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Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the book Catch a Wave
by Peter Ames Carlin
Published by Rodale; July 2006;$25.95US/$34.95CAN; 1-59486-320-2
Copyright © 2006 Peter Ames Carlin

Chapter 1

Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ original songwriter, producer, and visionary, is in his sixties now, a man of age and wealth and almost no discernible interest in the world as it existed before him, particularly with regard to his family and their own journey across the continent to the golden coast where he was born. “We never talked about that stuff,” Brian says. It is the spring of 2004, and he’s in one of his favorite restaurants, a bustling hillside deli in a mall down the street from his home on the crest of Beverly Hills. “That’s the one thing they never did, never talked about our ancestors at all.” Now, it’s hard to know if Brian is saying this because it’s true or because he just doesn’t remember any such conversations. Or, more likely, he just doesn’t want to address the issue. He’s an intimidating man, both for all he’s achieved in his life and for all he’s suffered along the way. And given the remove of his celebrity and his psychic torment, it’s hard to separate the humor from the horror in his eyes when he does recall something his father did like to say.

“Kick some ass!” Brian is smiling now, in his silly, sad way. “Exactly, that’s what my dad said. Kick ass! Kick ass!”

Murry Wilson was a big guy with a big personality and even bigger dreams of glory. That he would attain them through the work of his sons was a source of great pride and outrage from the old man. “My relationship with my dad was very unique,” Brian says. “In some ways I was very afraid of him. In other ways I loved him because he knew where it was at. He had that competitive spirit which really blew my mind.”

“Don’t be afraid to try the greatest sport around.” That’s the story of Brian’s life. But also the story of his brothers, his cousin and friends, and all of the ancestors whose ambitions, fears, hopes, and determination delivered them to this land beneath the unyielding sun. California, here we come. Right back where they started from. “Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world.”

As described by Timothy White in his intricately researched The Nearest Faraway Place, the story of the Wilsons in America begins in the late eighteenth century, when the first Wilson to venture to the New World settled in New York. The first American-born family member, named Henry Wilson, was born in 1804 and eventually moved west to Meigs County, Ohio, where he worked as a stonemason. His son, named George Washington Wilson in the spirit of the times, was born in 1820, and he and his family farmed a plot of rich, river-fed land in Meigs County for more than six decades until his own son, William Henry Wilson, decided to pursue fortune west to the wide-open plains of Hutchinson, Kansas. So west they went, with patriarch George in tow, settling onto a large, if relatively arid, farm that William Henry soon abandoned in order to go into the industrial plumbing business. Contracts to work on the state’s new reformatory system, along with the many opportunities afforded by the modernizing world around them, provided a decent working-class living and a solidly built clapboard bungalow on one of Hutchinson’s nice residential streets. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, William Henry began to think again of chasing fortune into the western horizon.

California! At the dawn of the new century, this was the setting of every ambitious man’s dreams. The real estate flyers papering the town painted in the details, describing the valley soil as every bit as rich and fertile as the sun was warm and the breezes gentle. Thus inspired, William Henry scraped together the cash to buy, sight unseen, ten acres of prime farmland in the southern California village of Escondido. William Henry loaded up his wife, kids, and even his eighty-five-year-old father into the family jalopy; they arrived in 1904 and spent the year laboring on their new vineyard. And though the sun did indeed shine, and the water flowed as promised, and the vines did erupt with fat, juicy fruit, the farming was every bit as hard as it had been back in Kansas, and the money not nearly as vast as previously anticipated. By 1905, William and family were back in the plumbing business in Kansas. Still, memories of the California sun and the dreams of ease and fortune that had once stirred William Henry’s soul came to rest in the imagination of his teenaged son, William Coral “Buddy” Wilson. As the boy grew, so too did his visions of the golden future that awaited him in the Golden State.

Dark-eyed, heavy-browed, and thick-featured, Buddy Wilson took off for California in 1914. Then in his early twenties, the young man?already married to Edith Shtole and the father of a child or two?fairly seethed with ambition. Surely, he imagined, a man with his drive and appetite could find an untapped stream of gold somewhere in that rich, open economic frontier. Leaving his family back in Hutchinson, Buddy would spend months at a time searching for his place in the sun, looking increasingly in the oil fields of the southern coast. Guys could make a fortune if they latched onto the right rig, and so Buddy used his plumbing skills as his entr?e, working as a steamfitter on the pipes that channeled the gushers out of the ground and into the pockets of the rich men whose example he was desperate to follow.

But Buddy would never join them in the gilded halls of the powerful. Moody and scattered, plagued by searing headaches and a self-destructive thirst for whiskey, Buddy wandered from job to job to long stretches of unemployment, which he passed grumbling into a glass in a dim barroom. When Edith and the kids finally joined him in 1921, taking the train to the elegant-sounding village of Cardiff-by-the-Sea, he couldn’t afford to lease an apartment in town. Instead, the family spent their first two months living in a snug eight-by-eight-foot tent with all the other squatters on the beach.

Edith took a job pressing clothes for a garment manufacturer, and eventually the family moved to a small home on an unpaved road in Inglewood where the eight Wilson kids attended school, worked weekend jobs, and marched the thin line dictated by their sour father and stern, demanding mother. Escape, such as it was, came in the occasional afternoon bike rides to the open, breezy expanse of Hermosa Beach.

Escape was a necessity for Buddy Wilson’s kids. Buddy, now in middle age and resigned to his life of small prospects and severely limited horizons, had long felt his ambition curdle into resentment. Often awash in alcohol and self-pity, Buddy’s bile regularly boiled over into violence, directed most often at Edith. But he could also turn his fists on his children, once beating the school-aged Charles so savagely (for mistakenly shattering his glasses) that Murry, then a teenager, had to come to his brother’s rescue, shoving the old man out of the house until he sobered up. And this wasn’t the only time Murry had come to blows with his father. Increasingly, the family’s second-oldest boy found himself thrust into the role of his mother’s protector, raising his own fists against the father he loved but who seemed unable to love him or anyone else in the family.

As in most abusive families, the physical and psychic violence that ruled their home became an unacknowledged presence, a force that both dominated their lives and forced them into silence. But if they couldn’t talk about their problems, the Wilsons could always sing their way to a kind of amity. Indeed, group sings had been a Wilson family tradition dating back to Kansas and beyond, as an eighty-seven-year-old Charles Wilson (an uncle to Brian, Dennis, and Carl) would tell Timothy White, describing nights on the Kansas plains when “we’d have shows on Saturday nights, with three of the oldest brothers on guitars and mandolins. This was at home, with the windows open to the street, and people would stop and listen.”

Even Buddy, a man with no discernible instincts toward paternal tenderness, loved to sing with his kids. He’d long since come to admire the sound of his own tenor voice anchoring the family blend. But even more important, weaving his voice together with those of his wife and kids was as close as Buddy could get to actual emotional intimacy with his family. And perhaps this was why Murry, the son who had come to be the family’s last line of defense against their drunk, vicious father, came to love music so very much. He taught himself to play guitar, too, and he picked up piano from his big sister. And when the living room radio picked up broadcasts from the elegant nightclubs of Hollywood or downtown Los Angeles, Murry sat in front of the speaker and soaked it in, his face glowing happily. What he was hearing was an entirely new vision of the world. Here, life was filled with luxury and ease; a place where careers could be made and fortunes earned, all by the grace of a clever new song. Sitting in front of the radio, aloft on the arc of a pretty melody, Murry Wilson had come to realize something: More than anything else in the world, he wanted to be a songwriter.

But if Murry could be just as dreamy as the next aspiring pop star, he was also a realist who had grown up knowing exactly how important?and difficult?it could be to buy the bare essentials of day-to-day life. He was a mediocre student at George Washington High School, but the rock-jawed youngster left school in 1935 armed with a steely resolve to find work. And though the rest of the nation was still mired in the teeth of the Depression, Murry landed a job as a clerk with the Southern California Gas Company. He was still employed there when he met and, in 1938, married Audree Korthof, the sweet-natured daughter of a stern, hard-working baker who had moved his family west from Minnesota when Audree was a schoolgirl. Murry and his new wife settled in southern Los Angeles, reveling for a time in Murry’s ascendance from the gas company office trenches to a junior administrative post. When Audree became pregnant in the fall of 1941, Murry’s determination to succeed and to outdo the sad, bitter legacy of his father only grew more intense. The couple’s first son, Brian Douglas Wilson, was born on June 20, 1942, bearing the same blue eyes, dark hair, and prominent brow that had followed the family across the generations.

Murry and Audree welcomed two more boys into their family in the next four years?the fair-haired Dennis Carl Wilson coming in late 1944 and Carl Dean Wilson, another dark-featured boy, at the end of 1946. Moving his family to a modern, if cozy, two-bedroom ranch house on West 119th Street in the blue-collar suburb of Hawthorne, Murry rolled his sleeves up over his bulky forearms and set to scratching out his own slice of the postwar economic boom. He’d already made some progress, jumping to a junior administration job at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company just after Brian’s birth and then, just as the war ended, to a foreman’s position in the manufacturing plant of AiResearch, an aeronautics company that made parts for Seattle-based Boeing Aircraft’s growing line of civilian and military airplanes.

By the end of World War II, the South Bay revolved around the thriving aerospace industry. Borne up by the dual demands of a rapidly expanding civilian airline market and the just-as-rapidly-growing tension with the Soviet Union, aeronautics presented opportunities for hardworking men that were seemingly as limitless as their own aspirations. But while Murry’s timing was spot-on, and he was a tireless worker with a penchant for big ideas, nothing came easily for him. A gruesome accident at Goodyear cost him his left eye, and that twist of fate only emphasized an aggressive-to-bellicose personality that tended to alienate him from co-workers and superiors alike. Stalled on the lower rungs of management and increasingly frustrated with his flat career arc, Murry descended into dark moods all too reminiscent of his own father’s. Still, unwilling to resign himself entirely to the old man’s fate, he scraped together as much cash as he could and opened his own business, an industrial equipment rental outfit he called A.B.L.E. (Always Better Lasting Equipment) Machinery. From that point on, Murry Wilson would be his own boss. The arrangement suited him just fine.

So in the mornings Murry would dress in his pressed white shirts and skinny tie knotted just so, his horn-rimmed glasses perched on his thick, bulldog’s face, his suit jacket straining against the prominent belly and muscular shoulders that testified both to his appetite for work and for the rewards awaiting a man at the end of his day. Steering his Ford down the quiet, sun-washed streets of mid-1950s Hawthorne, he’d see a hundred houses just like the one he shared with Audree and his three boys: small but neat, with a lush lawn and a wide driveway for the late-model Ford, Buick, or Chevy, its tail fins gleaming in the cool morning light.

These were the cars of men who were determined to get somewhere in their lives. Like Murry, many of Hawthorne’s men were either born in the Midwest or were the children of men and women who had made the westward trek sometime in the first few decades of the twentieth century. “It was like a little Midwestern town that just got moved right there to eighty acres of land,” recalls Robin Hood, who grew up a few blocks from the Wilsons. “There were a lot of farmers from Kansas and Missouri, a lot of Dust Bowl-era folks who settled in with their big, extended families. Nobody was rich, but we didn’t know it.”

But their parents certainly did. And if one belief held the community together, it was the one about the transformative potential of hard work. No matter where you came from, no matter what your people used to be or what anyone expected you to become, in a working-class West Coast town like Hawthorne?which had been a stretch of empty coastal flats and swamp a generation ago?you could work your way into being anything or anyone you felt like being. This belief is liberating, of course, but it’s also evidence of internal currents that can give the pursuit an undertone of desperation. As Joan Didion would write, the California of this era was a place “in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

Eventually the Baby Boom generation would turn the very edge of the continent into its own proving ground. But the impulse that propelled them there, that restless need for deliverance and the intuitive belief that it could be divined by your own hands somewhere out past the wild fringe of the western horizon, was the same one that had dragged their families across the American frontier and into the dreamy, bustling, sun-glazed cities they had built for themselves. And this was where Murry’s sons, Brian, Dennis, and Carl, came to understand their father’s need for them to kick the world in the ass. He wanted so much for them. He wanted so much for himself. In the worst possible way, you might say.

Reprinted from: Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson by Peter Ames Carlin © 2006 Rodale Inc. Permission granted by Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098. Available wherever books are sold or directly from the publisher by calling (800) 848-4735.

Author
Peter Ames Carlin is the television critic for The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon. His award-winning reportage on Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys has appeared in American Heritage, the New York Times, People, and The Oregonian. Carlin’s work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and Men’s Journal. For more information, please visit http://www.peteramescarlin.com

Originally published here.

Let me start off by saying that I love my job. The life that I lead is meant for me. I do what I do for many reasons, but the most important one is that I love what I do! So if this sounds like I am complaining, I am not, this is just the way it is.

To me there is nothing better than a full moon night, with some heat lightning off in the distance on a road that is all to myself. On a night like this I will sit back and listen to the rhythm of the tires on the road, solve a few problems in my mind, write a song, and really just enjoy what I do. To me this is why I drive a truck, and nothing more! Sound romantic? I guess it does, but there is a lot more to it than this. .
My average time out on the road is six weeks. When I do come home, I will take a week off and then go back out again. Now not all drivers drive this way, some are home once a week. The common practice is to be out about three weeks and then come home for a couple of days. The industry standard is that you get one day off for each week out on the road. A workweek consists of seventy hours. There is no overtime, and once you figure in all the hours that you don’t get paid for, or manage to hide, your average workweek is more like ninety to one hundred hours a week! This is just working time, but remember you don’t get to go home every night, you get to eat, sleep, and be trucking! The hours are long and very irregular. One day you will be trucking through the day, the next the night. You may deliver at 3:00AM or 10:00 PM. There is no such thing as a set schedule when you are a cross-country truck driver.

A lot of people think that we put freight in the trailer and go, we have a nice trip across country and deliver our goods. Well, the reality is that all pickups and deliveries are by appointments that we as drivers don’t set. There have been times where I have gone from LA to North Carolina in 42 hours. That leaves no time for sleep, and before you ask – NO I do not take drugs to stay awake!!! I drink a lot of coffee, smoke too much and take 15-minute power naps to keep going! Not all trips are like that, but if you are not getting as many miles in as you can, and you are not keeping your dispatcher happy, you are not going to make a living. If you sit down and figure out what you make with the hours involved, you make less then minimum wage! That is not to say that I don’t make good money, I do. But time worked that is not paid, plus the time spent away from home brings your average way down.

This is not a vacation; I have seen all 48 states of the continental USA, every province of Canada, The Northern Territories, Alaska, and the Border of Mexico, all through the windshield of a truck. I have seen a lot. However, I very rarely get to go sightseeing. Try pulling an 18 wheeler into a national park, and see what you are told, or try taking a truck into downtown and find a show to park at, in most cases it ain’t going to happen. Unless you have friends that are willing to come pick you up, most of your time off is spent in your truck at a truck stop, or terminal. Even personal time out on the road is limited. You would think that we could drop our trailer and take the truck only to get around. Well, in today’s trucking you are now tracked by satellite, every move you make is recorded, and your dispatcher can tell where you are at right down to the block number. This is not as much of a problem if you own your own truck, however as an owner-operator you have to report every mile the truck runs to the government for road tax reasons, so you really don’t want to go running around to much!

Most of America thinks that their products come from the storeroom in the back of the store; they don’t think any farther then that. If you can think of one thing that is not delivered by a truck driver please let me know, but I doubt that you can. At some point a piece of everything ends up on a truck, and people like me are there to get it where it needs to go. Birthdays and holidays are nothing when you drive a truck. In 1997 I spent Christmas day driving through Utah and Colorado, and Christmas dinner was at a truck stop. The morning after Christmas I delivered my load, the receiver asked where I lived; I told him, he said “Gee, too bad you were not home for Christmas, but we really needed this product for an after Christmas sale.” So there you go, they need it, your life is put on hold. I did get home on New Years, and that was when I got to celebrate my Christmas. This is not something that is uncommon, its more common then anything.

Being out on the highway is normally the best part about this job. Once the freight is on the trailer, and you have made your way out of the city into open country, you can relax and enjoy what you do. Then there are times when you have to fight just to keep rolling. Last November I got caught up in a Midwest winter storm. I only had 10,000 lbs. in the trailer (I can haul 47,000 lbs.) After spending a good part of the night fighting snow and ice, trying my best to keep the trailer behind me, I decided to call it a night. After about 4 hours of sleep I got back up and pointed west. The winds had picked up. Blowing out of the north at about 70mph. I played Hell trying to keep the truck on the road. About 40 miles from Cedar Rapids, Iowa the wind gusts where close to 100mph, with a 70mph steady. There where 4 of us running together for some moral support if nothing else. As we all came around a sweeping corner to the right, a gust hit us all hard. The truck in front of me was blown over, the two trucks behind me where blown over, I went up on 9 wheels and came back down on all 18 just in time to swerve and miss the truck that was in front of me. I pulled over and made sure everybody was OK, and called the cops, then made my way to the next truck stop. I called my dispatcher and told him what had happened and that I was shutting down. I sat for 13 hours until the wind died enough to go again. The customer had begged me to try and make it on time, or their assembly line would come to a stop. It is hard to make up 13 hours of driving time, and all I will admit to is that I made my appointment time with 5 minutes to spare! This is one of many stories that can be told about fighting and beating the elements. The other trucks that I was running with were not so lucky! There have also been times when I wasn’t so lucky myself, one night a drunk driver caused me to roll my truck. I was lucky in the sense that I am here to tell you about it, and I should not have been!

You would think that shippers and receivers would be glad to see you. Not true! In most cases you are treated like shit! If you happen to be at a grocery warehouse you will end up unloading your own load, taking it off of the pallets that it was shipped on, and putting it on theirs according to the way they want it stacked. Then you will pallet jack it down an aisle where they will count and put it away. Ask for a bathroom, you are not allowed to use it, ask for a phone, again you are not allowed to use it. The only thing you are allowed to do there is work for them. If you are 5 minutes late for an appointment, you are told to come back the next day. If you are on time, you will end up waiting for a couple of hours just to get a door to back into. If you are more than 30 minutes early, you are not allowed on the property. You are nothing more than cheap labor! Again this is more common than not, and the whole time you are there you have to keep a smile on your face and put up with it.

You are also a target for a lot of states. You are a great revenue source. If you get a ticket you are not likely to come back and fight it, so you are most likely to get a bogus ticket. Tickets for truck drivers are 3 times as much as for other drivers. The average speeding ticket starts around $200.00 and they go up from there. If you happen to be in California, they start at around $1500.00. Truck scales in some states can be the same way. That is not to say that there are not nice cops out there. I have gotten out of more tickets then I would care to admit.

Should you still decide that you want to drive a truck, truck-driving schools are about the only way to learn. There was a time when the only way you could learn was from another driver, and to be honest with you, I wish it where still that way. However, trucking companies will not hire inexperienced drivers unless they have some kind of school behind them. I don’t recommend schools, I have never had to deal with them, only their product, and in most cases I do not get close enough to find out where they went to school. So let me instead give you some suggestions. You can not learn what you need to know in a week, two weeks, or even three weeks. The longer you are in school, the better. Look for a school that gives you as much driving time as they do book time. The book knowledge is great to know, but a book does not drive a truck, and in most cases the writer of the book never has either. Once you have completed school, and get hired on with a company you will end up with a trainer for a month or so. After that you are on your own. At that point I recommend that you open up your eyes and shut your mouth. When you don’t know something, admit it; then ask. If you think it is a stupid question, ask anyhow. If the driver you asked thinks it a stupid question, ask another driver. If you cant back up a trailer very good, have somebody spot you. I was watching a driver who was new try to back into a very tight dock at a Safeway Warehouse in Portland. After almost an hour at it, he still was not backed into the dock. I asked him if he would like me to put it in there for him. His Answer “I have to learn sometime, might as well be now.” Great Answer; I spotted him to make sure he wouldn’t hit anything, and he eventually got it in the dock. In the winter never drive above your comfort zone. If other drivers are passing you, let them pass. They either know what they are doing, or will end up in a ditch. If the drivers on the CB are telling you to go faster, and the only reason they give you is that they need to go, shut off the CB. When you are in a truck stop, there is always some story being told. As I said, shut up and listen. Don’t tell your own, you will look like a fool. I have been at this game for 22 years. The stories stay the same, only the people telling them change. There are some good lessons in those stories, but there is a lot of crap as well. You need a good ear to sort it out. I can’t know it all. I learn something new all the time; I’m just not as stupid as I once was.

You can play the part of a truck driver really easy – get a chain drive wallet, some cowboy boots, western shirts, and a big buckle that says Peterbilt or something like that, and a cowboy hat or ball cap. But to be a truck driver is a lot different then what you see in the movies. It is hard work that takes a lot of commitment, with very little respect.

Why do I drive a truck? It was a dream. Why do I stay with it? I love what I do! Do I recommend it? Hmmm, I would have to talk to you to find out what makes you tick. It takes a special breed of person to be out here. Part Nomad, part Gypsy, and mostly Loner. You have way too much time to think, so you need to be comfortable with your thoughts. You have very little time to do, so again you need to be comfortable with your thoughts. What I do out on the road is not a game, nor is it a big adventure. What I do is my life, my highway, and most of all, my Dream! I drive for no other reason then that!

Originally published here.

Let me start off by saying that I love my job. The life that I lead is meant for me. I do what I do for many reasons, but the most important one is that I love what I do! So if this sounds like I am complaining, I am not, this is just the way it is.

To me there is nothing better than a full moon night, with some heat lightning off in the distance on a road that is all to myself. On a night like this I will sit back and listen to the rhythm of the tires on the road, solve a few problems in my mind, write a song, and really just enjoy what I do. To me this is why I drive a truck, and nothing more! Sound romantic? I guess it does, but there is a lot more to it than this. .
My average time out on the road is six weeks. When I do come home, I will take a week off and then go back out again. Now not all drivers drive this way, some are home once a week. The common practice is to be out about three weeks and then come home for a couple of days. The industry standard is that you get one day off for each week out on the road. A workweek consists of seventy hours. There is no overtime, and once you figure in all the hours that you don’t get paid for, or manage to hide, your average workweek is more like ninety to one hundred hours a week! This is just working time, but remember you don’t get to go home every night, you get to eat, sleep, and be trucking! The hours are long and very irregular. One day you will be trucking through the day, the next the night. You may deliver at 3:00AM or 10:00 PM. There is no such thing as a set schedule when you are a cross-country truck driver.

A lot of people think that we put freight in the trailer and go, we have a nice trip across country and deliver our goods. Well, the reality is that all pickups and deliveries are by appointments that we as drivers don’t set. There have been times where I have gone from LA to North Carolina in 42 hours. That leaves no time for sleep, and before you ask – NO I do not take drugs to stay awake!!! I drink a lot of coffee, smoke too much and take 15-minute power naps to keep going! Not all trips are like that, but if you are not getting as many miles in as you can, and you are not keeping your dispatcher happy, you are not going to make a living. If you sit down and figure out what you make with the hours involved, you make less then minimum wage! That is not to say that I don’t make good money, I do. But time worked that is not paid, plus the time spent away from home brings your average way down.

This is not a vacation; I have seen all 48 states of the continental USA, every province of Canada, The Northern Territories, Alaska, and the Border of Mexico, all through the windshield of a truck. I have seen a lot. However, I very rarely get to go sightseeing. Try pulling an 18 wheeler into a national park, and see what you are told, or try taking a truck into downtown and find a show to park at, in most cases it ain’t going to happen. Unless you have friends that are willing to come pick you up, most of your time off is spent in your truck at a truck stop, or terminal. Even personal time out on the road is limited. You would think that we could drop our trailer and take the truck only to get around. Well, in today’s trucking you are now tracked by satellite, every move you make is recorded, and your dispatcher can tell where you are at right down to the block number. This is not as much of a problem if you own your own truck, however as an owner-operator you have to report every mile the truck runs to the government for road tax reasons, so you really don’t want to go running around to much!

Most of America thinks that their products come from the storeroom in the back of the store; they don’t think any farther then that. If you can think of one thing that is not delivered by a truck driver please let me know, but I doubt that you can. At some point a piece of everything ends up on a truck, and people like me are there to get it where it needs to go. Birthdays and holidays are nothing when you drive a truck. In 1997 I spent Christmas day driving through Utah and Colorado, and Christmas dinner was at a truck stop. The morning after Christmas I delivered my load, the receiver asked where I lived; I told him, he said “Gee, too bad you were not home for Christmas, but we really needed this product for an after Christmas sale.” So there you go, they need it, your life is put on hold. I did get home on New Years, and that was when I got to celebrate my Christmas. This is not something that is uncommon, its more common then anything.

Being out on the highway is normally the best part about this job. Once the freight is on the trailer, and you have made your way out of the city into open country, you can relax and enjoy what you do. Then there are times when you have to fight just to keep rolling. Last November I got caught up in a Midwest winter storm. I only had 10,000 lbs. in the trailer (I can haul 47,000 lbs.) After spending a good part of the night fighting snow and ice, trying my best to keep the trailer behind me, I decided to call it a night. After about 4 hours of sleep I got back up and pointed west. The winds had picked up. Blowing out of the north at about 70mph. I played Hell trying to keep the truck on the road. About 40 miles from Cedar Rapids, Iowa the wind gusts where close to 100mph, with a 70mph steady. There where 4 of us running together for some moral support if nothing else. As we all came around a sweeping corner to the right, a gust hit us all hard. The truck in front of me was blown over, the two trucks behind me where blown over, I went up on 9 wheels and came back down on all 18 just in time to swerve and miss the truck that was in front of me. I pulled over and made sure everybody was OK, and called the cops, then made my way to the next truck stop. I called my dispatcher and told him what had happened and that I was shutting down. I sat for 13 hours until the wind died enough to go again. The customer had begged me to try and make it on time, or their assembly line would come to a stop. It is hard to make up 13 hours of driving time, and all I will admit to is that I made my appointment time with 5 minutes to spare! This is one of many stories that can be told about fighting and beating the elements. The other trucks that I was running with were not so lucky! There have also been times when I wasn’t so lucky myself, one night a drunk driver caused me to roll my truck. I was lucky in the sense that I am here to tell you about it, and I should not have been!

You would think that shippers and receivers would be glad to see you. Not true! In most cases you are treated like shit! If you happen to be at a grocery warehouse you will end up unloading your own load, taking it off of the pallets that it was shipped on, and putting it on theirs according to the way they want it stacked. Then you will pallet jack it down an aisle where they will count and put it away. Ask for a bathroom, you are not allowed to use it, ask for a phone, again you are not allowed to use it. The only thing you are allowed to do there is work for them. If you are 5 minutes late for an appointment, you are told to come back the next day. If you are on time, you will end up waiting for a couple of hours just to get a door to back into. If you are more than 30 minutes early, you are not allowed on the property. You are nothing more than cheap labor! Again this is more common than not, and the whole time you are there you have to keep a smile on your face and put up with it.

You are also a target for a lot of states. You are a great revenue source. If you get a ticket you are not likely to come back and fight it, so you are most likely to get a bogus ticket. Tickets for truck drivers are 3 times as much as for other drivers. The average speeding ticket starts around $200.00 and they go up from there. If you happen to be in California, they start at around $1500.00. Truck scales in some states can be the same way. That is not to say that there are not nice cops out there. I have gotten out of more tickets then I would care to admit.

Should you still decide that you want to drive a truck, truck-driving schools are about the only way to learn. There was a time when the only way you could learn was from another driver, and to be honest with you, I wish it where still that way. However, trucking companies will not hire inexperienced drivers unless they have some kind of school behind them. I don’t recommend schools, I have never had to deal with them, only their product, and in most cases I do not get close enough to find out where they went to school. So let me instead give you some suggestions. You can not learn what you need to know in a week, two weeks, or even three weeks. The longer you are in school, the better. Look for a school that gives you as much driving time as they do book time. The book knowledge is great to know, but a book does not drive a truck, and in most cases the writer of the book never has either. Once you have completed school, and get hired on with a company you will end up with a trainer for a month or so. After that you are on your own. At that point I recommend that you open up your eyes and shut your mouth. When you don’t know something, admit it; then ask. If you think it is a stupid question, ask anyhow. If the driver you asked thinks it a stupid question, ask another driver. If you cant back up a trailer very good, have somebody spot you. I was watching a driver who was new try to back into a very tight dock at a Safeway Warehouse in Portland. After almost an hour at it, he still was not backed into the dock. I asked him if he would like me to put it in there for him. His Answer “I have to learn sometime, might as well be now.” Great Answer; I spotted him to make sure he wouldn’t hit anything, and he eventually got it in the dock. In the winter never drive above your comfort zone. If other drivers are passing you, let them pass. They either know what they are doing, or will end up in a ditch. If the drivers on the CB are telling you to go faster, and the only reason they give you is that they need to go, shut off the CB. When you are in a truck stop, there is always some story being told. As I said, shut up and listen. Don’t tell your own, you will look like a fool. I have been at this game for 22 years. The stories stay the same, only the people telling them change. There are some good lessons in those stories, but there is a lot of crap as well. You need a good ear to sort it out. I can’t know it all. I learn something new all the time; I’m just not as stupid as I once was.

You can play the part of a truck driver really easy – get a chain drive wallet, some cowboy boots, western shirts, and a big buckle that says Peterbilt or something like that, and a cowboy hat or ball cap. But to be a truck driver is a lot different then what you see in the movies. It is hard work that takes a lot of commitment, with very little respect.

Why do I drive a truck? It was a dream. Why do I stay with it? I love what I do! Do I recommend it? Hmmm, I would have to talk to you to find out what makes you tick. It takes a special breed of person to be out here. Part Nomad, part Gypsy, and mostly Loner. You have way too much time to think, so you need to be comfortable with your thoughts. You have very little time to do, so again you need to be comfortable with your thoughts. What I do out on the road is not a game, nor is it a big adventure. What I do is my life, my highway, and most of all, my Dream! I drive for no other reason then that!

Originally published here.