Have You Thanked A Truck Driver Today

Have You Thanked A Truck Driver Today?

By R.J. Godlewski (a.k.a. Road Sailor, Good Buddy!)

As I get ready to pack for a vacation in which to attend my mother’s 80^th birthday bash and a Godlewski family reunion orchestrated by my cousin, I no doubt will encounter many tractor-trailer rigs on the highways and with the upcoming Labor Day holiday, I began to wonder how many people actually stop and consider the unfathomable importance of our nation’s big rigs. I do know many people are quite inconsiderate when it comes to the “kings of the highway”, but having done the job myself, I feel especially motivated to write firsthand about the perils and aggravations of a job few people could do if their lives depended upon it. So I would like to single out my preference for ‘workers of the day’ and hope that you will greet them with both respect and admiration too.

I began my trucking career in early 1994, though I can recall that back in high school during Career Day ’78 I had selected the occupation as one of my three choices. My family laughed. My friend’s questioned my intelligence which had until then largely subjected them to envy. There was just something about running the highways in a big rig that seemed beyond anything else that I could think of, save, perhaps, for working on the seas. I’ve always loved traveling and to get paid doing it seemed a bit romantic. I guess nearly everyone has the urge to vacate conventional wisdom every now and then and I’m no different.

Regardless of my adventurous spirit, it took until the end of 1993 before I really put effort into my dream. I had toyed with the idea with my (now) ex-brother-in-law who did become a trucker, driving locally until his attention to detail caused him to ‘lose’ the position. Still, dreams are hard to acquire without due motivation and I got mine as soon as I walked into the foreman’s office of the envelope factory in which I worked. “Godlewski,” the owner’s son-in-law barked in response to my inquiry for a raise and a promotion. “You were hired as a machine operator and a machine operator you’ll remain even if you were to stay here for twenty years!” I started checking out truck driver schools the very next day. After all, how long could I sit within an idle job and run out 350,000 Publisher’s Clearinghouse “You are one of only three finalists!” envelopes per shift?

I attended interviews for many positions, filled out many applications, and analyzed the merits of each one. Most made me feel as though I was being targeted to sell Bibles door to door. I decided on entering the household goods industry, not because I cared much about moving people’s belongings, but because I could enter their owner/operator training program and have my own business. Regardless of my selection, going from a Ford Escort to a sixty foot truck was a chore! The ‘safe track’ is where I had the most problems – the first week of school was learning how to handle furniture and do paperwork – and I never quite got used to seeing ‘stop’ written upon a piece of paper stapled to a pole. Worst still, every time that I turned a corner and saw row after row of orange cones denoting ‘lanes’ I somehow forgot that I was learning how to drive a tractor-trailer and proceeded to execute what I called the ‘harvesting’ maneuver so familiar to farmers and combine operators the world over. I never saw so many orange cones fly off into so many directions in my life! J

Finally – how, I will never know – I graduated from the safe track and entered the real world. Because of a snow storm in Indiana that locked up my trailer’s wheels, I had to use a backup rig for which I was not used to. I botched my ‘five maneuvers’ and forced the poor instructor to come in on a Sunday to retest me – and only me; everyone else had passed. I was so pissed that I passed all maneuvers including the backward serpentine without taking any deduction points! Most people backed around the first cone, took a deduction by stopping and pulling straight ahead, and then backed straight between cones two and three. I zigzagged my way around all cones without stopping! I was sure proud and so was Sara after I told her. Compared to the stupid parking lot, highway travel – even through downtown Cincinnati – was a piece of cake! Even my road instructor told his supervisor that I did better on my first day than the other student in our truck did in his second week.

Running household goods basically means that you hump furniture for about twelve hours and then hit the highway for several hundred miles. Not exactly why I wanted to become a trucker. Sara loved it because she was a people person and loved dealing with the families. Her ‘official’ job was helping me by doing the inventory inspections of their belongs. Simply point, any damage during the transportation came out of my pocket. On more than one occasion I was deducted $800 for a torn mattress yet the customers got to keep the mattresses. Now, honestly, if you got $800 for a cut mattress would you buy another one? Of course not; you’d flip over the mattress and haul ass off to Cancun! Hauling cars was the worst and most of you probably don’t realize that those large moving vans that you see along the road might have cars stuck in the trailers. You might also not realize that those same trucks are carrying plywood and two-by-fours so that the drivers can fabricate decks above the cars so they can carry a full trailer load either. That’s scary, particularly when you’re hauling a 1929 Model A Ford as I did for one Texas professor relocating to Northern Utah.

The only way to reduce damage is to pack a trailer full. That means tight, from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. When you move by yourselves I bet your U-Haul^® is only packed a few feet off of the floor. You would probably panic seeing a trained household goods driver tip your favorite sofa on its side and then stack your washer and dryer inside of the couch, resting between the arms. Everything’s padded, but you still can’t allow even a small hole to go unfilled. There’s one other thing that you may not have considered – the places where we people choose to live are definitely not designed for trucks. I remember snaking my way through the security barriers at an apartment complex in Dallas, holding up traffic while backing into a downtown Chicago high-rise (while Sara witnessed a robbery at the jeweler’s across the street), and being bitched out by fellow motorists while unloading in Brooklyn. Yet, the scariest and most nerve-wracking has to be when I unloaded at a mini storage in Prescott Valley, Arizona. Like an oaf, I pulled into the complex and then had to back out. It was situated on the side of a cliff and the only thing keeping me from going over the edge into the canyon below was a single strand of wire rope.

Sara was at the storage office and kept seeing my trailer climb back out between the rows of buildings and suddenly disappear forward for several seconds before reappearing and then disappearing again. I saw my life flash before my eyes and I felt my legs slowly succumbing to exhaustion and pain while my truck sat on a 45° incline and my eyes held a two mile uninterrupted view. Fortunately, I was finally able to get enough oomph out of my truck to push the trailer back up onto the road. In North Carolina, I think it was, a fellow trucker came up to me and said “I have to take my hat off to you household goods guys; you get those rigs in places that I can’t get my car into!” That was the best compliment I’ve ever received for driving a truck. The best recognition was earning a ‘Number 1’ risk factor rating from the carrier on our first evaluation. On a scale of 1 to 10, one is the best, three average, and anything lower usually tans your backside as you exit the company’s doors for the last time. My #1 rating meant that I was in a group of perhaps no more than one hundred other operators out of a total of some 5,000 trucks. We couldn’t get any better, but I did slide down to a #2 rating probably because winter rolled around and we we’re running half empty trailers and that meant a lot of wear and tear on furniture.

Needless to say, household goods got to be expensive and tiring. In Philadelphia, a motorist knocked his mirror off on my trailer while he was talking on his cell phone. He called the cops and the officer who arrived had just been at the scene of a motorcycle accident where the rider had buried his head into his helmet. The officer didn’t file a report due to the lack of anything really of significance, suggested that the motorist simply repair the mirror without calling his insurance company, and listed him as the impacting vehicle (though the other driver wrongly insisted that I ran into him). Meanwhile, my mind was slowly clicking through the $40/hour that it was costing me for lumpers while Sara and I sat idle waiting for this headache to go away. Later, the jerk sued the carrier for untold thousands of dollars for ‘emotional distress, pain and suffering, etc.’ He probably watched too many lawyer commercials on television.

Sara and I decided to move to Western Oklahoma, so we grabbed a couple of suitcases and climbed aboard a Greyhound bus. Within twenty minutes, we had found a place to live and within a day she found herself a job as the ‘salad chef’ for a local steakhouse. I wasn’t so fortunate; it took me three weeks before I returned to the road pulling refrigerated trailers. Running a reefer is what I became a truck driver for, but hauling as a company driver wasn’t. They simply had too many chances to screw me over. “Don’t want to run into downtown New York City? Well, then. Just park that truck right there and find your own way home!” Regardless of the B.S., I still enjoyed the job. Once, while I was napping at a truck stop in Indio, California I awoke to someone pounding away on my passenger door. I crawled out of the sleeper and rolled down the window. Outside was another driver laughing his pants off, pointing towards my trailer. I looked aft, and to my complete amazement was another truck – a nice big ‘all the bells and whistles’ Kenworth sitting nose against the side of my trailer. It turned out that the driver in the other truck had been so tired that he went to sleep without setting his brakes and his truck rolled across the parking lot and slammed into my trailer, much to the humor of the other truckers. I couldn’t understand how anyone could be so tired that they couldn’t know this until I realized that I myself was so tired that I didn’t wake up when my own truck was hit by another! Fatigue does that.

Another humorous incident involved me running towards the yard in Oklahoma City. It was winter and there was about a foot of snow on the highway and not much else. Well, there I am rolling along the highway with nary another vehicle in sight. When I got to the yard and walked into the driver’s lounge, all the other drivers looked at me in complete shock: “How did you get here? Didn’t you know that they closed down the city? The president of the company is going to make a statement soon!” Close down the city? Hell, to me it was just another spring day back in Michigan! Southerners. I didn’t stick around long with that company, there was just a certain ‘feeling’ that I had and it was vindicated when they filed for bankruptcy. I got out before the rush, but found myself working at the same restaurant as Sara did as a dishwasher to pay the bills. Not much humor, save for when I got carded for being a possible ‘vagrant’ while walking to work. Cops.

Well, I enjoyed working with Sara until they cut my hours down to 15 per week and I said “Why am I doing this?” and was saved by a knock on my front door one day when a local farmer said that he needed a driver for a new truck that he was buying. I walked out the door saying basically “I’m all packed”. It had been a while since I drove and the owner offered me a chance to team with another driver that he had to make sure that I still wanted to drive. Big mistake. The other ‘driver’ toked in the sleeper while I was driving, picked up floosies from one city for a ride to another, tailgated at eighty miles per hour during thunderstorms, and once threatened to leave me back when I caught mild food poisoning from a burrito in Houston. When I finally made it back home – the day before Easter – I walked through my front door and literally kissed the carpet. The next day – Easter, remember – I called the owner and told him precisely why “I am not driving with that bastard again!” A week later I was offered the good truck, the one the other driver was scarring the hell out of people with and I proceeded to turn around the owner’s business. Within a few weeks, I had an Outstanding Job Performance certificate from the carrier and I earned it.

That truck was a rocket ship and I was running 750 miles per day out West where the speed limit was seventy-five. Most of my loads were picked up in the evening and delivered by morning and I sent the paperwork in immediately. The previous driver sat on the documents for weeks on end. When I returned home the first time, the owner of the rig came nearly running up my driveway and gave me a big hug. In certain ways, he reminded me of John Wayne and I’m only about 5’8” so you can see what a little enthusiasm could do to one’s frame. Far more important, however, I picked up two passengers for the future – Sara had a beef with her boss about not getting a day off to spend with her son visiting from Michigan; and during my previous trucking job we had found an abandoned Australian Cattle Dog hiding alongside the highway – and having my wife and my dog along with me made a rewarding job even more exciting!

No longer would I have to suffer through the worst snow storms of my life – a half hour north of San Antonio – while desperately trying to avoid falling asleep while I wondered whether I was in the eastbound lane or the westbound until a bull hauler running the other way nearly ran me off of the highway. No longer would I worry about running out of the Eisenhower Tunnel at two o’clock in the morning while hauling forty tons of frozen beef and to be confronted with black ice as soon as I left the entrance to the tunnel. Sara kept me awake because she could tell when I was becoming tired by noticing that I wasn’t checking my mirrors or gauges every few seconds like I normally did. She saved my life, undoubtedly. Rocky provided us with humor.

After his first attempt to exit the truck with my help ended with him kissing the pavement, my dog decided that it was best that he learned very quickly to egress on his own. Getting into the truck was a different story. He had a problem. He never waited until the door was actually opened. Once, while I was sitting in the driver’s seat, filling out my logbook, there was a tremendous thud and the whole cab shook. I crawled over to the passenger window and saw Sara staring at the ground while Rocky lay partially knocked out, panting on the pavement. At another time, he jumped up and hugged the mirror preventing us from either getting him down or opening the door. Dogs. J However, once he did manage to learn the proper technique, Rocky managed to awe the other truckers with his Michael Jordan-esque leaps (complete with tongue wangling) into the passenger seat from the pavement. Even I was impressed. Yet, Rocky was also security.

Once, while we were at the yard in Oklahoma City getting an oil change, Rocky was sitting in the driver’s sit as he was wont to do whenever I wasn’t – sort of “I need to watch Dad’s seat” sort of thing – and Sara and I were asleep in the back. The mechanic finished his work under the hood and opened the door to start the engine and inspect his work. He didn’t know that Rocky was there. Rocky simply turn his head down towards the left – I heard something in Spanish a bit more shocking than “¡Hijo de una perra!” followed by a very broken “Nice doggie!” and felt the door gently close. Rocky could’ve had him for dinner, but he knew why the man was opening the door. Sometimes you just have to ask yourself how much dogs really do know. Once, he was sleeping on the bunk and it being only about seventy degrees outside we turned off the air conditioning. Within minutes, he stood up; looked around, and back himself up against the corner duct as if to say “Turn on that air conditioner or you’re going to smell my ass!” We turned it back on and he laid back down and went to sleep. Like I said; dogs.

Sara stopped riding with me in 1996 when she came down with cancer and preferred to stay in town (which had a cancer center) and I slowly lost enthusiasm for the job. When she had her teeth removed and jawbones sanded prior to radiation treatment commencing I had to drive her 100 miles to Oklahoma City in the tractor for the event. Afterwards, she was in such pain that even today I can’t think of it and I had to pull into a Wal-Mart parking lot and get her pain medication filled. One hundred miles in a semi, her face swollen up like a chipmunk and I had to work through thirteen gears whenever I stopped. B.J. and the Bear it wasn’t. Finally, I just called it quits and picked up some odds jobs as well as driving a vacuum truck full of 130 tons of liquid mud for a oilfield services company. Sara didn’t like me being around when she was sick and we got into some serious disagreements. Still, I couldn’t handle having two days off at home for every three weeks on the road and seeing her getting worse and worse and…

When she got better, I went on to Michigan by myself for four months and drove for a company running ‘just in time’ shipments for the automotive industry. What that means, for those of you stuck within office jobs, is that as soon as I pulled up in my truck, the factory unloaded the supplies and sent them straight to the floor for use. Rolling warehouses, in other words. That was the longest that we’d ever been apart and when my chance for gaining a dedicated run between Michigan and Kansas failed to materialize, I decided to find something better. Fortunately, I found a company that offered a tractor lease program and needed drivers out of Oklahoma. With one phone call, I became an owner/operator again and was able to come back home to Oklahoma. Sara, in the meantime, had moved from our home of nearly five years into a small, conveniently located rental right in town. The new carrier goofed on my request for a lease tractor and left me with a vehicle that became a major headache. It was a ‘condo’ – a high-rise sleeper – and had twice as much room as any other truck that I drove, not to mention that I could actually stand up inside of it.

The truck was a mechanical nightmare. Once, in Southern Indiana during an ice storm, my driver’s side wiper failed. That’s right; I had to literally hang my head outside of the window in order to get off of the highway because there was an inch of ice and building on my windshield. Sometimes, in a truck, it takes quite some time to find a safe place to park. You just can’t always pull over and park like you can with a car. In California, I remember distinctly, we had to drive for a hundred and fifty miles because all of the truck parking slots in the rest areas will filled with recreational vehicles. Last I checked, they were allowed in store parking lots.

After several months of raising holy hell about getting a new truck and after Sara came back on the road with me, I finally accepted lease on a brand new International^®. Loaded This truck had everything! It also had the Super 10 – Top Two transmission: shifting above 35 mph was as simple as clicking a switch. Compared to what I had been used to, this truck was definitely a luxury vehicle but fate had bad luck in store for me. On a Coors run from Golden, Colorado to Thibodaux, Louisiana I pulled into the Petro in Amarillo, Texas late at night. Being hungry, I wolfed down my cheeseburger; Sara tasted something wrong with her eggs and didn’t finish them. By the following morning I was sicker than, well, let’s just say that I couldn’t keep anything down. Still, I managed to get back on the road – fifty miles at a time. Every truck stop, rest area, exit ramp, and outhouse took part of my soul on that day. That was the only time that my logbook figuratively went out the window. I was a half hour late making my delivery, declined an offer from the local beer driver to go to the hospital, finally found a motel with truck parking and proceeded to worship the porcelain god for five days.

That sickness set into motion a chain of events that made me became severely fatigued and worn down. When I finally made the rounds back to our house, my doctor prescribed me Zoloft, industrial strength vitamins, and a few other things that I can’t remember. He gave me a two month prescription because that’s about how long it would take to get back into town for another appointment. The trucking company heard the word Zoloft and the safety department shut me down. I thought that it was all ridiculous but they just wouldn’t let me drive until I cleared out of the medication. Unfortunately, at $2,200 per month, the tractor payments alone didn’t forgive me sitting idle and I had to forfeit the truck. That was in 1999 and I haven’t driven a truck since. Oh, I still seek business opportunities in the industry, but back when I drove I didn’t pay more than a buck per gallon for fuel. I simply don’t see how truckers manage today.

Do I miss driving? Sure I do. I miss the scenery, the independence, and the time spent with Sara even if I had to block street traffic for twenty minutes much to the anger of the locals so that she could run into a McDonald’s and use the bathroom. We had a great time and the memories will last me for years. I know 45 of the 48 contiguous states intimately. I’ve driven in the mountains, over bridges (such as Michigan’s Mighty Mack!), through tunnels (some under water), across the desert, and through every type of climate imaginable including one storm that sent my truck across three lanes in the blink of an eye, causing me to forever be thankful that no one was driving next to me. I remember such pips as during day five of a layover at an Ontario, California truck stop when the smog courteously lifted revealing for Sara – who had never been to California before – a mountain! I laugh to this day at the sight of her revelation regarding Southern California’s climate.

Yes, I miss driving but there are far more serious times that I don’t miss. I don’t miss being held up for hours in traffic because some Lady Trucker snapped and blew her husband’s head off with a shotgun and the cops had to stop her along a busy section of Interstate 70. I don’t miss being wrongly diverted by highway signs and ending up in a fashionable district of Oakland as my dispatcher sent me an urgent message on the satellite system: “We show you to be in a very restricted part of the city?” I mean, how can you communicate with them when you can’t operate the keyboard while driving and dodging historic light posts and street signs? I did the only thing that I could – I grabbed the keyboard and sent off a two-letter reply: FU. J

I sincerely don’t miss having to drive until three o’clock in the morning just to find a place to park or arriving at a remote delivery point twenty minutes after they close on a Friday just to realize that I would have to park there all weekend with no food, no water, and no bathroom until they opened again the following Monday. I certainly don’t miss having multiple stops – though the one delivering fundraiser candy to a high school in Tulsa still brings back smiles – where each five minute delay in departing from a previous stop infuriates subsequent deliveries. Furthermore, who could miss dealing with Department of Transportation officials who add zeros to all of the fines that normal motorists receive? Would you not complain for a $500 infraction because of a burned out tail lamp? How would you feel if you had to log every minute of your every day and then have someone go over the times to ensure that when you said that you were at Taco Bell from 5:00 to 5:30 P.M. that you didn’t really leave at 5:25 P.M.?

In spite of all of this, the worst thing that I pull away from my years as a truck driver is the inconsiderate nature of how some other motorists treated us. How they would pull out in front of us with a large motor home and then just stopping dead not even comprehending that only God could stop a tractor-trailer rig in as short a distance as I had to sometimes. How people always seem to gripe that “truckers act like they own the roads” when we had to pay massive amounts of fuel taxes, road use taxes, etc. and probably did if fact pay for a sizeable portion of those very same roads. Yes, I enjoyed driving such as when I led the pack for a forty-five truck convoy running through Illinois on my way to Chicago but there were also times when I had to play tag with RVs that accelerated past me on the way uphill but got in my way going down the hill when my overwhelming weight played havoc with my brakes.

Walk a mile in my shoes is a great saying. A better one is to drive a mile in my vehicle. Today, despite cell phones, computers, and what have you, trucking is no mere walk in the park. At least, I don’t think that it is; how much could change in seven years that hadn’t in almost seventy? Regardless, I always appreciate the role they play and understand that not all truck drivers out there are unshaven, dirty, and foul mouthed renegades. There are bad drivers. I remember a UPS driver blow past me driving one of their tandem trailer rigs with his feet up on the dash and reading a book! Unions. As for me, whenever I had my truck on cruise control I was still in overall control and the vast majority of drivers out there are just as responsible as I was back then. So do them a favor and learn to appreciate their role within your lives. Without them, you wouldn’t possess a damn thing in your life.