The Long Haul

by Finn Murphy

  The industry goes much further back than the nineteenth century. Short-haul moving was well developed in Europe and America in colonial times. The picture of a drayman with his horse and wagon brimming with furniture is a familiar one. A bit later we’ll have large companies like Russell, Majors, and Waddell running the Pony Express and consolidating wagon trains from St. Louis for the trek out west. These companies collected fees from the dreamers, town boosters, religious whackos, misanthropes, psychopaths, and real estate hucksters who populated the immutable myth Americans call “the Winning of the West.” The wagon train companies were actually primitive van lines, and the man in charge of the wagon train was the latter-day long-haul driver. Even today, the sleekest $60,000 moving trailer is essentially only a wagon, and the most modern $150,000 tractor is still rated in horsepower.

  Today’s moving companies grew in tandem with the development of trucks and roads in the early twentieth century. Up until about 1920, all long-distance moving was handled by railroads. Someone moving from New York to Chicago in 1900 would be better off selling everything and packing a suitcase. (It’s still the best way.) A household move back then required a shipper to contract with a drayage company at origin to pack everything in wooden barrels and crates and cart them to the station. There the railroad men would load everything into a boxcar for the trip to Chicago. Upon arrival, the shipper would contract with another drayage company to load the goods onto a wagon, deliver to the residence, and uncrate and unpack.

  If you think moving is expensive and a hassle now, back then it was a nightmare. This is a point I’d like to emphasize: Moving today is cheaper, safer, and performed better than at any time in history. Let’s go back fourteen thousand years to our forebears crossing the land bridge in the Bering Sea. Moving was a dice-roll with death.

  Sure, nowadays, every once in a while, something gets broken or lost. So? Nobody’s getting ambushed and cut to pieces on a frozen mountain pass. Nobody’s being forced to eat their mother-in-law due to a lack of forage. Nobody’s getting their wagonload of household goods set on fire by hostile natives. I’m a careful mover. I respect people’s stuff, but shit happens. You know why? Because you’re moving it. Leave the piano in the living room for three generations. It will be fine. You want to put it somewhere else, guess what? You’re taking a risk. Did you ever move your leg the wrong way and spend two weeks in a brace? Ever drop a cell phone in a toilet? Ever move a sofa to vacuum underneath and put a scratch on the floor? Most of us have done at least one of those things. I’ve done all those things. What I don’t understand is why, when a mover scratches a floor or dents a lampshade, it’s a justification for a ferocious freak-out at the entire industry. A quick lap around the internet will illustrate the dismal opinion of the moving industry by its customers. Most of it is vitriol, and some of it is, literally, insane. People go crazy when something happens to their stuff. The reaction, it appears to me, is generally overblown and not commensurate with the perceived offense.

  Here’s some perspective: The number three cause of death in the United States is medical error. Do doctors get vilified like movers? No. Some doctor gives you the wrong med, or the wrong dose, or the wrong diagnosis, and before you know it, you’re lying in a coroner’s fridge wearing a toe tag. This happens to hundreds of thousands of people every year, but people still go around in hushed tones deferring to “the Doctor.” Nobody goes on the internet to spew bile about how Dr. X killed his wife.

  And another thing, while I’m at it: The moving industry is often portrayed as this monolithic leviathan conspiring to separate as much money from its customers as it can grab. This monolith is actually thousands of individual enterprises, each with its own ideas about ethics and service. In truth, the moving industry is less like a leviathan and more like the Lebanese parliament. Each faction is vainly striving to achieve hegemony over its neighbors in an endless sequence of shifting alliances, treachery, and occasional benevolence.

  Up until the Great Depression, the trucking industry was unregulated. Anyone owning a truck could carry any product anywhere for whatever price he could negotiate. As the depression deepened, the major players in trucking petitioned the government for help. In 1935, Congress regulated all interstate motor transportation, setting up a centralized schedule of fees and essentially closing the industry to new entrants. For the next forty-five years, interstate trucking rates were contrived by Byzantine formulas cooked up in the smoke-filled back rooms of trucking-industry trade associations.

  The one exception was farm products. Transportation of farm products remained unregulated under the Agricultural Exemption of the 1935 law for two reasons. First was that American farmers wouldn’t stand for it. They’d already experienced the benefits of a government-sponsored cartel in the form of the railroads. Farmers had seen enough central planning, thank you very much, at least insofar as it related to transportation. That isn’t to say farmers didn’t want New Deal help in the form of price supports, because they did; they just didn’t want any other industries getting support. The second reason was the Roosevelt administration’s dilemma of how to keep food prices low for the general population while simultaneously boosting farm incomes. The only way to do both was to lower costs in the supply chain (i.e., transportation). The contradiction here is that while it was considered in the national interest to protect large trucking companies throughout the nonfarm economy, it was also considered in the national interest to keep agricultural trucking small and fragmented.

  This two-tiered trucking world is what spawned the trucker culture that exists to this day. Your hourly driver is a union man, or a company man, anyway. He’s paid a wage, is home most of the time, and has a pension plan, health insurance, and vacations. He’s the direct descendant of the regulatory system. Your independent driver is a private contractor. He leases or finances his own truck, is probably from a rural area of the Midwest, or Deep South, and is driving a truck because he can’t make a living farming, won’t work in a factory, and refuses to punch a time clock. He’s the direct descendant of the Agricultural Exemption system. The latter group is the culturally dominant one, and the hourly boys take all their cues from the gypsies. Everything from the ubiquity of country music to the cowboy hats and belt buckles, right down to the food in whatever restaurants are left, are remnants of the anti-urban, anti-statist, anti-union origins of the wildcat drivers of the 1930s and ’40s. I personally find the whole thing maddeningly idiotic, as the gypsies would be the biggest beneficiaries of a bit of cartelization. As it stands now, most of them are over-the-road sharecroppers feeding their labor into the insatiable maw of Big Ag, which is happy enough to let them keep their cowboy myth in return for keeping all the money.

  Almost all long-haul movers are in the second group, as am I. I lease my truck, I set my own schedule, and my revenue is subject to the shifting winds of each load.

  I loaded my first shipment for this Florida trip in Lyndonville, Vermont, north of St. Johnsbury in the early morning. My first shipper’s name was Murray, and it was 1,000 pounds going to Kendall, Florida. It was a mini shipment, maybe thirty pieces or so, and I loaded it at the warehouse which was one of the now unused hangers at Lyndonville’s defunct airport. The road to it was the runway. This was the smallest North American agent I’d been to. The guy who owned it was an ex-long-haul driver taking a shot at owning his own business. I wished him well but didn’t have high hopes.

  My second pickup was in a town called Marshfield. I encountered a low bridge outside of town. I didn’t get much of a warning. The sign that said LOW CLEARANCE AHEAD 13 FEET was only twenty yards from the bridge. My trailer runs 13’4”, but I squeaked under it, going slowly with my head out the window looking backward. Truckers call hitting a low bridge “getting a haircut.” So far I’ve avoided that travesty. I haven’t used a runaway truck ramp either. Yet.

  This shipment was another 1,000-pound mini belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Howell, who were moving to Largo. They were a charming elderl
y couple. When I arrived it was just noon, so they invited me to sit down with them for lunch. They served homemade Vermont pickled beets, turkey salad sandwiches, and hot tea. They told me they had come to Marshfield from Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1957 when they bought the general store. Mrs. Howell said the locals were at first suspicious of them, being as they were from out of town, and worse from out of state, and worse from the Deep South, i.e., Massachusetts. After more than forty years in Marshfield they were giving up on winter and snowbirding south. The Howells had bought a double-wide trailer in a retirement park. I hoped they would adjust well down there. It’s true that winters in Florida are mild, but the rest of the year it’s a blazing inferno.

  I picked up two more little ones, a Mr. Gross and a Mr. Warren, at a warehouse in Essex Junction and started the three-hundred-mile trudge to Bangor. When you’re a dispatcher sitting in a cube in Indiana, New England looks pretty small, but it isn’t. There are no east/west interstates and my trek on US Route 2 took forever. I went up and over the White Mountains, through New Hampshire and into Maine, breezing through one dead or dying town after another. I hit Dysart’s Truck Stop in Bangor at 3 a.m. and crawled into the sleeper. Five hours later I arrived at Central Maine Moving & Storage on the dot of 8 a.m. Of course nobody was there. This was another one of those weird agents I enjoy going to. This place wasn’t a regular warehouse either; it was an old elementary school. Someone finally showed up around eight fifteen, and while I waited for the paperwork, I sat down in one of those school desks like we had in seventh grade. The classrooms were used as storage units. I kept expecting a bell to go off and see some nun fingering a detention slip and asking me what I was doing.

  I had called this agent a few days ago to arrange for some help. They gave me one of their regular guys and told me to pay him twelve dollars an hour. I picked up the bill of lading and directions, and we drove off to South Bangor to load 3,000 pounds belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, who were moving to Naples, Florida. Mr. Taylor had sold his accounting business the year before, and part of the deal was that he had to stay awhile and help them operate it. Now he was moving from a three-story Victorian into a ranch house on a golf course.

  My helper’s name was Warren Pease, I swear to God. He was a thorough professional, and we loaded the Taylors in no time.

  One of the dirty secrets of the moving business is that a shipper has no idea what kind of human offal a driver might pick up for day labor. Often I can pick up help from the local agent, but not always. At truckstops there are always guys dangling around looking for a day’s work; they’re what we call lot helpers. I can’t get from my truck to the fuel desk at any truckstop in the country without some guy asking, “Hey, driver, you need any help today?” Sometimes they even bang on the truck and wake me up. It can be very annoying or very useful depending upon my labor requirements, though banging on the side of a truck is never a good idea. It’s a great way to get a bullet in the head. Over the years I’ve been reduced to picking up help in soup kitchens, parole offices, and the corner bar.

  The higher-end work I do now requires my laborers to have passed a background check, and their names have to be on file with the van line. No longer can I just pick up a guy from the truckstop who may or may not ransack your medicine cabinet to score your expired Oxycontin. I’ve got a little black book with the names of top-notch, executive-class movers in forty-eight states. I don’t give out those names to anyone because these guys are well-paid professionals in high demand.

  This trip had me in a daze. Normally I’ll run with three, maybe four shipments. This time I had seven; two of them entailed extra pickups and deliveries going to six different cities, ending in Key West. Most of the shipments were small, and I’d gotten them all mixed in with each other. They wouldn’t be unloading in the sequence they went on, either, so I’d be digging some of them out. I knew I had to be empty on the Sunday of the last week of the month. Hardly anyone moves out of Florida except in a coffin. I’ve heard there’s a mortician in New York who’s cornered the market on snowbird cadavers. That’s a shame. I could probably get two hundred coffins in the truck and get them up there before they started to stink too bad if the price was right. No damage claims, no crazy shippers.

  I had three more to pick up after Bangor, so I headed south. I stopped at Hal’s Truck Stop in Kittery to grab a shower. I fell asleep in the truckstop parking lot listening to All Things Considered on Maine Public Radio. Every driver I’ve ever encountered listens to public radio. The great thing about NPR is that when you lose one signal you can pick up another that continues the broadcast. Some may not like the slant, if there is one, though it would be incorrect to think that truckers constitute some harmonized bloc of redneck atavism. I’ve heard All Things Considered called Small Things Considered and One Side Considered, and even heard a Klan member from Georgia call it US Jews and Girls Report. (He might have been a bigot, but he was a listener.) If I can, I’ll schedule my driving to catch Fresh Air with Terry Gross. She’s got that omniscient NPR tone they all have, but she always has someone interesting on. I’ve got a little crush on Terry, actually. It’s probably because I’ve spent more time with her than anyone else in my life.

  At the fuel desk they gave me a towel for the shower. Most truckstops now have private showers, but this was Hal’s in Kittery, not a gleaming Bosselman’s out on I-80 west of the big ditch. Hal’s had one large shower room with six spigots, like in high school, and there was a coin slot next to each spigot. You put in a quarter and that bought you five minutes’ worth of hot water. If you wanted more, you put in more money. Where was I supposed to put my quarters? I ended up thumbing them into my bar of soap. Though communal, the shower and bathroom stalls were spotless. There weren’t any glory holes drilled between the stall walls like you see down south.

  I was about to jump into the shower when another guy came in. It didn’t bother me unduly, but I would have preferred to shower alone. This fellow had his clothes in a clear plastic bag: new jeans, new briefs, and a three-pack of pocket T-shirts. He saw me looking at the bag.

  “Now don’t get all edgy there, driver. I’m no hobo. I drive for Pottle’s out of Bangor. I got fired yesterday, supposedly for too many fender-benders. I went in there today to pick up my CB and fuzzbuster and damn if they didn’t rehire me. Guess they wanted to teach me a lesson . . . more likely they had a hot load they couldn’t cover. They’re good folks, actually, and I can be a pain in the ass. I hadn’t brought any extra clothes, seeing as I was fired, so when they dispatched me to Tucson an hour ago I had to bobtail to the Kmart and pick up some fresh threads. Shit. I just remembered I took a chicken breast out of my freezer to eat tonight. Left it in the sink at home. Oh well.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Lone Ranger, who are you?”

  “U-Turn.”

  “Glad to know you. I forgot about this gumball-machine shower setup. How about you float me a couple quarters out of that bar of soap? I’ll pay you back outside. The real reason they fired me was because I took off the month of August to go fishing. I sure do love trucking. A man can quit whenever he wants and always find another job.”

  He went on like that throughout the shower. Lone Ranger gave me his entire job history, all the while jacking my quarters. He was the real deal trucker/drifter type. I liked him because he was intelligent and good-natured. He just had this streak of independence that kept his life flirting with the breadline. When that line got crossed, like today, he went happily to the Kmart and rolled with it.

  After my shower, I bought thirty gallons of go-go juice for the fifty-mile hop over to Manchester, New Hampshire, and went to sleep. I love sleeping in my sleeper, and I sleep better there than anywhere else. Getting up wasn’t nearly as pleasant; the cab was chilly, even with the heat on, and it’s always a struggle to wriggle into clean clothes in the cramped space. I had to piss real bad too. I took care of that with an empty Gatorade bottle stowed for the purpose. (Truckstop parking lots are littered with flattened Gator-a
de bottles, and a hot summer afternoon will provide a memorable olfactory experience.) I climbed out of the rig and was in Ray the Mover’s office at seven thirty ready to pick up paperwork and my two lumpers. The plan was to load 4,000 pounds out of Milford, New Hampshire, for Beverly Hills. I got my paperwork at five minutes to nine, the pricks, and the dispatcher told me to follow the two packers out there because the packing hadn’t been done yet. I wasn’t getting a good feeling.

  We arrived at the residence a little before ten. Not good. The packers I was following got lost, of course.

  The shipper was an elderly woman named Mrs. Fowler. When we got inside the house, we saw that she hadn’t done a thing to prepare for her move. Mrs. Fowler had told the agent she was going to do all the packing except for a bedroom mirror, her mattresses, and some dishes in the kitchen. We had to force open the front door of the house because there was so much crap in the way. She’d lived there for twenty years and apparently had thrown nothing away. We couldn’t get any of the interior doors open either, because every single tabletop, chair, and floor area was piled high with newspapers, files, magazines . . . It was the most full house that I had ever seen in my life, and I’ve been a lot of years in this game.