Rambling Memories of a Truck Driver
Thank you Lord for all the fun!



As most of you know, I’ve spent 15 years on the road driving 18 wheelers. I’ve been to 48 states and Canada. I’ve been on every Interstate and US highway. And so many tiny highways, right thru tiny towns, way out in the middle of no where. Which for some reason Cody, Wyoming came to mind. I was asked at a family get together recently, where did I like it most of all. I thought for a moment, couldn’t think of anywhere that I liked most. I thought of the Grand Tetons to the Florida beaches. And on a trip up into Maine, I’m headed north and as I looked off to my right, I can see the Atlantic Ocean thru the trees. And as I thought “wow, this looks like a setting in a Steven King story”. I was looking for some boogie man to come out of the trees. You know, like in his stories. That was a real cool feeling. Or the first time that I saw snow on the beach in Spokane. I grew up in southern California. Snow? What’s that? Oh, yea, that cool white stuff on Big Bear Mountain. Yea I’ve been there on a Warm Sunny day before.
Oops, got side tracked. Where were we? Oh yea. And I thought about Monument Valley in Utah. Wow! And all that forest in the southeast, and my heart skips a beat. But just as I peaked on that good feeling I remember that ivy that’s killing the forest for miles and miles in so many places. I feel a rush of sadness. And it hurts to see those majestic forests get choked out like that which brings me back to Maine for a minute. Don’t you know why? Steven King lives there. He probably wrote a book called Ivy Eats the World. And then I think about a trip to Vermont. 5 miles from Canada. I picked up a load of chocolate drops covered with tiny candy sprinkles on them. Those were really good, if you know what I mean. The shipper gave me a bag of them. Chomped on them for a week. And then I think about I-10 between El Paso and San Antonio. 500 miles and maybe 4 towns, and I’m not kidding. 100-120 miles between towns. And the cell phone didn’t work for a hundred miles at a time. Ozona. That last town, way out in the middle of nowhere. I can’t remember how many times I went thru that area in the middle if a thunder storm. At night. I thought some of them lightning strikes would hit my truck going down the interstate. They were so close, and bright, blindingly bright. And the thunder, wow, it was so loud. My heart skips a beat as I picture it in my mind, and how I was thinking “who needs headlights out here. I’m wasting electricity. It’s so bright out there”. I’m really getting a rush out of these memories. I call it a natural high. Kinda like that felling you get as you listen to some one tell their story about how they came to know Jesus. Or that feeling you get when your favorite song is being sung in church. I’m starting to shiver with excitement, as I remember actually hitting a note or two during the songs. That really gives me a good feeling as my one note matches everyone else. There it was for just a second, just one note on key. It sounded so good. As most of you know, I can’t sing.
Was I getting side tracked? So you see, I have so many happy memories around this country. I looked at this country as Gods canvas. I remember so many times thinking, “Wow, I wanna see the video”. You run back and forth across the north side of the grand canyon enough times, and see all that splendor and you’ll wanna see the video too. Just how did that canyon really get there?
Or the video about how did those mountains lift up at a 90 degree angle out of the ground. They run along the east side of I-15 for hundreds of miles in Utah. Or the time in North Dakota one night it was minus 40 outside. I’m here to tell those of you without that experience, I was just a tad chillier than really really reeeaaallly cooooooooooollld.
For a real heart stopper I can remember about the time when I was hauling Smiths groceries from Layton, Utah to all points in Wyoming. All points is like 7 or eight towns in the whole state. And Wyoming is a big state. We went back to Utah empty after delivering the groceries. That means we were light. You see, Wyoming has some wind out there. Empty big trucks blow over all the time. Somewheres a few miles south of Alcova, which is south of Casper, there is a sharper bend than the rest of the bends and wiggles on that 2 lane road. It curved around a windy mountain. Yes, that mountain blew across that stretch of road ALL winter. So, even if the road was dry there would be this ¼ mile strip of ice on that curve from the windy mountain blowing snow across the road. It usually wasn’t a problem after the first few times. That stretch of road got ice pimples. It was quite bumpy. I usually went thru there at nite when the ice is cold enough to give the tires traction. Well, one windy sunny afternoon I was headed south with my empty wagon. The wind was blowing really good that day. A big snow storm was moving east and I was going south to the interstate where I’d go west back to Utah to find that storm. As I head south from Alcova, I come up to windy mountain. Before I even hit the curve my truck started drifting to my left as windy mountain blew at me as I slid in that ice that had a sheet of water on it from the sun shinning that day. Instinct kicked in. I can remember steering left to negotiate the right hand curve. Just like on them video games we’ve all played. I think I might know what its like to have a heart attack. I’m surprised my heart stayed in my chest. And that wind, it wouldn’t stop. And I’m on a 2 lane road where the snow comes up to the edge of the road. You can’t pull over to rest, because you don’t know what’s under the snow at the edge of the road. You don’t wanna get stuck out there. Tow trucks are a hundred miles away. And I need to get to Rawlins to get a parking spot before dark, or there won’t be a parking spot. And I’m going so slowly. It’s gonna get dark soon. And Rawlins was still a hundred miles away. And that wind won’t stop. And I can’t stop. And there goes another gust. I try to hold the steering wheel straight. Won’t that wind stop? Enough already. My heart won’t slow down. I can’t rest. And there’s another gust, and here comes a big truck who is fighting his steering wheel to keep his truck on this skinny 2 lane road. As I try to calculate were we will meet on that skinny road up ahead, and what did I see? No, please no. Not there! My heart was pumping so fast. I could feel it pumping in my finger tips as I gripped that wheel even harder. Another gust hits my right side, trying to push me into the north bound lane as I grip the wheel tighter. My mind was racing because my calculations had me meeting that truck on that skinnier bridge with no shoulder. I hate those meetings. You see, I’ve always wiggled around in my lane, not much, but enough where I had to really concentrate on keeping the truck strait in close quarters, like in construction areas where you barely have 6 inches between your tire and the concrete walls. When that concrete gets wet, it darkens. And when it’s the middle of the night and the rain is pouring down so hard. The wipers barely keep the window clear. And those concrete barriers are so dark, I keep thinking. I have to really concentrate on that barrier to see where it is. This is too dang close. I can remember thinking so many times “cant they use some kind of reflectors on those walls”. This is scaring the heck out of me, so I have to remember where I left off.
Oh yea, all this stuff was going thru my mind as I prepare to meet that truck where I really think that bridge be too skinny for the both of us. I have to hold the wheel strait.













And now Chapter 2








So, as I’m slowing down so as to let him cross the bridge first, I notice that he was doing the same thing. We were going to meet at the bridge! I hate when that happens. It’s really scary. I’m always listening, really intently to see if I can hear the mirrors hit each other. The loud swooshing sounds as the other truck roars by can be really surprising. It can give you a rush. My mind is going 90 miles and hour and I’m trying to keep my truck strait and within the inch or two cushion space between that truck and the edge of the bridge. To this day I’ve never heard the driver side mirrors touch. That is a good thing you know. (Remind me to tell about the time my right side mirror got crunched.) There are so many of them tiny bridges all across America. If there was one on the road that I was on, sure enough, I’d have incoming traffic at the bridge.
Back to that Wyoming highway 220. I had made it across the bridge safely. I checked to see that the other truck was alright in my driver side mirror. He was growing fainter in my mirror. I begin to breathe a sigh of release when another gust of wind tries to blow me off the road, and I’m starting to think that the storm may beat me to Rawlins. It’s starting to snow, and it’s getting darker. Those clouds are really dark. Well, I fought my way to Rawlins and was able to get a front row parking space. Right behind the restaurant. I took me a couple of hours to come off that rush. A blizzard came thru that nite and the interstate got shut down. It was that bad. And I was safe once again.
And then I think about how small this country really is. I was headed up to Washington State, ratchet jawing with another driver all day. I was having a good day. This is what trucking was all about. Just rolling down the road with a new temporary friend. We kept that CB busy that day. He was a real friend for a day. Then towards the end of the day we parted ways. A couple of weeks go by, and after a long nite on a skinny road, US54 between Wichita, Kansas and Tucumcari, New Mexico, with the sun coming up behind me, I spot a rest area ahead. Rest areas are pretty scarce on the skinny roads. Well, as I rolled to a stop, the driver from the truck in front of me was just getting out of his truck. He was just waking up. Turns out, this guy is the guy I ran with a couple of weeks ago. We chatted there for a bit, and took off trucking, burning up the CB for another day. Reminds me of a Sunday in chapel, in basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. I was chattin with the guy next to about where we were from. Turns out he was from Simi Valley, California. That was my home town. He lived just a couple of miles from me. So we talked about our town. Wow, what a small world.
And then I remember the first time that I crossed the Rockies. In a freightliner cabover. The kind if truck with no hood on it. Big trucks with little engines that don’t climb mountains very fast. You get to view the scenery at 25 miles per hour while climbing those mountains. And the mountains never stop it seems. Just as soon as get to the bottom of the other side, you start climbing again, up another mountain. And if it wasn’t climbing up and down, the road would zig zag around streams, rivers and cliffs. 500 miles of those kinds of terrains. And the views. They can take your breath away. Majestic mountains. Rich peoples lodges on the hills between the mountains. They look kewl, dotting the landscape thata way. Some fine looking lodges out there. And the scattered ranches here and there. And the sky resorts. With their long trails crawling up the hills. And the sky lifts, high off the ground, chasing that trail up the hill. Wow. The Rockies are really something to see. Another piece of Gods canvas. Wow, what an artist he is. And on that maiden voyage, I ran into some traffic east of Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Turns out interstate 70 aint finished yet. Construction was still going on. It was still a 2 lane road. They were still building the other half of the road. This majestic stretch of road has cliffs or strait up mountains. Looking up those walls is like looking up a Giant Redwood tree. Seems like something way, way up there is touching heaven. But it’s so far up there you can’t really tell. I really do get excited with such views. Well, the walls are so tall, and you can’t cut into them to make a wider road, so they double stacked the interstate along the cliffs. This is a really scenic stretch of road. I believe the design of the road really adds to the scenery.







And I used to love listening to old truck driving songs when I was trucking. Artists such as Red Simpson, Red Sovine, C.W. McCall. I would sing them out of tune going down the road. "Wolf Crick Pass way up on the great divide, Truckin' on down, the other side" And how I had always wanted to take that road some day. Every time I had an inkling of a chance to possibly detour that way, it would be winter time. And there aint no way I was gonna run that mountain on ice and snow. C. W. McCall convinced me that Wolf Creek Pass would be one tough cookie. Wolf Creek Pass is a two lane road that cuts thru the Rockies and drops you off the western slope of the Rockies way south of Denver, Colorado.
Finally one fall day I got the opportunity to pick up a load of carrots from somewheres around Center, Colorado. Wow! I looked at my map. The load was going to Bakersfield, California. There’s Wolf Creek Pass right there on my way to California. No detours here. Just a shortcut over the Rockies. Saves probably 300 miles verses going back to interstate 25. Here was my chance to fulfill one of my trucking dreams. I had waited so many years for this opportunity. Well, getting that load of carrots was a long process. Took all day! See, it was them tiny already peeled miniature carrots. They load them on the floor with a conveyor belt that goes way into the trailer. Then they just start dumpin carrots off that long conveyor belt as it slowly travels the length of the trailer to the rear. One was lucky if they got you maxed out on our legal weight the first time around. If we were to light, we had to go back for more. If we were too heavy, they would wash some out with a big fireman’s kind of hose. I’m just sittin there waiting in line, and some poor guy didn’t get enough carrots on the first time, so he had to go back to the dock for more carrots. And then they overloaded him, so he had to go back to get a few carrots washed out of his trailer to bring his weight down. I just started laughing and got on the CB and said, “Whats a mat-ter dri-ver, you got too many car-rots in yer wa-gon?” Wow! That pushed his button. He got all fired up. I think he was just a tad upset at this point, and for some reason he didn’t like that snide remark. Well, heck, all that time he was getting and not getting carrots, he was tying up the dock making the rest of us wait even longer in line, and He was upset? Well, to make a long story short, he was three times bigger than me, and he knew what truck I was in, and I had fun with him. Nobody got hurt. Probably because I wouldn’t open the door. I would roll the window down just enough so that he could hear me ask him, “Did you run out of Prozac today, driver?” this kept on for about a half hour. I had no idea why he was so upset. Life is too short to not have fun.
I did manage to get out of there alive that day. That was a fun day, mostly because I was fixin to go down Wolf Creek Pass. But it was getting dark and I stopped at this awesome country inn, up on top of the Rockies, somewheres around South Fork, Colorado. It looked like a stagecoach stop like you see in the movies. Log walls and all. I went inside. It seemed they were fixin to close, but they said they’d fix me dinner though. That was one of the best steaks I’d had in a long time. Now it’s probably 10 pm, and I decide to go to bed and go down the mountain in the morning.









Chapter 3



Bill Fries as “C W McCall” was famous for “Convoy” and now lives an hour or two away from this mountain.

Wolf Creek Pass

By Bill Fries “C W McCall” & Chip Davis "Mannheim Steamroller"

Me an' Earl was haulin' chickens
On a flatbed outa Wiggins
And we had spent all night on the uphill side
Of thirty seven miles of hell called Wolf Crick Pass
Which was up on the great divide

And we was sittin' there suckin' toothpicks
And drinkin' Nehis an' onion soup mix
And I says "Earl, let's mail a card to mother
And then send them chickens on down t'other side"
Yeah, lets give them hens a ride

Wolf Crick Pass way up on the great divide
Truckin' on down, the other side

Well Earl put down his bottle
Mashed his foot down on the throttle
And then a couple of boobs, with a thousand cubes
In a 1948 Peterbuilt screamed to life
We woke up the chickens

We roared up off'n that shoulder
Sprayin' pine cones rocks 'n boulders
And put four hundred head of them Road Island Reds
And a couple of burnt out roosters on the line
Look out below...cause here we go

Wolf Crick Pass way up on the great divide
Truckin' on down, the other side

Well we commenced a truckin'
And them hens commenced a cluckin'
Then Earl took out a match, and scratched his pants
And lit up the unused half of a dollar cigar
And took a puff
Says "My ain't this pretty up here"

And I says "Earl this hill can spill us
You better slow down or you gonna kill us
Just make one mistake and it's the pearly gates
For them eighty five crates
Of USDA approved cluckers
You wanna hit second?"

Wolf Crick Pass way up on the great divide
Truckin' on down, the other side

Well Earl grabbed on the shifter
And he stabbed her into fifth gear
And then the chromium plated, fully illuminated
Genuine ac-cessory shift knob
Come right off in his hand
I says "you wana screw that thing back on Earl ?"

He was tryin' to thread it on there
When the fire fell off a his cigar
And dropped on down sorta rolled around
And lit the cuff of Earls pants
And burnt a whole in his sock
Yeah it sorta set him right on fire

I looked on outa the window
An' I started in a countin' phone poles
Goin' by the rate of four to the seventh power
I put two an' two together
Added twelve, an' carried five
Come up with twenty two thousand telephone poles an hour

I looked at Earl an' his eyes was wide
His lip was curled and his leg was fried
And his hands was froze to the wheel
Like a tongue to a sled in the middle of a blizzard
And I said Earl I'm not the type to complain
But the time has come for me to explain
That if you don't apply some brake real soon
They're gonna have to pick us up with a stick an' a spoon

Well Earl rared back
Cocked his leg
Stepped down as hard as he could on the brake
And the pedal went clear to the floor
And stayed - right there on the floor
Says it's sorta like steppin' on a plum
Well from there on down it just wasn't real pretty
It was hairpin county and switchback city
One of 'em looked like a can full of worms
Another one looked like malaria germs
Right in the middle of the whole damn show
Was a real nice tunnel now wouldn't you know
Sign says clearance to the twelve foot line
But them chickens was stacked to thirteen nine
Well we shot that tunnel at a hundred an' ten
Like gas through a funnel an' eggs through a hen
An' we took that top row of chickens off
Slicker 'n the scum off a Louisiana swamp
Went down an' around an' around an' down
An' we run outta ground at the edge of town
An' bashed on into the side of a feed store
In downtown Pagosa Springs

Wolf Crick Pass way up on the great divide
Truckin' on down, the other side

Wolf Crick Pass way up on the great divide
Truckin' on down, the other side


And that’s the song that had me fired up for years, wanting to run that hill. I really enjoy a tough mountain. The downhill side, that is. I don’t know why the uphill side isn’t as fun. Could be that the uphill side will only let you go so fast. Or is that so slow? And you can’t go any faster. Other than the hill being so steep, the higher the elevation, the lower the oxygen levels, the less horse power that your engine puts out. It’s starving for air. So, what I think is the deal here is that anyone can mash the pedal and drive 25 mph up a hill. It takes a lot more to maneuver your truck down a mountain and around all them curves while keeping your truck under control. You have to watch out for flaming brakes. Those are the kind that you want to avoid. Brakes on fire have no stopping power. So, to me, the challenge is why I like the down side of a mountain most.
I got started early this morning. The sun was shining and blue skies all around on this fine October morning. What I hadn’t really thought about was the time of year that it was because of where I had come from. I loaded up the carrots in the high plains of the eastern side of the Rockies. The eastern sides of most mountain ranges generally have less vegetation the western facing slopes. The view as I started down the mountain was awesome! The trees were changing colors, and I hadn’t really thought about that. Wow, what a view. There are a few lines in the song that were true. Like the line, “It was hairpin county and switchback city”, and you run right thru downtown Pagosa Springs at the bottom of the hill. There were a lot of curves and switchbacks on that road. There was no tunnel and I hardly saw a telephone pole. It really saddens me when telephone poles pollute the landscape scenery, because I love nature. It’s Gods canvas, remember? Anyways, it was a spectacular drive down that mountain that day. I remember thinking that I’d need to come back here someday to ride the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad.




Speaking of mountains, probably the steepest mountain I’ve went down has to be the Flaming Gorge-Uintas Scenic Byway. The byway meanders over the eastern flank of the Uinta Mountains and through the Ashley National Forest and Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area. It’s on US 191 between Rock Springs, Wyoming and Vernal, Utah. With Flaming Gorge in between.

I was on my last load from Paw Paw, Michigan. After the local authorities escorted me off of Minute Maids property, I knew I wouldn’t have to put up with those clowns again. Like, hear me out. I’m an honest kind of guy and I believe communication is a key in this or any industry. Just tell what’s going on so everyone is prepared for the situation at hand. It’s just logic in my book. Well, I had been picking up juice at this plant most every week for quite some time. I knew how they operated. They ran their shipping department in a pathetic and unprofessional manner. Here’s how it goes. A driver arrives at the guard shack and checks in and is told to go park and listen to the CB for a dock.. The parking lot is several acres big and is mostly filled with dropped trailers. So we go and find a parking spot. Now trucks a scattered amongst the dropped trailers throughout this huge parking lot. Not that bad yet, right? Not so bad if they would call you to a dock in a reasonable amount of time. My appointment was for two o’clock in the afternoon. I had arrived this day around one o’clock. After a couple of hours, I’ve noticed that no trucks are being called to the dock. And me, communication being the key, began trying to get the shipping department to explain what the scoop was and why no trucks were getting loaded. No problem with that right? Well, evidently there was a problem with that. The shipping department wouldn’t tell us. You see, if they would have told us that something broke down, and it would be several hours before they would be loading trucks, we drivers could get several hours sleep. A rested driver is a safer driver. I had kept this questioning going all afternoon with the only responses were “don’t worry, its none of your business” and “shut up”(why do I hear that too often?) or to that effect. Now it’s after dark. And they finally call a truck to the dock. Only problem is now the driver is asleep. And the shipping department tells us drivers to go look for that sleeping drivers’ truck. Hah! Yea right. Were talking several acres and the trucks are scattered all over this place. Hardly any trucks are actually side by side and it’s dark out there. Well, Minute Maid has Billy Goats. Those are also called hostlers or yard mules. They spot trailers all day in the yard and can find sleeping drivers faster than us drivers wandering around in the dark, right? Makes sense to me and so I told the shipping department that from the comfort of my truck on the CB radio. Oops. They took offense to that. Within about 20 minutes the local authorities are knocking on my door, asking me if I’d been drinking. What? Drinking? Yea, I’d been drinking Mountain Dew, cold, right out of the fridge in my truck. I’ve got a few extra, does anyone want one? There really cold. So I got escorted off of their property. And this is 7-8 hours past my loading appointment time.
But I still haven’t gotten loaded. After a few phone calls, they still won’t let me get loaded, but they’d still load my trailer if it wasn’t me connected to the trailer. So, off to the truck stop I go to try to find someone to take my trailer over to Minute Maid and load my trailer. I’m a salesman at heart, and this was going to be a tough sell. Now it’s about midnight. I had to go all the way to Benton Harbor, Michigan, because that was the nearest big truck stop on the interstate. And being so late, there aint that many trucks going by. While I’m on the CB trying to pitch this deal, knowledgeable drivers are explaining over the air about how bad they are at Minute Maid and how they’d never do it, but I’m good at what I do and I sold the deal. It cost me 300 bucks. And I was a company driver and we don’t get refunded for that. The other guy dropped his trailer, took mine, and we headed to Paw Paw, 45 miles away. He went to Minute Maid and I went to a tiny truck stop at the Paw Paw exit and went to sleep. By now it’s 2 in the morning, and I’m tired. I woke up around 8:30, thinking, oh shoot, where’s that guy at? Did he run off with my trailer? I bobtailed to Minute Maid to find him. The only way to see the loading dock was a dirt road on the east side of the plant. So that’s where I went and there he was still backed to the dock at 9am. And hour and a half later I had my trailer but I’m supposed to deliver part of this load tomorrow afternoon in Roosevelt, Utah. 1450 miles away! That means an all nighter. Around 10:00 the next morning I’m headed south on US 191, fixin to go down what turned out to be, probably the most challenging mountain to date. Now, this aint the way it’s supposed to be done, driving 24 hours or more strait. But I have a lot of stamina. To me it’s a mental thing, but your body can catch up with ya. And I was committed to getting my load delivered on time. So here we are and I’ve been up for 26 hours strait and here is a real steep winding mountain. A 10 percent grade with 10 switchbacks on it. As I crawled down the hill at each turn there was a sign. Every second sign told me how many switch backs were left. The signs continued to mark my progress: “9 More” “8 More ” all the way to “Last One.” The other signs between these are marked with what kind of fossil was found at that location and from what period they believed that fossil came from. All the while every time I completed a switchback/u-turn, there was the Flaming Gorge Dam down there at the bottom. I’m doing these turns at 10 miles per hour. That’s how sharp these turns were. The signs said 25 mph, but that’s fast enough to loose control in a big truck. There was one fossil sign that said “No fossils were found here”. I did make my delivery on time that day and then got plenty of sleep right there at the receiver in Vernal after I got unloaded.

Stay tuned.

Shaky
Shaky@shakydude.com

Copyright 2008