Rambling On

So, we finally did get that lettus off the trailer, but it took us two more days after the truck was fixed. We ended up taking part of it to the Food Bank, but they only needed ten pallets, which left us with 32 pallets. We sat and waited for instructions for the rest of it, and we sat, and sat, and eventually made a few calls of our own. The only place we could find that was interested was the zoo. It took a couple more hours to get permission to actually take it to the zoo, but eventually we got it there. Unfortunately, there was a miscommunication between the person we talked to and the person who approved the donation - they were only expecting 32 cases of lettus, not the half-truckload we showed up with.

Last Wednesday after delivering a load in Phoenix, we got the load from hell. We were told to go to Kingman, Arizona, about three hours away, to meet another truck from a different company. Our dispatcher gave us a phone number for the broker who was handling the load. A call to the broker, and we learned that the other truck was broken down and the broker had arraigned with a local warehouse in Kingman to crossdock the load from that driver's trailer onto ours. OK, sounds easy enough so far. We called the little warehouse and got directions. The guy we spoke to at the warehouse wasn't sure how the other driver was supposed to get his trailer there if he was broke down, so we called the broker back. This is where things start getting squirly.

Sorry about the long break from posting. I was kind of burnt out on trying to keep up with a blog, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, selling photos and writing articles for eHow, and still getting enough sleep so I can drive this truck. So, I took a break from the web for a while, but I'm back now.

We were on our way to York, Pensylvania on March 18th with a load when it all started. We got a message from our dispatcher that we needed to stop in Breezewood, PA and swap loads with another driver who was moving too "Sloooooowwww" (our dispatcher's exact wording).  That load had to be out in Reno, NV by 6 am on the 20th and there was no way we could get it there on time. We pushed it straight through, though, and ran ourselves right out of hours. We got the load there only a couple of hours late. Our dispatcher knew that I was out of hours, and Mike only had 4 hours left out of his 70 for the week, but we would both be picking up hours after midnight. She pre-planned us on a load with a lot of time on it so we could get a break, and we were looking forward to the break. But alas, it was not to be.

There was a driver shut down out in Fernley, NV with a load that had to be in Atlanta, GA, and there was no way he could make it, but we figured out, after some furious calculating, there was just enough time left on the load that we could ease it across the country and still get some hours back. Would have worked out perfectly, but the trailer we were pulling had different ideas. We grabbed the load and moved it 150 miles east before we were completely out of hours and had to shut down until after midnight. 

The next day we pushed it a little further, and we made it to Big Spring, NE before we ran out of hours again and had to shut down for the night. We stopped a little longer than we actually had to and got a good night's sleep, setting out again around 6am that next morning. We made it about 5 hours, almost to Lincoln, NE before the problems really started. A car passed us, the lady inside honking and waving franticaly at Mike. She was mouthing the word, "Fire!" and pointing to the rear of our trailer. Checking the rearview mirror, we could see smoke pouring from the trailer tires on the right side. Mike eased it off onto the shoulder, and I dived into the storage compartment under the bed to find the fire extinguisher. 

The extinguisher was in the side box, like it was supposed to be, but it was burried beneath coils of jumper cables and extention cords. I was frantically pulling at what seemed like an endless tangle of cords when Mike brushed me aside and took over. I got out of the way and grabbed the phone and climbed out of the truck to go look at our furiously smoking tires. There were no flames visible, just lots of smoke as I waited on hold for our breakdown department to answer their phone. Mike handed me the fire extinguisher as he walked past me to set out our warning triangles, then he passed me again going the other way, muttering under his breath. He came back by me a third time with the broken triangle and a roll of duct tape. The triangles looked brand new, but they wouldn't stay clipped together the way they were supposed to. While he fiddled with them, breakdown finally answered the phone. Almost as soon as I started talking to them I realized that the axle hub was actually on fire - the flames were inside the hub, and we couldn't see them until the plastic hub melted enough to develop a hole in it. So the first thing breakdown heard was me telling Mike "Hey, this thing is on fire, should I spray it?" and Mike is yelling "Stick it in the hole and spray!" 

I nearly dropped the phone as I pulled the pin on the fire extinguisher and got it aimed at the fire. One good burst of dry chemichal fire retardent was all it took to put out the flames, which was a good thing because one good burst was all that was left in the extinguisher. Oil was pouring out of the ruptured hub, and the inside rear trailer tire was worn almost completely bald, even though it had looked almost new we we'd done our pre-trip inspection that morning. Mike diagnosed the problem right away - one of our axle bearings had seized up.

Dispatch got a hold of a mechanic who did roadside service, and he promised that he would be there as soon as he got changed out of his church clothes. We owe this guy a huge thannk you because he stayed up until almost 5 am the next morning trying to get us rolling again after giving up most of his Sunday. (So Tom Elliott, if you are reading this - THANK YOU, SIR!) And for everyone else, if you are broke down in a big rig in the Lincoln, NE area, give this guy some buisness, he's good at what he does. (Tom's Truck Service)

The reason it took 18 hours to get rolling again is bcause that trailer had an oddly sized axle and Mr. Elliott couldn't get ahold of the oddly sized spindle nut that was needed to put it all beck to gether again. He called every parts supply house in the area looking for one. He eventually had to drive all the way to Omaha to get one. But he got us back together and rolling.

So we spent 18 hours sitting on the shoulder of I-80. Luckily we still had a few packages of the freeze dried hicking food that we'd bought at Cabela's a few months back, so we didn't go hungry. Mike split his Zero bar with me, and I boiled some water and made re-hydrated Huevos Rancheros and mashed potatoes for our dinner.

Trying to sleep with a busy highway only inches away wasn't easy, though. Turn your TV on to a Nascar race and try sleeping with your head next to the speakers and you will have an idea of what it's like. Only we also had the worry that someone might stray out of their lane and hit us. The truck rocked with every vehicle that flew past, and there were thousands of them. That is a very busy stretch of highway. Parking on the shoulder is never a safe thing to do, but we had no choice, the trailer was fully loaded and heavy and couldn't be moved without risking much more damage to it.

Once we got moving again that load was no longer an easy run, but a hard push to get it there on time because all of our extra time had been used up on the side of the highway. We got it to Atlanta barely half an hour before our delivery time.

We had a few hours to relax before we had to pick up our next load at one o'clock that afternoon. But the load we were picking up was a flat out burn to Ft. Worth with no extra time on it. It was due at 6 am the next morning. We made that one no problem, and headed down to Waco, TX to pick up our next load. 

There was a delay getting loaded on that one because the product for the load wasn't ready yet, and even though we arrived at 10 am, we didn't leave Waco till almost 9pm. That load was bound for Orlando, FL, and even though we had plenty of time on it - we could have actually stopped and got a nights sleep sitting still for a change, our dispatcher asked us to hurry because she had a load coming out in Atlanta that was going to be hot and had to have a team on it. So we hustled to get the load to the Orlando drop yard. 

Our routing had us taking a back road to cut some distance off between I-35 and I-20, but the weather was turning pretty rough so we decided to stick to the interstate and went up through Dallas instead. And it's a good thing we did. Mike drove the first leg, and when I got up he told me about the two tornados we'd barely avoided by changing our route. The radio announced a tornado in one of the little Texas towns that we would have gone right through if we had followed the route we were supposed to take, then later, on the Louisiana/Texas state line, Mike stopped at a truck stop just as the store staff was coimg out of the cooler where they had taken shelter. We had just missed a tornado that crossed the road just west of that truck stop accompanied by grapefruit sized hail, and if we had taken the shortcut we would have been right there when it happened. 

We swapped and I drove for a while, fighting wind and heavy rain the whole way over to Jackson, MS. At Jackson, we fueled, and Mike took the wheel back and we went down US-49 to US-98 - right through the town of McGee, MS in the aftermath of the tornado there.  There were power lines down. Not just down, but twisted and tangled, the poles splintered and smashed like they had been stomped by a giant three year old in the midst of a temper tantrum. A warehouse next to the road was half torn away, gaping open like a studio set missing it's fourth wall. In the foggy morning daylight we could see the track the tornado had followed through the trees. There were tree limbs, stripped of branches and bark, impaled in the grass of the median like javelins. We heard later that a 100 year old church had been destroyed, but there had been only 2 injuries and no deaths in the little town.

We got the load there on Thursday evening around 11pm,  where we dropped it off for the local driver to deliver. And here's where the night from hell starts. Most of the empty trailers on the drop yard had out-of-service tags on them for one reason or another. The only useable trailer had one of the marker lights burnt out, and another one missing altogether. You could see where the trailer had been scraped against something, knocking the light off and leaving bare wires exposed. 

We didn't have any other choice but to take that trailer so we called breakdown to see about getting it fixed. Now, we had been told by our dispatcher that we had to be in Atlanta by Friday morning, but she didn't know exactly what time the load would be ready. We were supposed to just grab an empty trailer and deadhead on up to Atlanta. We wanted to hurry and get there, hoping we could get a couple of hours of downtime before we had to pick up our hot load, but things didn't work out that way at all. 

This was the night that the freak blizzard was going full force across Colorado, Wyoming, Western Kansas, and Nothern Texas. The whole center of the country was shut down, and the night dispathers and breakdown had thier hands full. We couldn't get through to breakdown on the phone, so we sent them a message on the qualcomm and took off to Wildwood, FL at the other end of the Florida Turnpike. The Pilot there was our fuel stop, and there was a TA with a shop where we could get the light fixed. It was also as far as we could go without getting it fixed - there's a DOT scale just north of there on I-75 and we couldn't risk pushing on and getting stopped at the scale and put out of service. The problem - we still couldn't get through to breakdown, and they still hadn't gotten back with us, and we can't get any work done on the truck or trailer without approval from breakdown. 

Then it got worse. As we were pulling off the fuel island after fueling up, we hit a bump and every light on the trailer went out. The bare wires from the broken light must have touched each other, and shorted out the whole trailer. One broken light we might have been able to get away with - but the whole trailer? No way!

About this time we got a message from night dispatch that there was a driver sitting in Lake City, FL whose load was due in Atlanta at 5 in the morning and could we please repower it or it was going to be late because that driver wasn't moving. All we could do was tell dispatch we would try and let them know about our lighting problem, again. We moved across the street to the TA and settled in waiting for breakdown to tell us something. I stayed on hold for over half an hour and no-one answered. I can only imagine the chaos that the breakdown depatment must have been trying to handle with trucks probably freezing up in the 19 degree temperatures in Colorado, trucks sliding into ditches, and whatever other dramas the blizzard and severe thunderstorms and high winds in the southeast must have been stirring up. Whatever was going on, all I knew for sure was that breakdown wasn't answering the phone and we were out of luck.

Mike went to talk to the guys at the TA shop to see what it would cost for us to get the trailer fixed ourselves, and it turned out that breakdown had already called them and they were expecting us - its just no one had bothered to contact us and let us know. It took them about three hours to get the wiring working right and our lights back on.

By the time we were rolling again it was 2am, and the load we were supposed to repower was supposed to deliver to its first stop at 5am. Dispatch told us to go ahead and get it and do the best we could. 

We got to Lake City, FL around 4:30 and found that the load we were supposed to repower was parked in a dollar store parking lot on a narrow side street in a bad neighborhood and the driver was nowhere to be found. We called dispatch to find out what was up.

It turned out that the driver was sick and had gone to the hospital. But apparently, before he'd gone to the hospital he'd been quite a pain in the rear for dispatch and the broker who was handling that load. 

Mike had to get into the guy's truck to disconnect it from the trailer and he said the inside of the guys truck was a horror show of trash and stink. Then we discovered that the seal on the trailer had been broken so we had to call dispatch again and talk to safety/security to find out if we needed to call the police. When we looked in the trailer it was only half full. 

After over an hour of being transfered back and forth on the phone we finally established that all the freight was there and were told to re-seal the trailer and run with it. Mike went to sleep and I took the first leg of the trip. About halfway to Atlanta I got a message on the qualcomm that we needed to call the broker for the load ASAP. I pulled off at the next rest area and made the call. The broker put me on a three way confrence call with the shipper and they asked me when we would be at our first delivery. There were 4 drops on the load, and all of them were late. I told them that we would be at our first drop around 11:30 am, which didn't make them happy because the first stop was supposed to have been at 5am. They got my cellphone number and called me back once an hour for updates. 

Mike and I swapped just south of Atlanta so he could drive while I navigated. We turned on the traffic report on our Sirius radio and found that the entire I-285 loop around Atlanta was shut down due to an accident with  big-rig going through a center divider. Now I had to find an alternate route on back roads, we had to deal with surface streets, city traffic, near blinding downpours, and a nervous broker. Luckily all of the places we were delivering to were off of I-20 West of the city proper, so we didn't actually have to go downtown or anything.

To sum it all up, we got it all delivered. The recivers were hard to find, and three out of four of them were actually closed when we got there - we only got unloaded because the broker and the shipper made a bunch of phone calls and got them to take us late. The broker was impressed with us, and said he's be glad to work with us anytime - he even offered us a reload, but we already had one scheduled. We really pulled that load out of the fire for SRT. 

Thus ending one of our most exciting weeks so far.

Drivers are facing a serious problem out here on the road.

On March 5, 2009 Jason Rivenburg was shot twice in the head and killed. He was a truck driver. He was parked at an abandoned gas station near Interstate 26 in South Carolina waiting to deliver his load, because the load's receiver wouldn't allow him to wait on their property.

On March 13, 2009 a driver was shot and injured in North Memphis when he stopped on an exit ramp to switch places with his co-driver. There are no truck stops or rest areas on that stretch of Interstate 240.

On February 22, 2008 truck driver Robert Earl Lee was fatally shot and robbed while trying to sleep in his truck. He had arrived early for his delivery in Tampa, FL and was told by the gate guard that he couldn't enter the property until 8:00 am. He had no choice but to park on the street. http://blogs.tampabay.com/breakingnews/2008/02/truck-driver-sh.html

On October 12, 1986 truck driver Robert Campbell was shot and robbed of $6 as he was taking his rest break at a rest area along Interstate 95. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE4DF123AF931A25753C1A960948260

Drivers are forced to park along streets, on highway ramps, and in empty lots due to a shortage of safe parking. At the same time several states are closing down their rest areas – most notably Virginia, but Vermont, New Hampshire, Arizona and California all have plans to close rest areas that provide valuable parking space for tired truckers.

Truckstops are filled to capacity and overflowing, forcing drivers to waste time circling the lot hoping for a space, then drive on down the road while tired to find a place to park.

Many shippers and receivers won't allow drivers to arrive early for appointments and require them to leave immediately after delivering – even if they are out of hours and can't legally drive.

The federal government, through the Safe Accountable Flexible Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFTEA-LU), provides $6.25 million for states to provide rest areas and safe parking for commercial vehicles. This drop in the bucket has to be shared out between all 50 states, and is woefully inadequate. To give you an idea of where truck driver safety rates on the federal priority scale – the 2009 Omnibus spending bill included $6.6 million dollars for termite research. Apparently we rate just behind bugs.

Jason Rivenburg's family is working to raise awareness of this issue and they have built a website and started a petition asking lawmakers to work to improve the parking situation for truckers. Please visit their site and sign the petition for Jason's Law: http://www.jhlrivenburg.com/

Please write to your representatives in your state and the federal government and ask them to increase the funding for safe rest areas and to pass laws providing for safe places for truck drivers to rest while we are taking the breaks that federal law requires us to take.

Sitting in the eerie fog in Arcadia, Florida this morning. Mike and I got a couple of days of R&R at home, then it was back to running again.  And here we are, back in Florida, which I love - except for the traffic. And parking? In Florida? Faggedaboutit! As far as that goes it really is the sixth burough of New York City. 

Sorry I haven't updated in a couple of weeks, things got a little hectic, and internet access has been hard to come by. We weathered the outside edge of Hurricane Gustav at my parent's place two weeks ago. Only had a two foot rise in water, and it didn't even top their little seawall. Ike brought the water up four feet or so, but when they rebuilt after Ivan Dad had the property raised by three feet, so even though the neighbors had water in their yards and carports, my folks were high and dry. Thank goodness for lessons learned.

The photo above is the view from my parent's place before hurricane Gustav. This photo is the view during the storm. The water came up another foot after I took this.



















Mike walks on water after Gustav.


So, it rained the entire time we were there, but we were too busy running around a seeing all my many and various relatives to go to the beach anyway. Mike has become very interested in genealogy research (he's got a program called Family Tree Maker and he's determined to find everybody we could even remotely be related to) so we went to visit most of my living relatives, and found the graves of several deceased ones as well. Sometimes I think he goes a little overboard with it, but it keeps him out of bars and casinos so I indulge him. And I have learned some interesting stuff about my family.

I learned that my great-grandfather rode the rails as a hobo during the Great Depression, and that my great-grandmother was one ballsy lady who told him that the next time he went wandering no to bother coming back. And I learned that my great-great grandfather on the other side of the family built a boat in 1901 and named it after his daughter, my great aunt Nellie Meta, and that, after a long and interesting history, and changing hands several times, it was listed as sunk, and a navigation hazard, in 1986 in Galveston Bay, TX. I also learned that my great uncle served on the USS Hornet in WWII - that was the aircraft carrier that the Doolittle Raid was launched from. It was badly damaged in a battle sometime after the Battle of Midway and the crew was ordered to abandon ship. My great uncle and his crew mates spent many hours in the Pacific waiting to be rescued. The ship was scuttled, and, even though badly damaged by bombs, torpedoes and Kamikazes, it took repeated torpedoes and bombs from our own fleet to finally sink it. I never realized that my plain vanilla family had so many interesting stories to tell.

I was sorry to see the week end, but on Saturday we headed for Texarkana, Arkansas and our new job.

Our new employers put us up in a hotel for the week, and every day, from Monday to Thursday, we sat in a classroom re-learning all of the company's procedures and policies, and reacquainting ourselves with the world of trucking. Monday we took our DOT physicals, pre-employment drug tests, and road tests. I was vary nervous about the road test, but I did pretty well, even if I did grind a gear or two. Mike drove like he'd never even been off the road. We got our truck assignment and keys on Wednesday. The truck we were given had been recovered after another driver had quit and abandoned it. The previous occupant had apparently had a cat. Or maybe several of them. The interior was coated with an inch thick shag carpet of shed hair. It was nasty, and it stank. We did a thorough inspection and wrote up all the defects, all the while holding our noses and praying that they would clean disinfect and flea dip the thing before we had to drive it. The guys in the shop assured us it would be cleaned out before we had to move in, but having dealt with trucking company promises before, we weren't holding our breath (except when we had to actually get into the truck).

We did hit a snag in the middle of the week. Because truck driving is such a safety sensitive occupation, in order to hire us the company has to have a paper signed by Mike's doctor certifying that none of his prescriptions would interfere with him safely operating a big rig. He's only on blood pressure and cholesterol meds, so that should have been no problem - but it was. It seems that both of the doctors who could have signed the faxed form had been deployed to the middle east, and since Mike was a little overdue for a check-up anyway, he had to see another doctor before we could get the signature we needed. So, we had to drive all the way back to Junction City just so Mike could have his blood pressure taken by an Army doctor and we could get a single signature. But at least we got to sleep in our own bed for two more nights before we got on the road.

He saw the doc on Friday, and we were back in Texarkana by Saturday night. In fact, we arrived in Texarkana about the same time Ike did. We were in rain from the time we left Kansas, all the way down, with the wind growing harder as we converged on the hurricane. By the time we were in Arkansas the night had grown pretty wild. 60 MPH wind gusts threatened to throw us off the road, and several times we witnessed the searing blue flashes of transformers dieing glorious deaths. We arrived in Texarkana to find that our more pessimistic predictions had been correct. There wasn't a room to be had anywhere, they were full of Ike evacuees. Power was out all over town, and our only option was to head to our company's terminal (hereafter referred to as the SRT yard for simplicity's sake) and hope that they hadn't reassigned our truck and that it had been cleaned as promised.

Lucky for us, they were true to their word, and the truck was still ours, and it had been expertly detailed. There wasn't even any lingering cat odor. There was nothing we could do to get on the road any sooner than Monday because the office staff doesn't work on the weekends, so we would have to spend two nights in the truck there on the yard. We ran back and forth moving our gear from trunk to truck in a mad dash, trying to keep it from getting too wet in the driving downpour.
Sunday was spent making trips to Wal-mart and the local CB shop and truck stop, picking up all the last minute items we needed to set up housekeeping in our new little apartment on wheels.

By lunchtime on Monday all our paperwork had been signed, initialed and properly filed, and we were dispatched out on our first load.

It's now Thursday morning, and we're sitting at the receiver for our second load. We picked up in Arkansas, ran out to Wyoming and swapped loads with another driver, and now we are in Northern Alabama. We've gone 2762 miles in three days. We're already pre-planned for our next load, which will take us into the bayou country south of New Orleans.

"Got no time for spreading roots, the time has come to be gone..." -- Led Zepplin - Ramble On

Take a deep breath and dive in.
Luckily, I've swam in these waters before. I mostly know what to expect, but its still a little terrifying to change jobs, leave home behind and set out on a new adventure.

I'm drowning in a sea of small details - What should I pack? There's only so much room in the cab of a semi, even with a condo roof sleeper berth. Clothes, socks, underwear, toiletries, my laptop, my camera, my cell phone, battery rechargers - do I have all my chargers and power cords? Should I take my tripod? My portable lightstand and strobes? Will I need them out there? Will I be wasting space, or risking missing some great photos? Are all the bills set up to pay online? Have I missed any? Do we have enough savings to cover them until we start getting paid? Who's picking up our mail while we're gone? Do I have everyone's e-mail adresses? Have I said goodbye to everyone, hugged all the people who need hugging before I leave them behind?
These questions, images of just how I will stow everything so it fits in the smallest number of bags, reminders and checklists all run circles in my head, competeing for time with the butterflies in my stomach.

But it's what I long for, to be out there in the world. Free. Driving a truck isn't perfect. We have deadlines to meet, strict rules about what roads we can travel, even when and for how long we have to sleep, but even so, we're outside the walls.
I've always dreamed of just tossing a pack over my shoulder, grabbing my camera and just going... walking, hitchhiking, exploring, learning, climbing mountains, hiding from rainstorms, no place to be, no schedules, no rules...
But that's not going to happen in a world where we have a mortgage to pay, food to buy, retirement to plan for. But Trucking gives me a chance to do a little of that from my corner office on wheels.

I've enjoyed the break from being on the road, I've learned a lot, and met some wonderful people whom I will never forget. I've gotten a taste of what it's like to just be still, and it was nice. But my heart will always belong to out there... to seeing what's around the next corner.

Trucking isn't always interesting, sometimes it's long waits and heavy traffic and bump the dock and go to sleep, but I'll try to update this blog about once a week or so. I want to share the interesting stuff, and I want to try to stay connected with all the folks I'm leaving behind. My whole life has been about moving around, one Navy base to another, one town to another, one truckstop to another, but I never forget the people I meet and the friends I make, and it always hurts to leave friends behind. But, maybe, this way you can come with me... just a little.

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

-- J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit