother had run a red light, and rather than wiping out the small vehicle, the trucker had somehow kept control of his flatbed load of steel and steered to the right of the car. When I got there, the rig—what you may call a tractor trailer, a semitrailer, or a semitruck—looked like the driver had driven straight into a muddy cornfield for about one hundred yards. Many instances like this cause truck drivers to lose control of their vehicles and the rig jackknifes, with its trailer facing one way and its tractor another, like a pocket knife. The tires were almost completely buried, and the bottom of the flatbed was sitting on top the mud. As I drove past the scene, the woman and kids were laughing, crying, and hugging the truck driver who’d saved their lives. There is no telling how many wreckers—or tow trucks—it took to pull that rig out of the mud.
Truckers develop thicker skin every time they experience a narrow escape, including the damned near incidents they are thankful to have survived. I know I’ve had my share of them. But we do our best, and while I realize most people don’t know a thing about trucks, other than that they haul your goods around and, if—or when—you notice them, likely scare the hell out of you because they’re so big, you should know that no truck driver heads out on the road thinking, Let’s go out and terrorize the four-wheelers today!—even if it does have a nice ring to it. No, each truck driver hits the road with the same goals as you: to reach their destination safely and then return home to their family. I will say it again—truck drivers are the professionals of the highways. While you drive to work, a trucker’s drive is his work and we’re not slacking off behind the wheel, we’re putting the time in and getting the job done.
And we have to. America depends on truckers for nearly everything. We rely on them to haul our food to our local grocery stores. Our favorite snacks and beverages, and indeed everything that sustains us, doesn’t simply materialize out of thin air on shelves and in freezers. And those packages filled with new clothes, housewares, and books that appear on our doorsteps with such convenience? Truck drivers ensure their swift arrival. The home you just moved into? Truckers hauled the beams and bricks. The brand-new washer dryer? The stainless steel refrigerator? You guessed it. Truckers carry the foundations of our infrastructure, too—hauling the supplies that comprise roads, bridges, hospitals, and more. To borrow a couple of the fine, apropos lines of the American Trucking Association, “Without trucks, America stops,” and “If you got it, a truck brought it.”
In the pages that follow I’m going to offer a peek into our world. There might be wonkiness, swearing, and a good bit of grease, but you’ll get a behind-the-scenes view of how truckers are the bedrock of America, and do a damned fine job of keeping our country humming right along. By telling these stories, I am neither traveling down new highways, nor am I breaking new ground. Every trucker has also traveled these same roads, and each remembers their own special stories. Our stories touch every emotion from belly laughs to tearjerkers, and I’m sure other truckers think of theirs often, as I do mine. The fondest memories that comprise this book—whether hilarious, heartbreaking, or just plain stupid—are threads that, together, weave a tapestry of the American trucking culture.
Part One
An Education
My two brothers, my sister, and I grew up just a few hundred yards away from our grandparents’ farm, and we spent most of our free time there. Our mother had us two years apart, Betty Sue being the oldest, then me, Earl, and Yates. Betty Sue enjoyed cooking and canning with our grandmother, but we brothers had to be outside. Our granddad Obie was a self-made jack-of-all-trades. He purchased tractors and trailers, performed maintenance and repairs, and had a furniture delivery business with my dad. He also watched over a 168-acre farm, where he raised dairy cows, horses, chickens, pigs, dogs, and cats. For a while he also had a huge bull, Jonathan, whom he was very fond of, or at least he was until the day Jonathan chased Obie and my dad up a tree. Jonathan was gone just a few days after that.
Obie owned all kinds of farm equipment, and by the time my brothers and I were ten or eleven years old, we began driving and operating farm tractors, farm trucks, backhoes, bulldozers, and tractor trailers. One of Obie’s farm trucks was a red Dodge with two enormous headlights the size of medium pumpkins, one on each fender. One brother would drive the truck and the other two of us would straddle the fenders and ride them through the fields as though we were taming wild horses, and the men would load bales of hay onto the back of the truck. My favorite of Obie’s vehicles was a bright red Farmall M farm tractor. After kicking it out of fifth gear, you could fly downhill so fast you could barely hold on, two small steering tires violently shimmying.
No kid should have been doing what we did. Hell, no adult should have. It’s baffling that we reached adulthood with our eyes intact—or, for that matter, with anything intact. But the times were great. I’ll always fondly remember the monster mud fights that started after a field had been plowed, or a few times I accidentally took pot shots at my brothers with a BB gun. And there were great haystack jumps, epic ones really, even if there was that time a hidden pitchfork pierced my calf and got stuck.
The farm was also where I learned to speak like a trucker. I was only five or six when I picked up the first words from Obie. I was watching him handle the Farmall M farm tractor at the time. It was equipped with an electric starter, but the battery was always dead so you had to turn the crankshaft with a handle inserted into the front of the tractor to get it going. The crankshaft is a steel shaft that runs the length of an engine and drives an engine’s pistons up and down. The safest way to hold the handle was to push it down with your openhanded palm, rather than grip your palm around the circumference of the handle. You had to hold it just right to avoid a powerful kickback that could result in broken fingers and arms, and Obie was trying to do this, but it just wasn’t working. After repeated efforts proved unsuccessful, he stepped back, hitched up his britches, and yelled, “Goddamn you son of a bitch! I wish you would blow up and go to torment!” I’d heard swear words before, but this was real cussing, a whole torrent of expletives, anger, and release, and it was great.
When I got home that afternoon, I stood in front of my little pedal tractor, pretended I was trying to crank it, and yelled, “Goddamn you son of a bitch! I wish you would blow up and go to torment!” It took all of ten seconds for my mother to teach my backside that I should never use those words again. It was all right for Obie to use all the bad words he wanted, but I was never allowed to repeat any of them. Believe me when I tell you that watching my mouth was a very hard thing to do, since all the men in my life—my dad, all the men who worked for my dad, Obie, and all the men who worked for Obie—hell, every grown man I knew—punctuated every thought or sentence with at least a couple cuss words.
I practiced swearing to myself so much that I could cuss with the best of them before I made it out of elementary school. For the most part I kept it to myself, but just a couple times I must have let go, because I remember going to the principal in the fifth grade b
ecause Mrs. Gray thought I had uttered an inappropriate word. It must have been some version of “damn,” since I remember writing it a hundred times on her damned chalkboard.
I picked up my knack for storytelling from the truckers that Obie and my dad worked with through their furniture hauling business. At any one time, Obie owned between five and ten single-axle tractors and ten to fifteen trailers, so there were always plenty of guys around. Monday through Friday each week, my dad picked up shipments of new furniture at all the manufacturing plants in western North Carolina. He unloaded the shipments into his warehouse, and then on Saturdays, and usually half-days on Sundays, the shipments would be loaded for delivery to Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, with each trailer containing twenty to forty stops worth of goods. The drivers who delivered these multi-stop loads were referred to as “stick haulers,” and the wild stories they told my brothers and me added a great deal to our “liberal education.”
When the stick haulers returned to the farm at the end of a run, or at the end the week, it was time to perform maintenance on the equipment. Obie always told us that equipment wouldn’t last long if it wasn’t properly greased, so each weekend we brothers attacked every grease fitting on the tractors and trailers. Just like I will never forget my first whiff of diesel, I will never forget the sweet odor of that grease. It was different than anything I’d ever known, a musky scent of dark and thick molasses. Funny how those smells stick with you.
We never had air grease guns, which use compressed air to disperse the lubricant. Instead we had to continually fill hand pump grease guns that were much harder to use, hand-packing Shell multipurpose grease into them from five gallon buckets. Obie made it look easy as he used his index finger to smoothly remove excess grease from the fill end of the gun while rotating it, but it was much more difficult for us. We also had to check the fluid level of each vehicle’s rear-end differential housing, the “pumpkin.” A drive shaft transfers power from an engine into gears within the differential, which turn the rear wheels on the vehicle. To check the fluid, we would remove the plug and then insert a finger into the hole. If your finger was not covered in oil when you removed it, you had to add more. Unlike the sweet smell of the grease, the differential oil inside the pumpkin smelled terrible, like rotten eggs, and we’d have to violently scrub our hands to get the smell off. We also had the honor of changing each tractor’s oil every twenty thousand miles. This required using can openers to open forty-eight cans of Shell Rotella motor oil per oil change, per engine. It was always messy, and we would be up to our arms in dirty oil while we removed the drain plug.
