Roll On
An Ode to Snaggletooth, a.k.a. my dad
When I was a kid we had a small embroidered pillow that said, “We Make Our Bucks by Trucks.” I don’t know what ever happened to that thing; maybe it got lost in a move, sold in a yard sale, tossed in the trash, or more likely, it’s resting in my mom’s hope chest.
My dad retired last year after driving a truck for nearly 40 years. He estimates that in his career he drove more than 3 million miles (approx. 5 million km) as a conservative estimate. For some perspective, that’s good for almost 7 trips to the moon and back. He loved driving a big truck, and he considered himself fortunate that he’d been able to have a career doing something that he loved. Not that there weren’t sacrifices along the way.
He worked for a couple of different trucking companies over the years. Some of them are long gone, defunct, or merged with bigger operators. In those early days, he did real long haul driving, where he’d zip from state to state, traveling for many days at a time without coming home. One thing about trucking is that you get paid by the mile, so if you aren’t moving, you aren’t making money.
My dad was a hard-working man. He once said to me that he’d always hit it hard out of the gate — the expression he always used was “hauling ass” — driving as fast as possible for as long as possible to save the most time. These days there are strict rules to regulate driving hours, and I suppose there were back then too, but he said it wasn’t unusual to drive 13 or 14 hours nonstop, sleep for a few hours, then be back at it.
Meanwhile, I was home and very much a momma’s boy. I don’t recall his working schedule during my childhood. If I had to guess, I’d say he’d be gone for a week or so at a time, back home for a few days, then back on the road again. When he was home, we’d play catch in the front yard or he’d take me fishing.
There was a song I’d play on cassette just before I went to bed, “Roll On (Eighteen Wheeler)” by Alabama. I’m sure it must have been my mom’s cassette, since she’s always been the country music listener of the family, but she let me borrow it so that I could listen to it half a dozen times a night.
My dad has plenty of stories from his years on the road. Hell, it’s how he met my mom in the first place, through my uncle. He was a dispatcher that had asked my dad to help my mom move from Indiana back to New York. The rest, they say, is history. Then there’s the story of when he found out I had been conceived, trapped up in Minnesota under several feet of snow on a payphone next to a parking lot. There are also stories like the time he went into a real dump of a motel and found an actual dump under the bedsheets. He checked outta that one.
Later, in my teenage years, I’d go on trips with him during my summer break. He’d hand me a large, laminated atlas and I’d have to figure out our route. Nevermind he already knew all the roads like the back of his hand. One time we went down through Texas, then turned west through New Mexico, close enough to the border that we could have hit baseballs over the Rio Grande, before reaching our destination in Arizona. The highway in those parts is long and straight, dusty desert for as far as the eye can see. A car might pass in the other direction maybe every ten minutes or so, while we were hauling ass in the middle of nowhere.
I wore my wraparound Terminator sunglasses and would nod off sitting straight up in my seat. At some point my dad asked, “Would you like to drive?” I was thirteen or fourteen at the time; my feet couldn’t even reach the pedals. But of course I wanted to drive. As I kid I loved to honk the horn — not the normal horn, but the super loud air horn that you activated by pulling a cord above the driver’s side window. So, on this occasion, I sat on my dad’s lap and he let me steer the wheel. And then I honked the horn.
On another trip, we were heading down south to make a delivery of animal feed to Tampa Bay. On our approach to Orlando, my dad asked if I wanted to spend a day at Disney World. We got day passes to Magic Kingdom and, since this was the middle of July, spent what seemed like half the day waiting to do Splash Mountain. My favorite ride, however, was the Pirates of the Caribbean, and in the hour before the park closed, with the lines reduced to zero, I insisted on doing it over and over again.
By the time I was in high school, my dad changed companies to American Freightways, which was later bought out by FedEx. There, they ran a hub system, where rather than pulling a trailer with freight for a string of different destinations, he’d only run to one place and back the same day. Well, this is trucking, so he mostly ran at night, depending on his bid.
Still, that’s a long time in the saddle. For example, the longest single day run FedEx offered was from St. Louis to Memphis, a mere 600 miles (965 km) a night. Five nights a week. In his career, he traveled to all 48 continental states; and yet, for many of them, he only ever saw them from the highway through a moving window.
But now, for him, he says every day is Saturday. Retirement suits him well. There’s less stress now that he isn’t behind the wheel of a tractor trailer, racing red eye across the country. He used to have nightmares of flipping a truck, but he was fortunate, skilled, and lucky, and never had a serious accident.
These days the industry is changing. Automated vehicles are becoming more advanced and more prevalent. Already, the Kenworth trucks my dad used in his last few years on the road have an enormous amount of technology to keep the truck between the lines or able to control the distance between the truck and the car ahead. In the next five to ten years, it stands to reason the role of the driver will be reduced further still, which will have a lasting impact on the economy, especially considering something like 3.5 million people are professional truck drivers in the U.S.
So my dad is glad he got out when he did. No regrets. Now his days are free to annoy my mom and play golf, although maybe not in that order. The two of them recently bought a camper and have decided to be on the road again, but this time at their own leisure, stopping where they want, when they want. Now both of you can take all the time you need. You’ve earned it.
Happy Father’s Day!
