The Long Haul

by Finn Murphy

  “Here you go, Terry. It’s a shitty brew, and I didn’t know how you liked it, so I played the odds and got it black.”

  “Thanks. You got it right. Here I am again. Drinking bad coffee before dawn in a dusty truckyard in nowhere, USA.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Since 1980.”

  “Me too. I had a good long hiatus in the middle, but now I’m back in the harness.”

  “I’m so fucking sick of it.”

  “Did you ever do anything else?”

  “I started out hauling green beans in a dry box. Quick turns to grocery warehouses. Then I moved to hauling hay. Now there’s a place to exercise some judgement. Do I tarp the load or not? Clear skies and two hundred miles to run. No problem, unless it rains. If it rains, my 80,000-pound load turns into 150,000 pounds, ’cause that hay just sucks up the water. Ever pull into a weigh station weighing 150,000 pounds? They throw you in fuckin’ jail. Tarping sucks, but I was in my twenties, right? Jump up and down off the trailer a couple hundred times. Spend a few hours getting it all perfect and it’s dry all the way. Decide not to tarp and the fuckin’ skies open up. Too much stress.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “Went up to Canada and drove a Terex in a pit mine. That rig was 150,000 pounds empty, for crissakes. Tires twelve feet high. Biggest goddam thing you ever seen. Scared the shit out of me, driving little mining roads with a thousand-foot drop. I did well there, so they sent me to Chile for six months running a Terex at a copper mine. I finally quit. Maintenance? In a Chilean copper mine? You can say one thing about that job. No logbooks, no pre-trips, no regulations. I just couldn’t handle being so scared all the time. The workers hated us, the roads made the Canadian mine look like an interstate, and I was living in a trailer on-site. Nothing to do in the off-time except watch TV in Spanish.”

  “This is incredible. What else?”

  “Eighteen months in Iraq. I made $225,000. That made Chile look like kindergarten. The trucks were locked up every night in cages. Security inspections every couple hours. Pull into a dock with a pit and soldiers crawling up and down and under looking for bombs. I was carrying potable water for the locals. Who’d want to bomb a water truck? Guess what? Every nutcase out there wanted to bomb a water truck.”

  “What else?”

  “Three years frackin’ on the Bakken in North Dakota. That really sucked, but I made good money. Lived in an RV the company bought. Four thousand men and twenty women. All whores except for one or two church ladies. Couldn’t figure out which was worse. I’m from Christian country in eastern Kentucky. I’m not a Christian, but I’m not a drinker either. Up there you’re one or the other. I was neither. That’s where I learned computers. I had my laptop and started figuring it all out. I’m very plugged in. It’s helped a lot. Plus I read books and listen to books, mostly history. Did you know Abe Lincoln was born in Kentucky?”

  “I did. His dad was kind of like you. Kept moving on. The way I remember it, he moved to Indiana and then Illinois.”

  “Thomas Lincoln never moved to Illinois. He did move to Indiana. Kept buying farms with bad titles. The Lincolns came from the same county I grew up in. White trash, like me.”

  “I just read a book called White Trash. Ever come across it?”

  “Yeah. I just listened to it. Heard about it from Terry Gross on Fresh Air. Great title. Downloaded it on Audible. I’ve got an Audible habit that needs a twelve-step program.”

  “Me too. What did you think of the book?”

  “It made me think I’m one of a long line of losers and I’m continuing the line. My son just graduated high school. First one in the family to do that straight up. I’ve got a GED from a little jail time I did for a domestic way back when. Wasn’t my fault, but I figured I’d put the time to good use. The GED qualified me for a work grant to get my CDL, and I used that. I’ve been on the road ever since. It was my ex who made sure the boy went through school. I wasn’t around.”

  “Does he have any plans?”

  “In Paintsville? What the fuck is he going to do in Paintsville, Kentucky? A career choice there is meth or Oxy. Hillbilly heroin.”

  “How is it going to end?”

  “Fuck if I know. He’s a grown man. He’ll figure it out. Probably he’ll get some girl pregnant and the cycle will continue.”

  “C’mon, Terry, you’re a smart man. You’ve got to have a better answer than that.”

  My phone rang. It was Pete from dispatch. It was 7:30 a.m. on the East Coast.

  “Finn? Pete. You got the driver there?”

  “Yup.”

  “Tell him he’s not going to LA. He’s going to Connecticut, taking trailer 246.”

  “OK, Pete.” I turned to Terry. “You’re going to Connecticut.”

  “Whatever. I hate the East Coast. Come to think of it, I hate California. I don’t care where they send me. Gotta pay my bills. Long as I’m rolling, I’m paying my bills.”

  “They want the trailer in Oxford by Friday. Do you still have hours?”

  “I always have hours. I heard the Feds are going to require electronic logs next year. Did you hear that?”

  “That’s the story I heard. All interstate drivers will be required to use electronic logs.”

  “That will kill off what’s left of us owner-operators. They’ll call it a safety issue, but I’ll bet it’s the big carriers lobbying the politicians. There was a point somewhere when the big carriers were against government, and then came the point when they figured out they could use government to get what they wanted. I suppose people call that maturity. I call it corruption. As an owner-operator, I’m a dead man walking.”

  “Me too.”

  “Thanks for the coffee, dead man. I’ll see you in hell, I suppose.”

  “Hard to say where we’re going to end up, Terry. Rubber side down to the coast.”

  “Sure. What’s the fuckin’ difference? It’s all nowhere. Why are you here, anyway? I could have dropped this off and picked up without you.”

  “I like to meet the drivers and make sure the transfers are smooth. Between you and me, I like to show a little respect. I bring coffee. I know what it’s like out there. It’s all I can do.”

  “Thanks. ’Preciate it.”

  Terry dropped his trailer and hooked up 246. He pulled away in a glob of diesel smoke and a toot from the air horn. Gone. It’s unlikely I’ll ever see him again. He was a smart, thoughtful, and defeated man caught in the amber of class, education, and diminished expectations for himself and his progeny.

  As a New Englander, from a stable family and a product of a decent school system, I was given a suitcase full of intangible advantages Terry didn’t get. Becoming a long-haul driver was, for me, a choice. For Terry, it was the only way out, and he’s miles ahead of his contemporaries owning his own truck and making his way. The fact that he seemed to feel no responsibility for helping his son chart his way was mystifying. Where I came from, people fell over themselves trying to grease the wheels for their kids through connections, education, and a certain view of life’s potential. Terry didn’t bother with any of that. I got the impression he felt defeated from the outset.

  I hope that’s not true, but it feels true. They say anybody can grow up and be president of the United States, and Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama are bootstrapping examples that poor folks are supposed to emulate. That’s bullshit. Those guys are monumental exceptions used to bolster the myth that anybody can be a success. For every one of them, there are tens of millions of Americans who can see no way out of the pattern. This cuts across race, and it cuts across class. The myth of the trucker as a latter-day cowboy is the same narrative that the urban rapper or the southern rebel adopts to accept his place at the bottom of the American Dream. Terry had no such illusions. He knew there was no way out for him or his son. There’s something very wrong about that.

  One place you won’t find poor whites anymore is on a moving truck. Nowad
ays most moving is done by Hispanics. It varies by region whether your local mover is from Brazil, Mexico, or El Salvador, but the white guys are long gone and Spanish or Portuguese are lingua franca. This isn’t to say that the ownership of the companies themselves have changed because it hasn’t. Callahan Bros. is still around, but when that truck pulls up to your house you won’t hear any Irish brogues and most likely the only person you’ll be able to talk to will be the driver, and even the driver will be chosen for his green card and clean driving record, not his English skills, so you may not even be able to talk to him.

  The simple truth is, your latter-day Hispanic laborer, wallowing in the refuse-laden cesspit that constitutes the dregs of the American Dream is more dependable, works harder, and is more trustworthy than many native-born Anglos. The Hispanics actually want out of the cesspit and will work to get themselves out just like the Callahans did a generation or two ago. On the other hand, your typical head-banging, tatted-out, meth freak Anglo doesn’t even know where he is. You’ve pretty much reached the muddy, filth-strewn, windblown end of the American cesspit when you can’t find a white guy who can amass the rudimentary requirements needed to be hired as a local mover.

  I hear a lot about the immigration problem, but as a guy who works daily in the cesspool, I suspect American business already enjoys the solid immigration policy everyone says we’re lacking. American business needs workers to do shitty jobs like humping furniture, and people from poor countries are eager to do these jobs.

  I was assigned to deliver the trailer Terry had dropped. Per standard procedure, when I got the paperwork, I looked up the address on Google Maps and compared it to my atlas map. Mr. Vaughan had bought a house on a Colorado mountainside. The residence delivery looked so dicey that I decided to drive up there in my car two days before to check it out. A site visit is not typical for movers in general, but I’m a careful guy who doesn’t like surprises, and besides, I like to perform top service for our corporate clients. The Vaughans’ house was certainly going to be what we call a shuttle, which is when I have to bring a smaller truck and transfer the goods into that because there’s no tractor-trailer access. The residence was two miles from any pavement, and his “street” was a 10-percent-grade gravel track with several twists and turns that on my best day I couldn’t negotiate with a trailer. Even if I could, it was a dead end at the top.

  I’d scoped out a turnout about three miles down from the residence where I could park the trailer. I’d also transferred the first load onto a straight truck at our yard so we could start unloading into the house on Monday morning. Carlos and Julio had worked the day before, a Sunday, to get it all ready. I parked the big truck at the turnout and took over the straight truck from Carlos. Even in a straight truck this grade was gnarly, and it was drizzling rain, making the dirt road gooey. If the truck was going over the side, I didn’t want Carlos behind the wheel. I got stuck going up the first grade because I was hesitant at the hairpin turns and slowed down too much. I had to back down and start over. I had the guys go up ahead to block traffic so I could keep my momentum. I got the truck in low gear and was redlining the tachometer at 3,500 on the flattish first section. As I climbed, the tach slowly dropped to 2,500, then to 2,000, then to 1,500, and I was lugging the engine. It just didn’t have any more juice. I realized I shouldn’t have loaded the thing full. Just before the truck gave it up and stalled, I hit a flatter section. My guys ran up ahead to stop traffic at the next group of hairpins. I picked up my rpm to 3,000 and dealt with the next grade. We did this three times before I backed into the Vaughan driveway at 7:59 a.m. We were greeted by Mr. Vaughan and an iPhone on a tripod, filming us.

  “You were supposed to be here yesterday,” he said.

  “Hi, Mr. Vaughan. I’m Finn Murphy from Joyce Van Lines. Here’s my card. I was assigned by the office to deliver today. I’m sorry if there was some confusion. This is Carlos and Julio. We’re here to make this move as smooth as possible.”

  “That’s not the truck my stuff was loaded into. My stuff was loaded onto a trailer. I took down the number. It was trailer 248.”

  “Yes it was. Trailer 248 is just down the road. We had to transfer your belongings into a smaller truck to make the hill. It’s called a shuttle.”

  “Why wasn’t I informed there was going to be a shuttle? I don’t want my stuff to be double-handled. It makes for more damage. I was told it was going to stay on the trailer.”

  “Mr. Vaughan, you’re an engineer, right?”

  “I certainly am.”

  “Well sir, as an engineer, can you tell me how we can get a tractor-trailer anywhere near this house?”

  “You can’t. Still, I should have been informed.”

  “Maybe so. If there’s any blame, it’s me. I drove up here on Saturday. I’ve been driving trucks since 1976. If there was ever a reason for a shuttle, this is it. We barely got the straight truck up here.”

  “I was wondering about that too.”

  “Well sir, we’re here. Ready to start. We’re going to prep the house and get things rolling.”

  Our plan was to unload into the garage and then move items into the house. Mrs. Vaughan was sitting on a lawn chair attending to the tripod, taking video of the unload with a notebook and pencil on her lap. The first item off the truck was a pushbroom. I asked her where she wanted it to go.

  “That broom is dirty. Somebody used it. It was new back in Pennsylvania.”

  This was probably true. As I’ve mentioned before, movers do not covet other people’s stuff, with one exception—a pushbroom. All moving vans need a pushbroom because the hardwood trailer floor gets filthy with the residue of people’s faulty housekeeping. You move out a refrigerator or a barbecue grill and all of a sudden there’s a dusty, filthy mess on the trailer floor. It’s dangerous and ugly, and I like a clean trailer. John Callahan told me forty years ago that a “clean truck is a happy truck,” and he was right. I’m a stickler on the point. The problem with brooms is that the truck’s broom often gets delivered to the residence by mistake. (Nobody ever files claims on items delivered that don’t belong to them, which are most often brooms and extension ladders.) This pretty much always leaves a driver looking for a broom. I don’t deliberately steal brooms, but I often end up with one that’s not mine. In this case, the origin driver most likely used Mrs. Vaughan’s broom to sweep out the dust, trash, ashes, coins, dust bunnies, mouse turds, and bits of food left behind from her own house.

  “Yes, Mrs. Vaughan, this broom has certainly been used.”

  “I’m going to write it up as damaged.”

  “You’re certainly entitled to do that.” She started writing in her notebook. This was not going to be a smooth couple of days. One of the advantages of moving work is that I have very limited time with problem people. I’ll be with a shipper three days a week at most. I pity, up to a point, the postal worker who is consigned to a hostile work environment for two or three decades. It must be hell.

  We took everything off the truck in pads and unpadded most of the items in the garage. The overstuffed furniture, big bedroom pieces, dining room table and chairs, and the usual good stuff people have, we unpadded inside the house. Mrs. Vaughan ran from room to room taking video of the unpadding and scribbling into her notebook. It all looked fine to me, but she was writing frantically. After we finished the first load, we went down to the trailer to load the second shipment. Mr. Vaughan came with us and shot video of the transfer. More notes. By 5 p.m. we had unloaded the second shuttle and there was a half load left in the trailer. We told the Vaughans we’d load the last shipment onto the straight truck and finish the next day. This time Mr. Vaughan didn’t come to do video. It had started to rain again. We loaded the last half load onto the straight truck, and I took the trailer back to Erie and left the straight truck at the turnoff.

  When I got home I had a message from Mr. Vaughan. They had gone out to have dinner, but on the return home their four-wheel-drive vehicle had gotten stuck on the hi
ll due to the mud caused by the rain. Mr. Vaughan’s message said he was wondering if we’d be able to get the truck up the hill in the morning. That was helpful.

  The next day we picked up the straight truck at 7:30 a.m. Pouring rain. I took the wheel and started up the hill like the previous day, but it didn’t work because the road had turned from gooey to gumbo. At the first grade my wheels spun in the mud and the truck started sliding backward down the hill. I got really lucky and managed to keep the thing out of the ditches until we hit the flatter grade at the bottom. This was the point where the smart money stops and waits for the rain to end and the road to dry. But I’ve never been a fan of the smart money, and I knew Mr. Vaughan would be working the phones if he had to wait a few more days. I didn’t want that. From the perspective of the company paying for the move and my own office, there are only two phone calls wanted: one to say I’m there on time and unloading, and one to say I’m finished and the shipper is happy. Any other call for any other reason is driver ineptitude.

  I called Pete in operations and asked for approval to hire a tow truck to drag me up. He gave me a curt no and hung up. My next option was to try backing up the hill to the house. I knew that the reverse gear had slightly better torque than the lowest forward gear and that the weight on the rear tires might get better purchase. Also, if I was going to slide downhill again, I figured it was marginally better to be facing forward.

  Julio and Carlos manned the turns again, and I backed the truck up the grade. It worked, but it took a long time. We arrived at the house at 9 a.m. Carlos and Julio were soaking wet from the two-mile walk in the rain, and I was soaking wet from fear and stress. Mr. Vaughan came out holding a Venti Caramel Macchiato.