The west is the best

SIOUX FALLS, SD - The desert will be the death of me one day. Got stuck in Elko, NV, a few days ago on a truck that kept overheating as it chugged along deserted I-80 in thick air filled with smoke blowing over the Sierras from California burning. Got routed to a repair shop on a hardscrabble strip of casinos, motels, and gas stations, a rare stop between Reno and Salt Lake. My stomach had been doing worrisome sickly flips all day, like all these physical and mechanical components revolting against the overambitious human mind.

I am 47 driving hours away from completing training (would have been done by now if not for aforementioned breakdown and a slew of other unexpected delays), and my next step will likely be getting dropped off in Omaha to wait for another trainer (this would be trainer #5, for those counting at home) because Larry's going home for a week, and he's getting on my last nerve anyway. I don't do well when I don't get regular meals. And I mean, I REALLY don't do well. And flatbed operation requires an amount of effort I just have no inclination to make, especially without regular meals.

But in better news, I found what I believe to be my new favorite stretch of road in all the land: I-84 from Boise to Portland, first winding through the Cascade pines under a weepy gray sky then running along the Columbia river with Washington State on the other bank.



On the night of the Fourth of July, I drove south over the Grapevine snaking uphill towards Los Angeles in gathering dusk, and when I crested the hill the LA basin exploded with light, more and more fireworks beyond hills with every turn, confetti falling and dissipating into the brake lights of city traffic.

The more unfamiliar parts of California I see the more sure I am that this is my home, no matter where I came from or where I'll go in the future.





(Click on individual pictures for bigger versions. More can be found over on Flickr.)

Lug it out

LODI, CA - I'm sitting in a truck stop about 15 minutes away from my house, but don't have the time or chance to actually go home. It's disorienting to be on home turf yet not be able to act like it. Leaving soon, always leaving soon.

New trainer Larry told me in full seriousness that oranges are bad for you because the acid wears down enamel on teeth. He said this as he put a dip of Copenhagen chewing tobacco between his lip and set of rotting teeth.

Things are all right, I suppose. Larry watched me drive for all of about 15 minutes before he said I had everything under control and retreated into the sleeper, leaving me to drive in peace. What's nice is that I feel comfortable enough already behind the wheel, so I don't need the supervision. Otherwise, he and I have absolutely nothing in common and our conversations feel like we're both speaking different languages.

Also, he doesn't eat. Like, seriously. The man lives on Pepsi and Copenhagen, and when I try to stop for food he acts like we're going to be late for everything in the world because of me. By the happy coincidence of my being in Cali right now, my roommate just met me at this truck stop and brought my cooler, which I left at home because I didn't think I'd need it on a trainer truck. (Thanks again for the cooler, Lunza!) Now I can stock up on sandwiches and stuff, and not sit there munching on Wheat Thins just to stave off the lightheadedness caused by not eating all day, which is what I did yesterday until I finally stopped for a much-needed square meal at about midnight in Oregon.

Oh, and he's a flatbed driver. Which means I am supposed to help strap down things like vinyl window parts to the truck, which is not something I have any intention of ever doing. Ever. Especially not for the amount of money Werner is paying me. Cheap bastards.

I only have 80-odd hours of training left. Should be done by next weekend. This shit seriously needs to be over so I can finally get my own truck.

Going what? Where? Already?

FONTANA, CA - Well, damn. Werner has all of a sudden decided to get shit together and find me a trainer. I'm leaving for Idaho tonight. Idaho! Tonight! Pulling flatbed trailers, apparently? Whatever. I only have a week and a half worth of training left to do, so hopefully I can just get that shit overwith.

Vaya con Dios, amigos!

E.T.A. @ 10pm: Oh, but it really couldn't have been that easy. What my new trainer failed to mention when he called me at noon and told me to get over to the terminal ASAP was that the truck was in the shop. We sat and waited for it until 9:30, then went back to the hotel. It's supposed to be ready in the morning, but I'm not holding my breath.

Highlight of the day: listening to a driver from southern Louisiana talk about the best way to cook roadkill armadillos. Apparently, you turn the armadillo on its back, split it open from the stomach, scoop the meat out of the shell, marinade it in vinegar, then cook in a crock pot. Learn something new every day...

All hands on deck at dawn

STOCKTON, CA - Hello? Is this thing on?

I've been home on a leave of absence from work/the road for a month. Tomorrow morning, I am getting on a bus heading back to Fontana, CA, to resume training for Werner. More adventures and desperate Twitter posts from far-off lands will resume shortly.

I appreciate the comments and other calls of concern during June's radio silence. I just sort of needed some space from Internet-land, you know? I've done a lot of sleeping and reading and cooking and eating, spent a lot of time with people I care about, applied for some local jobs that I didn't end up getting, and am now falling back on the Original Plan B of truckin' across the USA. Lots of mixed feelings, still, but for now I've gotta finish what I started.

If you go out right now and get into any moving vehicle headed in an unfamiliar direction and blast this song, you'll get an idea of how I'm feeling.

I've been traveling so long, how am I ever gonna know my home when I see it again?

STOCKTON, CA - You read that right, I'm back to the home base. Finally, after two full days on a Greyhound bus that followed three days of no sleep on a truck. This is gonna be a long one, kids.

The first issue at hand is that my beloved state of California, bless its heart, has screwed up royally by not sending me a permanent copy of my CDL. All this time, I've been trucking around on a temporary one, a print-out from the state saying that I was in fact a licensed commercial driver in wait of a new and shiny permanent copy. The temporary expires on June 2 (tomorrow, as of time of writing). The last couple weeks my roommate has been texting me status updates when he came home to check the mail - still no license. Each time I called the DMV, they'd tell me something ridiculous and apologize and say it would be in the mail that very day, but obviously they are a bunch of stinking liars.

With the expiration date so close at hand, Werner started getting worried about my driving status. When I was assigned a new trainer, they told me we'd get routed California-way immediately so I could either pick up my license or be dropped off to take care of this issue.

And in comes my third trainer, Dana, who is by far the best one of the lot. She and I get along great, and we hit the road on Tuesday once her truck gets out of the shop, with a load destined for Red Bluff, CA. We barely get an hour outside of Dallas when it becomes apparent that the truck was not really fixed, even though this was the truck's fourth time in the shop for the same problem - the AC freezing up. It works fine for the first hour or so after starting up, then either stops blowing air or starts blowing hot air. At that point, the only thing one can do is shut the truck down, pop the hood, chip off the LARGE CHUNKS OF ICE that have formed on the AC pipes, and wait at least 15 minutes for the system to thaw. Obviously, one can't make very good time stopping this way.

So here we are, driving through the desert with no AC. This is bad enough for driving, but absolutely unbearable for sleeping, because the sleeper windows don't actually open and the space heats up exactly like you'd imagine a closed metal box to heat up. Dana calls in an emergency maintenance request and dispatch tells us to go to a Peterbilt dealership in Albuqurque. We spend the entirety of Wednesday there. In the meantime, the company sends another driver to come get our trailer, since we obviously can't make it to the destination on time. We get out of the dealership by nightfall with the lead mechanic promising up and down that the problem is fixed, and are promptly dispatched to El Paso to pick up another load.

Imagine driving around El Paso, TX, where the weather is a temperate 110 degrees (yes, really), lost as hell trying to find a warehouse, with hot air coming at you from the windows AND the AC vents. Obviously, the problem was not fixed. Dana, completely fed up and angry at this point, calls dispatch and tells them that she's taking the truck back to Dallas (which is her home terminal) so they can give her another truck, since this one appears to be irreparable. They proceed to tell her that plenty of drivers do just fine without AC, and that she's just a silly lady driver who should quit whining. Eventually, her intention to trade in the truck turn into an intention to turn the truck in and quit the company. So we spend Thursday driving from El Paso to Dallas in the horrid Texas summer heat, stopping frequently to chip ice off.

Remember how I've said before that Texas is pretty much its own level of hell? Yeah, that. I drove the night shift, which was still hot but somewhat more bearable, but every time I stopped for ice-chipping I was attacked by legions of gigantic weird bugs. Have I mentioned yet that I hate Texas? Oh, and the load we were taking back was destined for Quebec. Last I checked, Quebec was sort of in the opposite direction and a different country from California, making it very hard for me to get my license issues taken care of, and far enough that it would be illegal for me to operate a truck by the time we got there.

We spent a few hours sitting at the truck stop just outside the Dallas terminal as Dana argued with dispatch. Finally, we took the truck into the terminal, cleaned it out and went our separate ways. I'd already requested to take home time by this point, since it was clear that my license was not on its way. My options at this point were to let Werner pay for a Greyhound bus ticket, or put a plane ticket on my credit card in hopes that the company would later reimburse me, which I honestly don't trust it to do.

Got on the bus in Dallas on Friday afternoon. Bus promptly broke down in Abilene, leaving all of us stranded in a roach-infested station for five hours until another bus came and retraced the roads I'd driven the night before. I slept, woke up, cursed the world for making Texas so damn huge, many times over. Several crazy people who talked to themselves sat next to me. Some guy tried to pick me up in Phoenix by saying, "Do you got a baby daddy?" Another guy tried to pick me up in Bakersfield by saying, "Where are you headed? Are you going home to see your kids? That's what I'm doing. I just got out of prison. Do you have a boyfriend?" The highlight of the trip was a three-hour layover in LA early Sunday morning, where I ordered an egg sandwich at the station cafe and almost cried from happiness when I saw the cook crack an actual egg on the grill because that's how long it's been since I watched real food be prepared for my consumption. Got off the bus in Stockton Sunday afternoon, filthy and braindead.

The interesting thing about Greyhound buses is that they are arguably the least pretentious way to travel. There are no excuses or apologies made for the lack of good service, comfort, or promptness, because let's face it, if you're taking Greyhound you're letting the world know that your ass is flat broke but you still somehow need to get from point A to point B, so you obviously can't afford to complain.

I am pretty sure at this point that I will not be going back to Werner. I haven't decided yet whether I want to keep driving trucks or not. I need to gather my thoughts here, sleep in my own bed, see people I love, eat real food, figure out what happened with my license, and process all that's happened in the past six weeks. Stay tuned.

Everybody needs some time on their own

DALLAS, TX - Arrived in Dallas and had a trainer assigned to me the following day. Unfortunately, her truck is in the shop until Tuesday. Damn. Stuck again.

The new trainer is the best one yet. She is a collector of second hand make-up bags, which she uses for every purpose imaginable. The brown bag holds pliers and screwdrivers, the leopard print one is for phone chargers and accessories, the black one is for fuses and other mechanical items. Her truck is craftily rigged with shelves and storage spaces attached by bungee cords and clips, equipped with everything you could ever need on the road. We get along incredibly well so far. She says that after we hit the road on Tuesday, I'll be done with my training before I know it. But I've heard that before, so I'm not holding my breath.

In the meantime, I am stuck in Texas, which I am convinced is its own special level of hell. I mean, really. Half the state smells like sulphur. The Dallas terminal is the biggest that Werner has, and the only one that has a hotel onsite. It is one of the crappiest lodging places I've ever stayed in, run down and dirty. All the buildings here form a gated, fenced-in compound - the fences to protect us from what is genuinely a shady area. Food delivery guys hand us pizzas and bags of Chinese over the barbed wire and take money through the fence as we make jokes about being in jail. Outside the wires, toothless prostitutes and their pimps circle the truck stop and hide in the tall grass of abandoned lots. The wind blowing across these plains is strong, hot, damp, relentless. It puts out cigarettes and steals words from lips, takes my resolve away, leaves a layer of sticky dust on my skin.



A reader recently left a comment asking me whether I miss the cerebral side of my past life, which is an interesting enough question to earn a public response.

In a way, I feel like what I'm doing now is more "cerebral" than what I was doing before. My most recent job had me writing mindless, middling news stories centered around mindless, middling towns. The job title of news reporter connotes thought and analysis, but the job I had was so dumbed down that a trained monkey could do it: go to boring city council meeting, write crap story. Lather, rinse, repeat.

These days, I write feverishly into the night. I see and hear more things than I have a chance to write down in the course of a day. My mind is on fire with ideas and observations. Some days (when on the road, of course, not sitting around hellish hotel rooms), the need to write overpowers the need to sleep. The paper journal I brought with me is almost out of clean pages. Most of this writing does not make it to the blog because it's part of something larger, and I won't share it until the larger project takes on a more cohesive shape.

The biggest challenge is to keep this big picture in mind. The main reason I am out here is to write about it, but it's easy - too easy - to lose myself in the small things, the highs and lows of each passing day. But as long as the pen is moving across the page, I remember why I'm here.

West, but not far enough

LAKELAND, FL - They're sending me to Dallas. Apparently not a whole lot of drivers/trainers go through Florida because there isn't much freight going out of this state, but there are so many students here that they're putting us in rental cars and sending us to Dallas. This whole thing is becoming almost comically ridiculous.

I sort of had a meltdown last night. My roommate had left in the morning and I had spent the whole day holed up in the hotel room by myself watching the Food Network and driving myself crazy, and ended up crying on the phone to R in the middle of the night, talking about my tendencies to run away from myself.

It's so hard to gain momentum, then so easy to lose it.

Stranded again - the Florida edition

LAKELAND, FL - Melissa was supposed to pick me up today so we could get back on the road. Instead, she called to say that her boyfriend got laid off from his trucking job and is going to come work for Werner so they can drive as a team. Which means I'm stranded in wait of yet another trainer. AGAIN.

I swear, if I were anywhere near California right now, I would quit and go home. Instead, I am about as far as I could get from home while still remaining in the lower 48 states. I am so tired of this.

I am full of daydreams of a faraway touch, but the air here is thick as hot swamp water, trees overhung with the tattered lace of Spanish moss trapped in the stillness, weather too oppressive even for daydreams. There's no poetry in in-between places, just the endless ticking of clocks.

The girl truck

LAKELAND, FL - I was really surprised to hear from my new trainer less than 24 hours after my last one dropped me in Ohio, and even more surprised that it was a woman. Melissa came in all tight jeans and feathered bangs, straight out of the 80s. I got on the truck that evening, we picked up a load in Toledo and rushed down to Miami, where it had to be on Friday morning. In the course of that rushed 30-hour stretch during which the truck never really stopped moving, I learned a lot of things about my new trainer. For instance, the man she calls her "husband" is really her long-distance boyfriend, even though she's still married to someone else and so is he. Also, that her stalker ex-boyfriend likes to text message her with marriage proposals. That she will curse out other truck drivers, then get on the CB and be sweet as pie to them. Also, that she has no teeth, which is helpful to her anorexia.

Just when I was starting to adore her trashy awesomeness (or maybe her awesome trashiness), we arrived in Miami. I'd never been to Florida before, and the rest of the state really did not impress me, but there was something about Miami that enchanted me instantly - something about the security guards with Haitian accents, and the fresh fruit and Cuban desserts on the roach coach that pulled up to the dock where we were waiting to unload the trailer, the brightness and glitter of early morning shining with this delicious cultural twist. After too much time in the monotone of the Midwest, it was the perfect city flavor to land on my tongue.

And just as I was relishing the taste of Miami morning, Melissa set in with a long and involved tirade about how this part of her home state is now full of black and Hispanic people, and how much she hates both, complete with long and bone-chillingly racist reasons why. It was then that I noticed the small confederate flag sticker on her CB radio. Oy.

I've kept my mouth shut so far. Except for the awful, blatant racism, I like her a lot. We get along. She's a good driver, and a good teacher - at least for me, it seems. My last trainer was a good driver too, as well as a licensed mechanic, and he was constantly appalled at all the things I didn't know about how trucks and other vehicles function, and tried to make me feel bad for not knowing things I don't know, which is bullshit. Melissa, on the other hand, breaks things down into terms I understand. And her truck is a lot easier to handle and shift than the last one I was on, though technically it's a lot older and crappier. I'm going to chalk that one up to female energy.

I asked me why she became a truck driver, and she told me the story of how she went to visit her grandfather in Wisconsin at the age of 8. He was a driver, and had an ancient cab-over truck. She sat in a lawn chair in the space generally reserved for a passenger seat and looked at the countryside they were passing through, so high up above everything, moving so fast. It was one of the big defining moments of her life. She told him then, "One day, Grandpa, I'm going to drive a truck just like you." He replied, "Over my dead body, you will." But he changed his mind once he saw her behind the wheel, she said.

One thing I really like is the difference I feel between walking into a truck stop or shipper's office with another woman rather than a man. With my last trainer, everyone assumed I was his wife or girlfriend, and always addressed him first, assuming he was in charge of the truck - which was true, obviously, but not for those reasons. I always felt self-conscious during those moments, and angry at the assumptions, but powerless against them since I am "just a student." With Melissa, it feels more like equal footing. Other drivers and the company's customers don't know which one of us to address first, and they get confused, and it's fantastic to see the looks on people's faces as they slowly realize that no, there are no men on that truck. Right now, I am spending my energy trying to somehow get past the racism so I can mine this woman for writing material.

She is taking home time this weekend, and I get to stay in a hotel. Unlike my last trainer, she will actually pick me back up after the weekend is over. The hotel is near our company terminal in the Tampa area. I considered renting a car or something and going exploring, but I've been on the road for nearly a month and nothing seems as wonderful as indulging as sleeping in a hotel bed and lounging by the pool for a couple days. Especially since my birthday is tomorrow.

Also, just as a note about how I've been living - I haven't had a shower, proper meal, or a chance to sleep longer than two hours at a stretch since Ohio. I am a dirty, hungry, and tired girl, yet what do I do first upon checking into my hotel room? I check my email and update my blog. Priorities are priorities, after all.

Stranded again

SPRINGFIELD, OH - Looks like I'll be in Ohio for the next few days. Bah. My trainer went on home time, and dropped me off here.

Here's what supposed to happen when a trainer goes on home time: s/he contacts the company, the company gets the student a hotel room as close as possible to the trainer's house, the trainer drops the student off and then picks her back up when the home time is done.

Knowing my trainer was going on home time, I assumed I'd be spending a few days in northern Michigan. Instead, he told me he never takes students home, and instead dropped me off at our Ohio terminal on his way home. Which means I get to sit here in the middle of Ohio, waiting for another trainer.

If the wait is as long as it was in Fontana, I'll be here for a while. Oy. I'm not a happy girl right now. But at least I get a real bed to sleep in, and an Internet connection, and a roommate who seems pretty cool. So it could be worse?

I wish he'd dropped me off a terminal that's near people I know. SoCal would have been fine, or Atlanta, or Portland. Instead I'm in Ohio. Anyone reading this live in Ohio? Want to come entertain me?

Oh, and my birthday is in four days. Chances are, I'll be spending it in a hotel room. Bah.