by Finn Murphy
This South Carolina stretch of I-95 is wallpapered with a zillion different billboards. The most common among them are the ones for SOUTH OF THE BORDER, simply the largest, tackiest, tourist trap in the Milky Way.
One thing South Carolina does have is an excellent public radio system. From any point in the state you can pick a station up. The two best public radio networks are in South Carolina and Maine. Virginia is a mess. I understand why that happened in Maine, but South Carolina? Given the rest of its atavistic infrastructure, it’s a mystery. There’s absolutely nothing there. Once in a while I’ll see someone fishing from a bridge but that’s it. There doesn’t appear to be a lot of opportunity for blacks, or whites for that matter, in rural South Carolina. Get a few miles off the highway and it’s hard to believe you’re in the United States. It looks more like South Africa. One of the things I like about the moving business is its equal opportunity attitude. The work is so hard and held in such low esteem that there’s not a lot of room left over for bigotry. Anyone who will do this job is accepted. This did not go unnoticed by a large group of black men who flocked to the industry in the 1960s as long-haul drivers. North American Van Lines was proudly nicknamed North African Van Lines because it had so many black drivers. Just about the time I got on the road these guys were starting to retire, but I did get to know quite a few of them. Every one of them owned his own home and had put money away for retirement. I knew two who had second homes in Florida. They had nothing but good things to say about North American Van Lines and the moving business.
Once I made it through the gauntlet of SOUTH OF THE BORDER signs and reached the North Carolina border, it was fifty miles to Fayetteville, home of Fort Bragg—Fayettenam, as it’s known, because it’s the home of the 82nd Airborne and was one of the main clearinghouses for anyone heading over to Southeast Asia in the 1960s and ’70s. I’ve done a lot of work there over the years. Right in the center of town they’ve got the 1832 Market House, where slaves were bought and sold up until 1865. Orbiting the market for miles in all directions you have the typical economic support system for an American military town. That means pawn shops, secondhand car dealers, pawn shops, secondhand furniture dealers, secondhand clothing stores, pawn shops, gun stores, all-you-can-eat cafeterias, and, oh God, how could I forget, mobile homes and prefab home sales. Then you run the gamut of strip clubs and bowling alleys.
It’s the pawnshops that give me pause. I’ve moved a bunch of military folks—nobody moves people around like the military—and they’re no different from their countrymen in wanting the car, the house, the big TV, the guns, and the sound system. Just like their countrymen, they want it all, right now, today if possible. It’s the American way, but military people don’t make enough money to have it all right now, or actually . . . ever. That’s one part of it. The other part of it is they have kids, lots of them, way more kids than families in the civilian world have, so that eats even further into their disposable income. In addition to that you have to factor in young enlisted men; I mean who else goes to strip clubs, right? (OK. Wrong. Lots of middle-aged truckers go to strip clubs.) Many of these these young enlisted folks get married young, aren’t used to a steady income, and are easy prey for salesmen banging on their doors. The signs on the mobile home lots all say that if you come in with a military ID there’s no credit check, no down payment, easy terms. Ergo, all the pawnshops. A pawnshop is a ruthless indicator of flawed financial planning. When you encounter a galaxy of pawnshops, like in Fayetteville, you don’t need to be Lord Keynes to figure out what’s going on.
When you move people and pack their stuff, you see how people really live, not how they want the neighbors to think they live. Louise DeSalvo wrote in a book called On Moving that “packing is a full-scale life inspection.” She’s spot on. I get to see the filthy bathrooms, the dirty dishes, the eight-year-old in diapers, the empty booze bottles, everything. The intimacy is immediate and merciless. I don’t ask for this and I take no voyeuristic pleasure from it. Well, occasionally I do, but not often. It’s just part of the job. As a driver, I get to set my boundaries, but a shipper doesn’t. Shippers sense this, and they react to it with various ineffective defensive strategies. The most common is to make the movers anonymous. This makes the revelation of their life contradictions irrelevant. Basic linguistics supports my view: I’m waiting for the movers, The movers are here, The movers just left . . . We’re not real people. We get tagged and filed away as a nebulous group of anonymous wraiths in order to deemphasize the intimacy. Regardless of psychological gymnastics, we know what we see, and many of us learn from it. It’s a rare mover who becomes a collector of anything. Even rarer is a mover who gets hung up on the “sentimental value” of objects. After more than three thousand moves I know that everyone has almost the exact same stuff and I certainly know where it’s all going to end up. It’s going to end up in a yard sale or in a dumpster. It might take a generation, though usually not, but Aunt Tillie’s sewing machine is getting tossed. So is your high school yearbook and grandma’s needlepoint doily of the Eiffel Tower. Most people save the kids kindergarten drawings and the IKEA bookcases. After the basement and attic are full it’s off to a mini-storage to put aside more useless stuff. A decade or three down the road when the estate is settled and nobody wants to pay the storage fees anymore, off it all will go into the ether. This is not anecdotal. I know because I’m the guy who puts it all into the dumpster.
Movers are there at the beginning point of accumulation and all the points to the bitter end, so we tend to develop a Buddhist view of attachment. We do not covet your stuff. It’s freight. We’ll take the best care we can because you’re paying for that and we’re responsible for the damage claim. But we don’t care on any other so-called higher level because no higher level actually exists. Sentimental value of stuff is a graven image and a mug’s game. The only beneficiary is the self-storage guy. What my customers need to know is that it’s not the stuff but the connection with people and family and friends that matters. Practically everyone I move gets this wrong.
Be nice to your movers. What we do care about is making your transition into a new life and place as easy as possible by being professional and sympathetic. I think that’s a responsible job and a worthy occupation. When we’re allowed to do that, which isn’t often, because most people are more concerned about their crockpot than a proper transition to a new life, you’ll find out that we’re on your side. When people let that happen, they’re always surprised, and they relax.
I entered Virginia and immediately upped my game. Truckers call Virginia the Communist State because of its strict enforcement of highway laws and the harsh state police. They’re especially tough at the weigh stations. Everyone has seen weigh stations, but most people probably have only have a vague idea what they are. Here’s how they work: The federal weight limit for Class 8 trucks (tractor-trailers) on interstate highways is 80,000 pounds. That’s because the road surface is engineered to support that. An overweight vehicle stresses the road surface. Roadways are designed to last a certain amount of time, and an early breakdown of the road means higher unbudgeted expenditures. Municipal finance types hate overweight trucks for that reason, and they transfer that hate to their minions. In Virginia it’s open season on trucks. Other states are less aggressive. All trucks are required to pull into all weigh stations or face a hefty fine. When I pull in, the scale has three platforms: one for the front axle, the second for the drive axles, and the third for the trailer axles. Each axle has its own weight limit in addition to the gross vehicle weight limit. If you’re overweight there’s a fine.
Weigh stations are operated by the state’s Department of Transportation, and they’ll also use the opportunity to check logbooks, truck maintenance reports, vehicle registrations, permits, insurance, and driver licensing. The regulations and compliance metrics get stricter every year, which is one reason I get on my high horse about the free-ranging trucker cowboy myth. There’s nothing more regulated than a
trucker hauling for a big company. (I was going through Kansas one time when a thunderstorm came through. You’ve never seen weird weather like a midsummer Kansas thunderstorm. I pulled into a rest area to wait it out and started chatting with a FedEx driver in the lobby. We hadn’t talked for two minutes when his phone rang. It was a compliance operative from a call center in Mumbai: “You’ve been redlined for making an unauthorized stop. What’s going on?” They had his truck on GPS. All FedEx trucks are on GPS. It’s getting even worse. Now some big freighthauling companies have 24/7 video in the cab. That ain’t Wild West freedom, folks, that’s Big Brother.)
You hear a lot these days about driverless cars, but what the people who run things really want are driverless trucks. It’s the missing link. Loads are already operated robotically. When a driver pulls into certain distribution centers, he opens the door and a bunch of machines empty the trailer and put away the goods. His truck is then loaded by another cadre of machines. There’s one warehouse guy making twelve bucks an hour watching computers and robots loading several dozen trailers. One guy is still one too many, though, and a couple dozen truck drivers waiting around is unacceptably inefficient. Real people will want health insurance and a living wage. Better to get rid of them entirely. No theft, no sick days, and no pensions.
Anyway, I always get nailed at Virginia weigh stations. If I loaded the nose of the trailer too tight I’d pop over the weight limit. The last time I was caught it was three in the morning at the Woodbridge weigh station on I-95 just south of DC. They’re never closed, curse ’em. Generally if I’m over on my weight it means I have a lot of loads on, which means I’m in a hurry to try to get them off. So they pulled me in and kept me waiting. This Virginia trooper was really taking his time, and I was starting to fume. He finally wrote up his fine, and it turned out I was over 280 pounds on the drives and the fine was sixty-one dollars. I’m never overweight by very much, so it’s not like I’m destroying the roadway. The trooper handed me the receipt, and I said, “I hope you’re real happy with the sixty-one dollars,” He exploded. He put me up against the wall, yanked the wallet out of my pocket, pulled out my license, and called it in to see if it was clean. After thirty minutes, the trooper returned my license, smiled, and said, “Well, driver, tell your trucker buddies what happens when you mouth off to a Virginia state trooper.” I answered, “Yes sir, I will, sir.”
Happy to leave Virginia behind, I cruised through Maryland and crossed into Delaware. The toll attendant (can you imagine a more anachronistic job?) looked like she was fourteen years old. I asked her if it wasn’t past her bedtime, and she gave me a dirty look. Tollbooths are a particularly vexing aspect of truck driving. They tie up traffic and are completely unnecessary. We already pay to use the road through fuel taxes based on our weight and mileage, so they’re double dipping besides slowing everything down.
The road was starting to get really bumpy and would get bumpier into North Jersey. Up through here you have to keep the seat belt cinched down real tight or you’ll bang your head on the ceiling and knock yourself out.
My universe was firing on all cylinders as I pushed north on Interstate 95, putting Exit 12 Carteret/Rahway in North Jersey behind me. Yellow sodium arc lights from the factories, refineries, and warehouses discharged a murky, stagelit glow onto the gantry towers at Port Elizabeth. The horizon was broken by steel girders, steel cranes, steel storage tanks, steel trains, steel bridges, and steel ships. I had “Born to Run” blasting out from the oversize speakers, which sit on my sleeper mattress stuck to the back wall with strips of Velcro. (Last month in Miami I slammed on the brakes coming over the crest of a blind hill on the Southeast Expressway where the traffic was completely stopped. Both speakers hurled forward. One hit me on the back of my head, and the other cracked the right windshield. I’ve got two living-room-size Polk Audio speakers in the sleeper and two Visonik Little Davids sitting cozily on a pillow on the dashboard. Me being me, I replaced the windshield and put the speakers back on the Velcro, figuring I’d never have to slam on the brakes that hard ever again. Wrong.)
Coming into metro New York from points west or south has always supercharged me, but doing it in a big truck is pure adrenaline. This is the closest I ever come to feeling the true essence of life on the road. I’ve got a hard-muscled body, a big, comfortable, new tractor hauling a 53-foot moving trailer, grooving with my killer sound system, a 30-ounce Dr Cola in the holder. There’s the whistle of the supercharger as I shift into thirteenth gear, the whoosh of the air dryer, my mouth slightly sour, arms shaking from the pounding of the wheel, making money, setting my own schedule, the Manhattan skyline on my right, flying fast and furious on my way up to home plate in Connecticut. I’m inside sixty miles of tremendously satisfying task saturation, what I call threading the needle. Me and the monster truck are hurtling through sixteen lanes of the most intense, dangerous, and exhilarating piece of roadway ever devised by man, and I’m the king of it all with my truck, my tunes, and my big independence. All the stories, the longings, the dreams, the books, the movies, the songs, the great American Dream of chucking it all and hitting the road? Well, right at this moment, I am the song.
These moments don’t last long. Exhilaration will step aside and make room for the other reality that’s always pushing to get in. Are these brief moments of euphoria worth the punishing loneliness, the physical abuse, and the lack of direction my job entails? Right now the answer is yes. Tomorrow morning, after three hours of fitful sleep, when I wake up shivering in the cold sleeper and stagger into a truckstop looking at another frozen burrito for breakfast, the answer will be no. My ambivalence, after almost ten years doing this, is starting to coalesce. Sometimes I can see the end coming but I’m stuck. Something will need to happen that will break me out. Some days I pray for that. I guess I’m not the master of my ship after all. Is that maturity, or is that resignation?
I parked my rig at 2 a.m. at the Callahan Bros. warehouse. I’d driven 1,095 miles in a little over twenty-two hours.
The next morning I was awakened by a loud bang against the side of my truck. I jerked up completely disoriented and terrified. I opened the curtain a slit, looked in my mirror, and saw Little Al at the tail end of my trailer holding a two-by-four like a baseball bat and giving me the finger. I had no idea where I was until I looked out the other side and saw I was parked in the Callahan Bros. yard along the fence rail under the drinking tree. Al was walking back to his straight truck, laughing. It was ten minutes after eight on a fucking Sunday morning.
I didn’t find Little Al’s wake-up call funny. I felt like ripping him to pieces, but since it was Little Al, who had been my mentor, I didn’t. Since I was in my sleeper and naked, I lurched over and mooned the crew as they drove past. They’ll be telling that one under the tree on Monday.
I got dressed and walked past Dan’s Service Station over to the Callahan office. John was there checking to make sure Little Al’s crew took off before going to church. John looked up from his desk and smiled.
“How’s it going, fella? I thought you were in Florida.” John never knew where I was.
“That was yesterday.”
“You need anything?”
“I need some cartons and a few pads. I’m heading up to Vermont today and loading back to Florida. I was hoping to get some cash.”
“How much do you want?”
“Three thousand.”
“I’ll be right back.” A couple of minutes later John returned and handed me thirty Ben Franklins. “You know you’ve got a lot more than that in your account. I think it’s about forty thousand dollars. What do you want me to do with it?”
“Hang on to it for now. I’ll just load the equipment and head out.”
“Are you OK, Murph? You’ve been running pretty hard.”
“I’m OK, John. Just tired. See you later.” That was my stop at home plate.
Thirty-six miles south of White River Junction, Vermont, on I-91, I was running an easy 65 up and down the h
ills. It was a lovely afternoon. There was the Connecticut River on my right and to my left a forest, then a patch of pasture, and a white farmhouse with a red barn. I saw a green sign that read SCENIC VIEW 1 MILE, so I slowed down to get off and take a look. Then I saw the next sign: NO TRUCKS. So much for seeing the country in a tractor trailer.
Vermonters have a totally different way of looking at life than the strip mall desert denizens of Florida. There’s a Yankee stubbornness the way the farms are built into the hillsides and the way they all keep a certain distance from each other. It must be hell trying to make a living off this land. It’s odd how Vermont’s topography and geography are so pleasant and it’s such a nice climate, but practically nobody lives here. Florida, which has a depressive climate and no topography, has people flocking there.
In St. Johnsbury I needed directions to the agent’s office, so I pulled into a general store. The blight of the Quik Stop and Kum & Go hasn’t completely infected New England yet, though I’ve no doubt it will. The woman inside was reading Buddenbrooks. I disturbed her. You definitely would not find a store clerk reading Thomas Mann in South Carolina. As I walked out eating a strawberry shortcake ice cream bar, this little kid looked at me, then my truck, and gave me the victory sign: “Go, trucker, go!” Good old Vermont.
Chapter 5
SEVEN SHIPPERS
Moving is a risky and capricious industry. Moving companies and the people who own them are a conservative bunch, equally impervious to the grandiose aspirations of charlatans and to the self-serving dreams of the solid citizens who constitute their customer base. Companies that have risen above the subsistence level of a laborer with a truck are open boats tossing about in economic high seas. The business at this level is cyclical, capital intensive, and seasonal. That’s a particularly nasty combination bound to inculcate a certain degree of caution for those whose desire is to pass assets on to succeeding generations. Because of this innate caution, many of the early drayage companies are still around today: Wells Fargo began in 1852, Reebie Moving in Chicago in 1880, Holman in New Jersey in 1886, Security Storage of Washington, DC, in 1890, Bekins in Sioux City in 1891; countless others are still around and thriving. Wells Fargo of course, has moved on. Only 7 percent of all moving companies have more than fifty employees, 40 percent have fewer than five, and 96 percent are privately held. Another anomaly is the number of multigenerational families in the industry. Morgan Manhattan in New York City is a perfect and not at all uncommon example. Morgan was founded in 1851 by Patrick Morgan, an immigrant from Ireland, who got hold of a horse and wagon and started hauling household goods. Today Morgan Manhattan is a multimillion-dollar moving conglomerate still owned and operated by the Morgan family.