Driving

The good thing about a road trip is the simple fact that it’s a nice opportunity to turn off the cell phone, turn up the tunes, and just let the mind wander. The recent trip to Chicago for their swap meet and custom bike show is a good case in point. Highway 94, then 90, runs almost from my front door to downtown Chicago. During the trip, while rolling past truck after truck in the right lane, I couldn’t help but recall my own stint as a truck driver, running this same road back in the day.

If there’s music in good literature, there surely is music in the harmonics of those diesels.

Driving a truck was always on my “bucket list” long before the term was coined, and at an age where the term wouldn’t have been appropriate anyway. It was simply one of those things I was determined to do during my life.

The lust for eighteen wheels might have started in high school. While my classmates pretended to be paying attention to English, I was counting shifts. Whenever one of the big rigs rolled past our school, stopped and turned onto Hennepin avenue, I counted the shifts as they made their way slowly across the bridge, headed toward downtown Minneapolis. There was some kind of magic in that sound, in the pure mechanical effort it took to get sixty or seventy thousand pounds under way, bound for who knows where. If there’s music in good literature, there surely is music in the harmonics of those diesels.

Ten years or so later I somehow convinced my neighbor, who just happened to own a semi tractor and pull for a van line company, to let me drive for him part time. It also happened that he ran back and forth to Chicago, twice per week. Each trip was a 36 to 48 hour non-stop grind, and two of those in five days was a little more than a mere mortal can endure week after week. Enter Tim – the guy who made it possible to make that second round trip without resorting to excess amounts of sweet whites and wine. The payload is carpets, and a typical run starts Wednesday evening, about 7 PM, after I finish my shift as a part time mechanic in a shop downtown.

The trailer is empty when we leave the owner’s house, and the truck pulls easily. Soon I have all eighteen wheels on the super slab headed east. The truck itself is like a cheap Chevy. No Peterbuilt or Kenworth, only a cab-over International with an AM radio, no A/C, and a small sleeper compartment behind the driver and passenger seats. The Detroit diesel, with ten forward gears, is good for a top speed of almost seventy miles per hour.

The first stop is just across the border in Hudson, Wisconsin, where we fill the tanks and then truly get underway. The rush of pulling out of a fuel stop, operating all that machinery with some semblance of skill, shepherding it around the other rigs, onto the service road and eventually onto the freeway ramp, always put a shot of electricity down my spine.

People wonder how hard it is to shift without the clutch. It’s hard, but the much harder part, for me, was memorizing eight or nine shift points – a match of speed and rpm that would allow me to drop the shifter into a particular gear from neutral without hesitation or the grinding of any gears. That way when the traffic suddenly slowed down, forcing me to go from say, sixty to forty miles per hour, I knew that at forty miles per hour I should bring the rpms up to 2000 and the lever would drop right into sixth gear so I could get rolling again. On paper, it sounds like a reasonable thing to do, but at two in the morning when your mind has turned to mush in spite of the coffee, it was a little tough to instantly match up rpm with the right gear at a given speed. Especially considering that the speed was dropping as you tried to remember whether it would be better to use sixth or seventh or whatever the hell.

The run from the Twin Cities to Chicago took most of the night. There was always at least one more fuel stop, and then a dinner stop, often combined with an oil change in Madison, Wisconsin. What I remember about those nights is the dreaded toll booths, trying with all my strength to stay awake, and wondering if I would remember which exit to take in Chicago so I didn’t have to wake up the boss. Someplace around four AM, we pulled into a huge warehouse facility on the south side, and swapped an empty trailer for a full one. By the time we swapped the trailers, and did the paper work, rush hour traffic had begun. We turned north and headed into Milwaukee with it’s breweries, neat blue collar housing, and the first stop at another big warehouse. Backing up to the dock was a pain in the ass. Oddly enough though I always found it easier to pull up to a busy spot, and thread the trailer between two other trucks, simply because if you could just maintain equal clearance on either side between our trailer and the other two, you were dead-on to the dock. Sometimes the trucks on either side were so close our mirrors would catch on theirs as I backed into position.

Kids on bikes would see us coming, stop, turn to face the truck, and give us that universal sign – a closed fist pulling on an imaginary halyard. We blew the horn like there was no tomorrow. The boys’ faces broke out in huge smiles, and life was good.

Typically, there were two or three stops on the east side of Wisconsin, and then we started making our way west, stopping a total of ten or fifteen times at large and small carpet and flooring stores. The smaller drops took us across Wisconsin and Minnesota on the two lanes. The boss drove much of that second day, and I often spent my off time sitting high above the world, just enjoying the sense of motion, with the ever-changing panorama of wood lots, farm fields and small American towns. Kids on bikes would see us coming, stop, turn to face the truck, and give us that universal sign – a closed fist pulling on an imaginary halyard. We blew the horn like there was no tomorrow. The boys’ faces broke out in huge smiles, and life was good.

I made the mistake of starting my new career in the fall of the year, which meant I got to experience the joys of driving through a lot of snow, ice and really shitty conditions. Nothing like counting the trucks in the ditch, thinking each time, "there but for the grace of God go I." But I did survive needing only the occasional change of underwear after making it through some especially pucker-inducing situation.

By the time I could actually get through the gears, up and down, on a curvy road with traffic, I was also getting bored. Brash and confident, I wanted to run alone. The boss however, had other thoughts. Oddly enough, we parted company in Fort Wayne, Indiana during an unusual run to the East Coast. He headed east with the truck, I headed home, to a new full time mechanic’s job in a foreign car dealership.

As I roll into Chicago for the show, I realize that my ten months of driving truck didn’t really make me any money, and didn’t advance my life in any significant way. But it did satisfy one particular itch and allow me to cross one item off my list, More importantly, it gave me enough memories of scary snow storms, cute waitresses, challenging freight docks, beautiful two lane roads, and smiling kids waving from the side of the road, to last a lifetime.