by Finn Murphy
After hooking up the next trailer, I lined it up next to mine, about a foot away. I needed to make this line tight. I did this eight more times, and I had a neat row of trailers. It took about two hours. It wasn’t real moving work, like lifting pianos up staircases, but wasn’t sipping coffee at the truckstop either. Nine times crank-ing up the landing gear, nine times cranking down the gear, thirty-six times into and out of the tractor, eighteen times coupling hoses, eighteen times connecting and disconnecting the gladhands, and nine times pulling fifth-wheel pins. And I hadn’t started the day’s work yet.
Since I had a whole week, I was going to wash out the trailers. I pulled the first one out of the line and opened all the doors. There’s a large set of double doors on the driver side and four sets of doors on the shotgun side. I parked next to the loading dock, and we tossed all the pads and cartons and garbage onto the dock. Julio had a pressure hose, and he started at the front washing out the ceiling, walls, and floor. A moving trailer has slotted sides, and you wouldn’t believe the stuff that gets in there. Food, dust, dead mice, dirt, more food, and more dust. He moved the hose down the fifty-three feet and stopped at the end with his pile of yuck. We dumped it into a dumpster, and I drove the trailer around the block to dry it off. In the Colorado summer it takes about ten minutes for a trailer to dry out. Then the pads will be folded, the equipment stowed, and the cartons flattened for recycling. While the boys did that I performed a complete trailer inspection, starting on the ground with a mechanic’s creeper to check the brake adjustments. Each trailer brake has an arm that engages the brake. The play in the arm shouldn’t be more than an eighth of an inch. If it’s too much or too little, I adjust them with a 7/16 wrench. Brake arms are touchy little buggers, and they have a tendency to lock up in cold weather. I’ve spent many an early morning underneath my trailer in the snow thawing frozen brake arms with a safety flare.
Next, I checked the trailer bubble, which is a small plastic compartment at the front of the trailer, for a current registration, current DOT inspection, and current insurance card. I took my tire wear gauge and checked the tread depth on all eight skins. I took my tire buddy, a wooden dowel with a metal handle (it makes a great weapon), and banged all the tires to check inflation. I can feel if a tire is flat or soft, and if it is, I make a note to inflate or replace it at the next truckstop. Then I checked all the doors for locks and made sure the locks were lubricated and all had the same key.
We could do two of these trailers in one long day, and I had ten to do.
I’m going into all of this in detail not just to sing my song about the work but to let shippers out there know what it entails to get a truck to your front door. If any of the things I’m checking needs attention, it’s more work, time, and money. A new tire is $400 at the truckstop and a lot more if you’re out on the Big Slab, plus hours of wasted time. A DOT inspection is $150 and at least a day if there’s nothing that needs fixing, and something always needs fixing. It costs $125 to register the trailer, $1,000 to insure it, not including cargo, and $20,000 to properly equip it. My tractor costs $3,500 to register, $10,000 to insure, and $125,000 to replace. Everything requires an army of office workers doing accounting, insurance, and federal compliance in fuel taxes, registrations, logbooks, driver certification, drug testing, and DOT physical exams. Any compliance violation results in a shutdown of the vehicle.
After I’d finished with the trailers I was going to air out the mattresses in my sleeper, wash and vacuum the tractor interior, and stock the fridge with Gatorade and water. I do all this ahead of time so I don’t get delayed getting to your job.
By Friday night I’d gotten the ten trailers and my tractor cleaned and ready. Call me a sentimental old mover, but after Carlos and Julio left at 9 p.m. it was still light out, so I cracked open a beer, unlocked each trailer, and looked inside to enjoy the handiwork. Rows and rows of clean, perfectly folded pads. Belly boxes filled with cargo bars and plywood of various widths. Equipment boxes with floor runners, straps, car tie-downs, bungee cords, shrink-wrap, door pads, and humpstraps. Each trailer was perfect, and I was ready to mess them up all over again.
I ran out of room in the lot for trailer number ten, but I was loading it the next day in Littleton for San Diego, so I parked it out on the street. That night a mini tornado howled through Erie and blew the rig over onto its side. I got a call from the state police at 11 p.m. asking if there was anybody inside. I told them no and went over to supervise the two tow trucks I hired to put the tractor-trailer back on its sneakers. I have a video of the truck being upended. It cost $2,000, and one of the tow trucks took my tractor to the shop. The whole left side had been crushed. No mirrors, no windows, no lights. The trailer doors had been sprung and the landing gear destroyed. That trailer never went back out on the road.
I got to bed at 1 a.m. and was up at 4 for the trip to Penske Truck Rental in Aurora. I arrived at 6, picked up a rental tractor, drove to Erie, hooked up another trailer, and arrived with my crew at the residence in Littleton at 8:30. As I walked up to the shipper, holding my card in my hand and a smile on my face, he looked at me and said:
“You’re late.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks first and foremost to Matt Weiland at W. W. Norton, who believed in the book and in my ability to write it.
To Rafe Sagalyn, who took a proposal from an unknown trucker and managed to get Matt to look at it.
To Will Joyce, my lifelong friend, nemesis, hero, and villain.
To those who encouraged me in this project over the long years: Pam Murphy, Laura Byrne, Lori DeBoer, Sarah Massey-Warren, Deb Edgecombe, Betsy Crane, Wendy Hudson.
To Christopher Hunt for early edits, help on my proposal, and lots of mountain hikes talking about writing.
To Cait and Cullen Murphy for their encouragement and moral support.
To India Cooper, who showed me I should have paid more attention in seventh-grade grammar class. And to all the staff at W. W. Norton who welcomed me into the fold.
The Long Haul is a work of nonfiction. Certain names, identifying
details, and locales have been altered.
Copyright © 2017 by Finn Murphy
All rights reserved
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