THRIVING’ ON TRUCKIN’ CHAOS
Recollections Of My Rolling Role
by
Appleton H. Schneider
BEFORE I HIT THE ROAD
and vice versa
These pages contain my recollections (and post-traumatic stress catharses) concerning my career (my second) as a commercial truck driver. I haven’t attempted any real continuity of this saga, although I do start at the beginning: the inspirations and images of truckin’ even when I was a little kid. And I kind of follow a time-line to an extent.
But I’ve kind of free-associated what I’ve written here. Not only the words themselves, but also the situations, contexts, and categories that I write about. As things came to me I put ‘em down into the computer. I haven’t bothered to edit or consolidate or anything other than checking that my typographical errors (wrong letter, double comma, etc.) are within tolerance to me. Hopefully the reader won’t even notice any.
And hopefully that I jump from one thing to another will even add to the reader’s experience of my experience I look back on it. Kind of kaleidoscopic. Definitely chaotic.
But the company I’ve been with for thirty years has thrived (thriven?), expanding from three terminals to over forty now, reaching from the original New England to Southern Jersey corridor to the whole East Coast, parts of Canada, Puerto Rico, and westward (partially by interlining with other carriers) all over almost the rest of the country.
And I’ve found everything fascinating, even fulfilling. Even my first, ill-advised, three years as an owner-operator. Since joining as a company driver I’ve made a very decent blue-collar living and more by the owner. I’ll expand on this subject later on.
For now, start shift whatever “rig” you’re reading this on into the next “gear” and get on the road with me. Truckin’. Thriving on Truckin’ Chaos.
But thriving while driving.
CATEGORIES OF CHAOTIGORICAL CONCERN
From Early Childhood
Oh-oh for the O-O
A Step Up The Linear Ladder
Come Back To Me
Cookies and Crackers
Winter At Presque Isle
I Got A Wot Of Twucks Wunnin
Medical Disasters and Otherwise Unwiseness
Company Festivities
Tire Ire
Jack(ass)
Plastics Spastics
Other Status Quos
Chaos, Curse, or Infection?
Placard Pathology
Small Wood
Line Haul Hell
End of the OO Era/error
Things That Go Hump In The Night
Other Kinds of Hazards
Icy Night, Mute night
Miscellaneous Madnesses
In The Cab
Mess Textaging
DockuDementary
OOOps!!es
Snap!!!!
Industrial Endemic
Snow Jobs
Thriving Despite Chaos
It’s Been a Trip Far Beyond the Actual Travel!!!
Even from childhood was
it predestined to be?
Or was it mid-life pathology?
Who knows which?
Maybe it was both.
Having a B. A. degree in psychology (Boston University, class of 1963) I’ve been able (despite perhaps a negative grade-point average) to analyze the directions (and distractions and diversions) my life has taken from a number of perspectives and schools of psychodynamic premise.
But rather than even touching on such depths, I think it should be noted that trucks (and other such machinery inclusive of bulldozers and airplanes and ships and trains and such) seem to be built-in to little boys’ beings. It’s almost a gender-extension that the male-child will go for the equipment in the kindergarten, sand box, store. The boy-kid will be attracted, almost like tropism, to such major devices (older, the male’s focus too often comes to leave off the “de-!!)
In other times and parts even of the contemporary world, we really just substitute a biological device (ox or horse or camel or elephant) for the Western, developed world’s pre-ordained preference of plaything -- the major mobile machine (plaything for the child prior to, and in practice for, its being an aspect of adulthood -- a work thing.)
It’s not sexist at all to make such an assumption of gender differential, including that the little girl doesn’t possess some inherent “mechanism motivation”. The female child’s orientation and attraction to external objects appears to be more “self-referenced” involving things to be worn, or adorned with, and the ultimately important extension thereof into “replication” of self represented by a doll (even Barbi) -- but so primally important when it’s a baby-doll that the little girl dresses up, tucks in, gives baw-baw to, etc. etc. Play is reproductive role rehearsal of adult maternal nurture of ongoing humanity.
Little boys make-a-believe they’re running engines and using fuel and spewing exhaust and destroying the ecology even starting in the sand box with the Tonkas.
Regarding little girls (the gender-differential), some time ago I ran across a two-part cartoon. The first square showed two hippie-looking couples talking together, the male of one couple explaining that in order not to role-regiment their little daughter they’d denied her request for dolls and bought her a junior tool kit for Christmas. The second cartoon panel showed the little girl stretched out on her floor, making believe that the hammer in her left hand was Ken, the a screw driver in her right hand was Barbi . . . . .
I probably shouldn’t even mention mathematical differences . . . . no, I’d better not. Cost the president of Harvard his job, I believe.
But there are built in characteristics, gender-differential, and even, I think obviously, involving what the little kid will focus on in a spectrum from notice through curiosity to want (to have) to involvement with (first play), to, eventually, career doing.
And for little boys, machinery is one of those apparently inherent characteristics, orientations, fixations.
And trucks are one category of the machine-things that little boys seem pre-programmed, if not preordained, to be drawn to. I don’t remember being a truck-kid to any extent. My Lionel train set, some toy boats which I manipulated on the high seas of a blue rug, and a cast aluminum bus (1940s Grayhound) are what I remember vividly of my toys. The only focus on toy truck I have is the Christmas that ma and dad wrapped a plastic toy cement-mixer truck and I presented it to one of my chums who lived across the street. The next day he brought it back, appreciative, but forbidden to receive presents other than clothing or edibles due to his Orthodox Jewish faith and father. But that incident entails nothing emotional that might make my wanting to be a truck driver some sort of ultimately convoluted manifestation of either anger (displaced from my Jewish chum to myself) . . . . or even more absurdly astray anti-Semitism.
And I’m way off the deep end here.
At any rate, I wasn’t “conditioned to” trucks as a child.
So why, from at least freshman year at B. U., did I seem to become trucking-fixated? Was it my latent, inherent preordained boy-being finally, fully, expressed along with voice, hair, tumescence --an aspect of my completed male puberty?
I think not. I think it was a matter of imprint. “Conditioning” is assumed to involve a sequence or a continuum of influence. Imprint can be even a one-shot phenomenon that suddenly programs the person. With situations of trauma, this is obvious. Something horrific or pathologic enough and the one-shot event may be seared into the psych (the “engram”).
But even the benign and beatific can be instantaneous factors that form the focus in, even the formulation of life, especially for a young person even into the late teens. For example, the girl who suddenly is all but driven to become an actress after having been overwhelmed by attending a play. For example, the boy suddenly “called” to religion and The School of Theology after attending a retreat or missionary venue of some kind. She switches to drama from sociology. He transfers credits from a basic studies curriculum to religion major.
I started out in chemistry. That I switched to philosophy had nothing to do with trucks. Nor did my switch from philosophy to psychology involve any quest to attain information and abilities so I could self-analyze why I’d want to become a truck driver. Back then I wasn’t at the point of even pre-viewed career-change, although a subliminal fixation with trucking did exist in me.
The switch from chem. major was because I was absolutely not of mind or motivation to deal with such determined (as opposed to creative) material and manipulations (such as mixing chemicals which require specific amounts of this or that lest something go drastically “FIZZZ“ or even “BOOM“). You can’t use your imagination in undergraduate chemistry studies, especially labs. And I’m a highly imaginative person.
The switch from philosophy was because it didn’t seem to have any “hands-on” dimension, not even a “mind-on” meaning in life. What can one actually DO with philosophy? The question is a double entendre, “DO” meaning to enact or fabricate or function, on the one hand . . . and on the other, of course “DO” in terms of making a living in a paying position. Help wanted. Need crew of at least twelve philosophers, minimum B.A. degree required. Must be willing to relocate. Good benefits.
Why did I want to become a truck driver? Why have I actually enjoyed the mayhem and mania and worse, now for over thirty years? Why, at 72, do I have no desire to completely retire although I could?
The three questions all equal one (I sucked in college math classes too).
Three primary influences account for the fixation first, (why I became a truck driver) -- and ongoing the fixturing behind the wheel for usually 12 hours a day ever since I gave switched from doing construction work in my forties.
The first vivid, truck imprint-experience was on a trip my ma and dad and I made to visit dad’s folks in South Carolina. I was maybe 6, 7, somewhere around that age. Sweltering hot day. Pennsylvania Turnpike (one of, if not the, nation’s first divided highway)(s). As I remember, its hills were steeper than what’s allowed for the modern interstates. And back then neither cars nor the tractor-trailer rigs had air conditioning. But both had what were called “running boards” which were like a step kind of extending floor-level outside, along-side the vehicle. The trucks were creeping up the hills in low gear. To keep from roasting, their drivers were standing, outside the cabs, on the running boards, steering through the windows!! Engine revs could be maintained without foot on pedal by pulling the “throttle” lever out.
Dad, ma, and I found ourselves boxed-in by trucks with their externalized drivers. One right ahead, one right behind, one right beside us and much too close beside. I remember dad’s hands clenched on the wheel and teeth clenched uppers on lowers as ma absolutely freaked out. Did I want to become a truck driver due to some latent, lunatic, catharsis of anger vs. my mother? Or to “embody” more manhood (by “occupational rebellion”) than I witnessed in my poor, scared and screamed-at father that time? Interesting psychodynamic possibilities, eh? But I think it was just the imprint image of the drivers, the trucks, the power of engines roaring and guys even outside the vehicles controlling them.
There are fascinating pictures of the Pa. Pike and others on the ‘Net under “abandoned highways”, “abandoned tunnels”, “Pennsylvania Turnpike”, etc.
Another imprint. I was about seventeen and heading into Boston to a night course. I was on a stretch of old road through the industrial section of a city just outside Boston. Coming toward me in the early dark was a big cab-over rig festooned with lights. All I could see of the driver was an arm looped out the window. For some reason that rig grinding up the incline, adding fumes from its pipes to the spew from the stacks of surrounding factories and the chemical complex . . . . . for some reason that scene, that experience, etched my mind and motivations.
Then there were the couple times I made all-night trips from Boston down to New Jersey to briefly visit my first “love” whom I’d met at a summer resort job. Nights over the roads, it seems almost hallucinating to the reality of lights, sounds, the tactile rhythms of road vibrations and expansion-joint thumps determining a kind of tempo. Imprint experience.
And finally for influences, a job at a relative’s building supply company. I briefly was put in the position of driving their trailer truck, thus escaping a situation in which I was really rather poorly treated, definitely poorly paid. Unloading freight cars by hand in the dust and swelter, doing bookkeeping and billing, trying to facilitate operations, organize inventory, I’d be deprecated. Finishing a task with time to spare, I’d be told to go wash his car rather than allowed to sit for a few minutes and read the paper. Like the salesman, the son of relative’s wife’s country-club best friend.
In my Oddobiography I‘ve comprehensively chronicled what I experienced as bullshit and bullying -- except when I was driving their rig out over the open road, into the artistry of the sunrise, past the ice sculptures adorning winter cliffs. Freedom from oppression!! Freedom per se. The open road. Trucking.
I was only their driver for a few months. But I’d finally become a tractor-trailer driver, not just experienced a multiple of prior memories and motivations, and imprint images of former times and places.so to speak.
The driving position with relative didn’t last that long. Nor did my
employment in the company. I ventured out on my own doing design and construction work in restaurant and lounge interiors: early American, nautical, and other decors -- also small residential additions, decks, basement playrooms and more.
But all along there was the latent, mostly subliminal, drive to drive tractor-trailer again. And consciously I recognized that sometime, again . . . . .
And the time came. A neighbor owned his own tractor and hauled trailers on contract. As part of the payment for the basement playroom I built him, he secured me a job and accompanied me to my road test once I’d bought a tractor. Back when I’d driven for relative, in Mass. anyone with a basic driver’s license could drive anything. But now there were “classes” of license and the time within which I could have been “grandfathered” (having driven before) had long passed.
But I passed written and road test, signed with the company, finished neighbor’s basement job, stenciled my name on my tractor, and hit the road.
***
OH-OH FOR THE OO (owner-operator)
My impression had been of the truck driver as kind of a knight, a noble, privileged by such vast passage over the pavement, elevation above it in those big cab-overs. My delusion was that owning one’s own truck was an even higher state, perhaps entitled to the name Trucking Templar or something. My impression (imprint) from many influences in my life was that one should be ultimately frugal in expenditures.
And thus variedly deluded, I’d purchased a twelve year old tandem axle cab-over tractor from a trucking company, “saving” myself at least $25,000 that a mid-price purchase from an actual used truck dealership would have run. (This despite my having seen uncles buy a similar piece of junk running on little more than momentum -- that they ended up junking. Imprint supersedes intelligence in so many ways in life, from such familial, even unto whole cultural, paradigms).
I signed on with the company as an owner-operator. They provided loads, trailers, permits and insurance other than for the tractor itself. They paid per mile or delivery,
For a year I added to the probably more than million miles on my truck. Within the first month a stop for a flat revealed that the whole steering mechanism was about to fall off. One of the front wheels could be flipped back and forth when jacked. New this and that and the other cost a lot which added insult to the loss of revenue while the repairs and replacements were being done.
But then back on the road pulling 48,000# loads of beer from freight yards here or there to distribution warehouses here or there. Except for down-gearing into lower on even moderate up-hills (at 30 mph), for months all ran alright although (I had no way of knowing before) the by-the-delivery (or by-the-mile) revenue was far from adequate to cover the long-run of fuel, upkeep, repairs, eventual replacement of whole truck, and still have something left over as personal income for the driver -- the owner-operator.
But it took awhile to get to the finance pit there at the bottom line.
Diving deeper into the diverse delusions, I made an interstate “over-the-road” trip to deliver a two-stop full trailer load of Kmart freight. I’d pick up the trailer from another driver at a pullover in Connecticut. The trucking company had me move trailers around their Boston lot until mid-afternoon before they told me to leave for the road-trip. For those hours, the driver who had been taking the load was sitting in his malfunctioning tractor in Connecticut, waiting. It was mid-afternoon when I hooked to the trailer and headed on South as headed North, hopefully to make it to a repair facility before his truck died completely. (It almost seemed like the company had punished him by making him wait so long for his breakdown!! The company was actually a couple hot-headed, arrogant guys in their early thirties or so).
By the time I crossed the Delaware Memorial Bridge it was late night and I was so exhausted that I almost ran past an open truck weigh scale. Thankfully no one noticed me back up the fifty feet or so in order to turn into the weighing area -- which just waved me through. On the other side was a lot with a sign which, through the haze of my exhaustion, seemed to say “overnight trucks”.
Almost collapsing I pulled in and was just about to slump over the wheel when the voice of a harpy startled me with threats of arrest and towing because I was in a lot only for over weight vehicles.
I finally made it to the first delivery stop. I managed to sleep an hour or so until the place opened. I backed into the loading dock. They cut the seal and opened the roll-up door. Wrong stop. Their freight was in front of the hundreds of boxes for the other stop, over 100 miles away, essentially back from the direction whence I‘d come to the wrong stop where I was at.
I’d made it a point to confirm with the dispatcher which stop was first to deliver. He’d been wrong.
By the time I made it to the other place it was the middle of the night and too cold to slump in the cab. I found, nearby, a rather derelict motel where, for $25.00, I was ensconced in what had been a cocktail lounge and still contained the debris of bar and tables and bottles and boxes surrounding a mattress on the floor. But at least I got a good night’s sleep and there was a bath with shower.
Next morning I was at the Kmart early. But another other load had arrived before me. And since my appointment had been for the previous day, he would have had priority anyway. So I had to wait. By the time I finally had rolled off my load of hundreds of boxes onto the conveyor (after he’d finished his) it was late, late afternoon.
Back down the road through the night I headed to the first (second, actually) stop again. I delivered their store’s freight after I’d spent the night in the cab. Finally empty. Exhausted.
My call to dispatch directed me to a Stroh’s (Schlitz) distribution facility only a half hour or so away. I arrived. They wouldn’t load me until the next morning. They directed me to drop the trailer in their yard and return early. That night I paid to stay in a reputable motel room.
Loading the trailer the next morning was fascinating to watch. The forklifts lifted (two-at-once) side-by-side pallets. It took maybe twenty minutes for the whole 45,000# of beer to be on-board and the seal on the door and I was on my way back North. On my way barely able to maintain 55 mph in highest gear (tenth). A mere slope upward and I had to downshift. On I went through the day and night when drizzle had become rain and soon was a deluge and as I crept along I went past where a rig had become mired in median strip mud and its driver and another were soaking while trying to hook a chain to another rig . . . and the little flash of greater disaster than my own was gone behind me.
A flat detoured me half and hour off the highway to a tire repair place where I was delayed for two hours while a phone call cleared payment with the truck company, then both tire and tube were removed and decent used replacements mounted.
Missed an exit and had to run through Baltimore overland rather than through the tunnel. Wasted a couple hours, but I managed to doze briefly in a lot, probably fortunate that I wasn‘t hijacked, considering the locale.
On and on. I don’t remember many miles during which I may have been DWS (driving while sleeping). Naw, couldn’t have been, for I made it through Delaware and Jersey.
Going up the ramp to the George Washington Bridge I was in lowest gear and probably doing less than 5 mph. Worse up some of the Connecticut hills. But I made it to the warehouse in Springfield just at the last moment to deliver the load. Otherwise I’d have had to sit there all Saturday and Sunday until they opened -- or cost myself the fuel to drive seventy miles to home, then back to make the delivery Monday morning -- and miss that day’s income doing another load somewhere.
That was the one and only long-haul run I made. I think I figured my net pay after expenses (including the tire and tube replacement) came to about $160.00. Well less than minimum wage, figured by hourly division.
For awhile I made frequent nightly runs from Boston to Long Island (New York) delivering liquor. From L. I., empty to Harford to a warehouse for a trailer-load pickup of other booze to take to Fairhaven, Mass. On the way from L. I. one trip, I’d had to buy a steering (front) tire. Short of cash I purchased a used one, “guaranteed” by the guy (?specie) who put it on my truck as roadworthy.
After a three hour delay I was on my way. I made it to the shipping warehouse, waited an hour and a half for the load. Load on, it was dark by the time I was grinding up and racing down the hills of back road Rte 44, the most direct route to Providence and then over to Fall River to Fairhaven. Route 44. Five mph uphill. Sixty or more down. Narrow, twisting road. Pitch black. Drop offs or trees or cliffs up on either side. In the middle of nowhere, it seemed, there was a light which turned red. I stopped. It was then the used front tire blew, exploded, erupted into nothing but shreds and shrapnel. It was then (and ever since) that I’ve said “Thank you, God” and really wondered if, why I’d have deserved such divine intervention.
I had a spare. Took a couple hours to change the blowout in the dark. When I got to the warehouse in Fairhaven at about eleven PM, they were loading their trucks. No room to park in their facility. I drove all the way (60 miles or so) home. Along the way I realized by the pulsing and bouncing that I had another flat tire, the tube bunched up making the “eccentric” effect.
At home I slept a couple hours, was awakened to respond to the enraged voice of the truck company owner ordering me back to Fairhaven where they were impatiently awaiting their delivery. I had a spare at home. Exchanged it for the flat. Made it back the 60 miles. No doubt with the cost of the subsequent tire repairs added to fuel and such, I came out with about ten cents per hour for myself for that trip.
Local work was much more . . . well, “profitable” isn’t quite the word. “Less costly”? The primary local itinerary involved driving to one of the two container facilities at the Boston waterfront. There, trucks would line up, most returning empty containers which had to be checked-in and checked-out. The wait in line could be a couple hours from the six AM or so arrival until you‘d get to the check point.
Next step would be presenting papers for the container to be picked up. The personnel behind the counters in the main building looked no less alcoholic than those who checked-in the containers outside! Nor did sobriety seem a characteristic of those who operated or directed the massive forklifts and top-lift devices that would pick the empty container off the chassis.
As for those who operated the towering cranes . . . I read of a case where a full container was jerked so that it crushed a driver waiting below. The operator of the crane was whisked from the scene and some excuse for his disappearance was concocted until, I guess, enough time had passed for his blood alcohol level to decrease to measurable??
The cranes could roll from one to another of the stacks of containers on the huge lot. The truck driver would position his rig (with empty chassis) as directed, crane would pluck a container from nearby, and soon lower it onto the chassis. Frequently to achieve the position that interlocks would take place, some jostling and jerking would be done. And I wondered just how many nips to open up your eye the operator might have required that morning. But I saw no mishaps.
Finally with container affixed to chassis, one drove to and waited in another line to checkout. Eventually, perhaps three hours or more after initial arrival, you’d be on the road to deliver, mostly booze from abroad.
Local deliveries required unloading whole trailer or container loads of liquor or other heavy stuff and stacking it as prescribed by the recipient upon their pallets. To unload a trailer would take a good part of the day. Rarely there’d be palletized freight in the container. That usually had to be re-palletized according to the requirements of the receiving facility. Generally the cartons and cases of wine or whiskey or whatever would be a “floor-load”. Each box had to be picked up and placed on a pallet, number/position of each tier and number of tiers specified.
The pay was by the load. Given tie-up at the container port, traffic, weather, warehouse wait, and otherwise, for the effort of moving 40 or more thousand pounds of freight the pay was minimal. The heat or cold discomfort could be maximal. But the most money to be made for the owner operator in that local-regional domain . . . . was when the truck wasn’t running.
I still hadn’t really figured that out, so wanted to experience the road, the distance, the night-speed of . . . truckin’ . . . . .
What remained of the integrity of my tractor was disintegrating. I had to have the rear suspension entirely replaced. Engine rebuilt. On the way back from Jersey one time I had three flat tires. But I’d figured that by buying cheap and replacing/rebuilding as necessary, I’d have “new” as a kind of evolution (or renaissance) of old. I’d run last-stage used cars on that basis and saved a fortune through the years.
But with the cars I could do a lot myself. Not so with commercial vehicle components and diesel power. Most had to be worked on by “professionals”. And everything touched cost a fortune. And it seemed that nothing was really fixed. And it seemed that “professional”, when it comes to diesel repairs (as with used car salesmen) . . . . .
Within a week of having all the rear brake parts replaced, one (of the four) sets of brake shoes fell off somewhere along the road. Replacement was grudgingly made without charge, but it cost me two days pay while the truck was “down”. Another time I had a mechanic “set the rack” (which controls by things similar to rocker arms, the fuel injectors). He charged me $150. The engine smoked just as bad as it had before. Another “repair” tried to hit me for $450. and from all I could see the truck hadn’t even been moved from where I’d parked it. And yet another place didn’t just not tighten down the tappet covers, but also left cloths tangled in the exhaust manifolds and it’s another wonder of the grace of God that the gallon or more of oil that was dribbling all over everything hadn’t been ignited by the manifolds and the whole truck burned up (perhaps along with me). I stopped their charge on my credit card before it went through.
Engine decline of performance but drastic increment of leakage and smokeage reached the point of my needing a complete rebuild. That took over a month. For the duration I had a construction project to work on so I really didn’t care. Engine finally done, it smoked significantly still, but at least seemed to run very well. Power such as I’d not known previously.
And I figured that I now had a rebuilt rear suspension, completely replaced brake system, repaired this and that, finally switched to all tubeless tires. So a rebuilt engine would be in order.
The while the rebuild and my interim building job, I’d terminated my contract with first trucking company and signed on with the outfit that a neighbor now worked for, still as an owner-operator. The pay program was better. And now with a partially rebuilt, “restored” , tractor, I felt enthused again that I had made the right decision in pledging my self to the honored legions of the Knights of the road (I guess a subset thereof are the Road Scholars).
My new contract was with North Englewood Carriers Corp.
My first run would be from Pawtucket, R. I. to the main terminal in northern, N. J. and back. A night-”turn”. Sounded good.