Layoffs, breakups, and prison stints are popular notes of inspiration. No one enters out of high school, because they can't, so everyone goes in because something else didn't work out. I entered the industry in the way many do: with a sense of complete personal abandon and lack of direction. I walked out of the office, still, somehow, employed. "It's just… somebody's got to give these people a second chance. "I'm going to write a book someday about all the shit I've seen." He was looking through the wall.
#Long haul trucking drivers
I was not among the first thousand drivers to come through here. "Well, that guy," he said, nodding to Chuck, who was standing outside. "You fall asleep at the wheel?" he finally asked. After a day of waiting on site, I was called in. The man who fires people folded his hands and sighed at me, speaking with a southern tiredness. We arrived back in Murray, Kentucky, where Paschall's front office was. Multiple times a day he called and messaged Paschall's offices, berating them for having put him in danger. I didn't begrudge Chuck when, after the truck bounced to a stop and the air brakes hissed into the night, he flew out of the sleeper, threatened to ruin my entire life if I blamed any of this on him, and became my corrections officer for the next several days, forbidding me to leave the sleeper cab for anything more than pee breaks. It didn't look like we were going to make it. Either way, I'd been looking forward to California. I hoped the trailer wouldn't come loose from the kingpin, or that it wouldn't jackknife and tear us down sideways. As he came to, his head slammed into the wall, and his body jerked with the truck as it skimmed the washboard plains.
#Long haul trucking driver
I'd been a long-haul truck driver for exactly three weeks.īut then, Chuck might have a similar impression. A spiritually paralyzing tower of student debt from four years of college. I considered what I'd left and the world I was delving into. To live in a box with an unstable man is its own ethereal journey. That's part of how you trained long-haulers at Paschall Truck Lines, the company I worked for-put two new hires in a truck and let 'em roll. I'd met him a week earlier and was sharing the nine-by-seven compartment with him, exploring his temperament, which cycled at random from giddiness to virulent outbursts. My partner's name was Chuck, a fifty-nine-year-old truck driver who dubiously claimed to have once been one of Ford's top nationwide salesmen, despite a noticeable speech impediment he coolly didn't acknowledge.
Before we reached Amarillo, I'd spent days on an acrobatic sleep schedule, trying to weather my driving partner's erratic temper and fearing for my own safety.
Under prolonged sensory deprivation, your brain invents its own visions. After a few hours, the parameters that separate you from the prism of night dissolve, and only an elongated tube of light sucks you along. As the world slips into darkness, you enter a free-form self that is post-sleep and incoherent. There's something metaphysical about driving alone through the night. I'd been a long-haul truck driver for exactly three weeks. A spiritually paralyzing tower of student debt from four years of college. It was crisp outside Amarillo, where industry meets the Texas plains, and I considered what I'd left and the world I was delving into. watching the canvas of white stars meet the glittering orange lights of the nuclear-weapons plant far to the north. My last clear memory was standing outside a rest stop at 3:00 a.m. The view a dark blur, I slammed on the brakes, but 80,000 pounds of inertia wasn't going to stop for air brakes. Baggage rained down on me from the upper bunk. Everything in the truck rattled and shook. My partner was screaming as he bounced around in the back he had just woken up, too. I woke up driving an eighteen-wheeler 60 miles per hour through a field east of Amarillo, Texas.