P.S. In Population 485, I described my first Greyhound ride. I caught that bus out of Ray’s station. Four years after this piece was published, Greyhound cut over 250 small-town stops from its routes.
The Haul Road
Notes for nontruckers: Western Star is the brand name of a Canadian-made semi tractor. The average fully loaded semi running on a smooth concrete highway “grosses” roughly eighty thousand pounds. The term “90-weight” refers to an extremely high viscosity engine oil. The “fifth wheel” is a large steel plate that serves as the point of attachment between the semi tractor and trailer. A “Jake” is a specialized braking device that allows a trucker to throw a switch and essentially make the engine work against itself.
If you stick your rig in the ditch along Alaska’s treacherous Haul Road, the word starts traveling before the white leaves your knuckles. For the next two weeks, every trucker you meet is a wise guy. You may stop for a bowl of bean soup at Coldfoot and find a Polaroid of your wayward load tacked to the bulletin board. If the R-rated, irregularly published Chuck Hole Gazzett is up and running, you can expect your bad day to be immortalized in headines like ABE OMAR PLOWS SNOW, or A SHOOTING [WESTERN] STAR. But nobody laughs too hard or too long. Because up here, they have a saying about drivers who exit the Haul Road unexpectedly: “There are two types of truckers: Those of you who have, and those of you who will.”
Tom McAlpine won’t talk about whether he has or hasn’t. “That’s voodoo.” He grins, and changes the subject. McAlpine has been making the run between Fairbanks and the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay since 1978, with a three-year break beginning in 1986, when the oil business tanked. He headed for the lower forty-eight, where he worked on a ranch and ran produce. He refers to it as time he spent “outside.” When the oil field action picked up again, he returned to Fairbanks, and he’s been running the Haul Road ever since. Officially known as the Dalton Highway, the Haul Road was completed in 1974. It runs alongside the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, terminating at the Arctic Ocean. Its primary purpose is to supply drilling operations in the gigantic Prudhoe Bay oil field, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
The map may say “highway,” but down where the rubber meets the road, the Dalton is a skinny four-hundred-mile scar of chuckholes, dust, mud, snowpack and black ice that winds its way up and down through swaths of forbidding pine forests, ragged-edge mountain passes and endless sweeps of tundra.
The head of the Dalton is around eighty-five miles from Fairbanks—the only stretch of what could reasonably be called “highway” on our route. We pulled out of Fairbanks at 10:30 a.m., grossing 101,400, our four-axle trailer loaded with 9,426 gallons of methanol, used in the oil fields to keep drill holes from freezing. Almost as soon as we got started, we pulled off the road to fuel the trucks and ourselves at the Hilltop truck stop, the last full-time services for five-hundred miles. The truck gorged on diesel, and we gorged on hot biscuits slathered in 90-weight gravy, served with fried potatoes on a plate half the size of a fifth wheel. Then we struck out.
As Tom McAlpine puts it, the first 130 miles of the Haul Road are “nothin’ but shiftin’.” We took many of the hills at fifteen miles per hour, and McAlpine kept up a running commentary: “This one here has caught its fair share of trucks…. See there where all those trees are flattened? Buddy of mine went in there a few weeks ago…. This one’s called Five Mile Hill…. I stopped to dig a guy out of a car on this one….” The litany continues: Gobbler’s Knob (“Misjudge that one, and you learn to back with your brakes locked!”). Oil Spill Hill. The Roller Coaster. Sand Hill (“This one will eat your lunch”). The Beaver Slide (“Guy lost it here once, jammed it in a low gear and wound the engine up—there were wrist pins and connecting rods all over the road”). For mile after rough mile, the big 600hp Cat in McAlpine’s ’99 Western Star 4964FX is either chomping up a grade or riding the Jake. We stop atop Two-and-a-Half-Mile Hill and walk around the truck, performing a visual inspection. Up here, the pines are daubed with fat licks of snow, and packed snow has taken much of the roughness from the road. “In the summertime, you stop here to count your tires, see how many you have left,” jokes McAlpine.
The nature of the Prudhoe Bay run imposes itself on the trucks and truckers in many ways. McAlpine has to replace the peg on his CB mike with a steel bolt. “The bracket vibrates so much, it saws right through the plastic one,” he says. Tires are run at low pressure to extend their life—still, they last only about thirty thousand miles. Once started, engines are rarely shut down; all that idle time adds up to a 3.3 mpg lifetime average. Twin spotlights in the mirror racks are aimed at both ditches to illuminate moose—they like to run the Haul Road when they get tired of fighting deep snow. The intense cold can freeze axles in an instant; McAlpine always puts his truck in motion with a gentle left-to-right swerve, checking in the mirrors to see that all the flourescent orange stripes painted on his trailer wheels are spinning.
Sometimes it’s not cold enough. “Zero to ten degrees, that’s pretty good truckin’,” said McAlpine as we left Fairbanks. But later that night, when we inched up Atigun Pass and over the Brooks Range, the Western Star’s exterior thermometer read thirty-three degrees—just the right temperature to turn the snow pack into a water slide.
McAlpine drove on the edge of his seat. We had stopped to chain up before the climb—“Chains decrease the pucker factor,” says McAlpine—but it was still a tense ride, waiting for the wheels to slip like someone waiting for a balloon to pop. Tom kept looking in the mirror to check his tires. Tires that run white are getting a good grip on the snow pack. Tires that run black are too warm—they’re melting, not gripping, the snow. Our tires were running black, so Tom kept one eye out for traction-giving loose gravel at the edge of the road; at the same time, he has learned to distrust that edge—a sharp shoulder might be nothing more than graded snow.
Any trucker who has run a variety of weather and terrain will tell you the jokers in the Haul Road deck aren’t unique. What is unique is how often those jokers come up. For five-hundred miles, the road demands constant attention. There’s a gremlin waiting every quarter mile: an icy switchback, a love-crazed caribou, a whiteout, a chuckhole blowout that hangs your snout out over some godforsaken ravine.
One of the old hands, a man who goes by the handle of “Pappy,” puts up white steel crosses where anyone has died. It’s hardly the “tombstone every mile” that truckin’ singer Cowboy Dick Curless sang about, but there are just enough of Pappy’s crosses along the way to help you think about family waiting at home and grip that wheel a little more tightly.
Truckers meeting atop narrow Haul Road hills have been known to clip mirrors, but such incidents incite more ribbing than road rage. Out here, a sort of rough-hewn courtesy prevails. Each time we met an oncoming truck, each driver slowed, reducing the amount of gravel in the air. McAlpine’s windshield is filled with cracks and stars, almost all of them put there by four-wheelers who don’t know the rules (the Dalton Highway was only recently opened to the public).
When a pickup full of oil-field workers catches us crawling up the 9 percent grade of the Beaver Slide, they wait until we’re about to crest and then radio us. “Yeah, can we get around ya there?” McAlpine gives them the all clear. “Thank ya!” they radio as they zip past. The same thing happens when we’re caught by a reefer running produce. The pass is arranged before it’s executed.
Every time we meet a truck, McAlpine greets the driver by name. They update each other on road conditions ahead and behind, maybe rib each other a little, but there’s very little yakkety-yakkety. “Down there on the ‘outside’ the CB is a toy,” says McAlpine, “but up here it’s a necessity.” He likes the fact that he knows everyone on the road, likes knowing that if he gets in a jam, the next truck through will pull over to help. “The old rules still apply up here,” he says.
It was long dark when we hit Coldfoot, the unofficial halfway point of the Prudhoe run. Coldfoot is a lonely little outpost with a restaurant
that, depending on staffing, is sometimes self-service. Midway through our bean soup, we were joined by Tom’s father, Del. He was running cement and had been playing catch-up all day. He would make the rest of the run with us.
It was a Monday night; on our way out the door, we walked past a handful of truckers watching TV. Many time zones away, the Dallas Cowboys were spanking the Philadelphia Eagles, 34-0. The twin Western Stars were idling in the lot. “Dad doesn’t like to have anyone out front of him,” laughed Tom, and right on cue, Del poured the cobs to ’er. The big blue cab torqued and bounced, and off he went, his moose spotters punching twin holes through the night.
In general, the Dalton Highway passes through three kinds of terrain: aspen and pine-covered foothills on the Fairbanks end, expanses of tundra on the Prudhoe end and, in between, the grand, upheaved bulk of the Brooks Range. The stark breadth of the land is stunning. “Sometimes out here,” says McAlpine, “it’s like somebody shut all the lights off, turned the heat down, and went home.”
But the desolation is trumped by beauty. “Look at this,” he breathes in a voice as awed as a first-timer. We’re in the Brooks Range now, running with a view to the valley ahead. The moon is fat and incandescent, cradled between two bleached peaks like a bright bead in a gun sight. Ahead of us, and to both sides, everything glows an electric white. “Sometimes,” he says, “it looks like a giant black-light poster.”
We heave and lurch through the moonlight, the mountains beginning to flatten into rolling tundra. The Western Star’s 306-inch wheelbase takes some of the jolt from the road, which is actually much smoother now that we’ve reached the point where water trucks have been running, covering pits and ruts with a smooth layer of ice. Occasionally, an ice chunk or a rock will deliver a ringing shot to the frame.
By the time we hit the oil fields, it’s 1:30 a.m. and I’m nodding off. Everything is socked in fog. Drilling superstructures, studded with halogen beacons, loom through the haze. Over the CB, we bid good night to Del, who will be unloading at another site. Then we park. As soon as the truck stops, Tom hauls a spill pad from his toolbox and puts it beneath his oil pan—environmental regulations forbid even the tiniest drip of oil on the snow. Then he pokes his head into a portable office and checks the unloading schedule. He’s in line to be unloaded and on his way home well before noon. He climbs in his bunk, and I sling my bedroll on the sleeper floor. And then, snug in my sleeping bag, I let that big Cat engine purr me off to the best night’s sleep I’ve had in months.
There are times, out on the tundra, when the mercury slides to forty or fifty below and the wind pushes the flexible delineators flat and puts up a horizontal wall of snow, that McAlpine pulls the rig over and idles for three days. He huddles in his warm little cube of air, eating MREs and waiting for the storm to pass. And there are times—when he’s babying a trailer full of methanol up one side of the Brooks Range, wishing he had chained up and waiting for the tires to slip—that the fan on his Cat 600 kicks in, and he flinches like someone set off a cherry bomb in his sleeper.
And then there are those times, on the homeward end of a run, when he rounds yet another curve shouldering out over the pine tops and he sees one of Pappy’s white crosses, that he’s reminded that you don’t run this road; it runs you.
But it’s not all bad. As we left Prudhoe Bay the next morning, we saw two signs. One said we had 494 axle-busting miles to go; the other said, DON’T BE GRUMPY. And for all the nasty surprises the Haul Road can spring, Tom McAlpine knows his run holds at least one attraction every trucker dreams of: “Once you get up here,” he says, “you’ve got to go home. It’s the end of the road.”
1999
Aaron Tippin: A Holler Full of Trucks
A ways east of Nashville, there’s a holler full of trucks. Eleven of ’em, a rough, beat-up bunch, faced inward on a semicircle. At one end of that semicircle is an old wooden shop. You can read a lot about a man by his shop. This one is generally organized, but retains the comfortable clutter of use. A worn stand-up toolbox stands front and center; a screwdriver handle and a few wrenches protrude from gapped drawers. A torn-down transfer case rests alongside a homemade straddle pit. There’s an old yellow fridge covered in stickers, a plumb-ugly bench upholstered in Naugahyde, a tiny, tinny boom box tuned to a country station, and a pair of dusty fishing poles. And hung on a hook on one wall, along with a mess of other things, an old forest-green hard hat. On the side, in scuffed orange letters, it says “98 TIP.”
“TIP” is Aaron Tippin, the man who first caught the attention of country music fans in 1991 with the single “You’ve Got To Stand For Something.” Other hits followed—“Workin’ Man’s Ph.D.,” “I Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way” and “My Blue Angel.” Since his debut hit, Tippin has produced three gold albums, one platinum album, and is currently on the charts with his fifth and most recent album, Tool Box. Not bad. But today we don’t spend five minutes talking about music. Aaron Tippin wants to talk about his trucks.
Tippin’s trucks aren’t museum pieces. He’s pulled them out of junkyards, yanked them from the weeds, even spotted a few along America’s back roads from the window of his tour bus. But where did it all begin? “I think it was kind of an accident,” chuckles Tippin. He points across the clearing where his former bus driver, Smitty, is carving out a pad for a bus garage, moving fill with a red-and-black ’74 Ford F750. “First dump truck I had on the place,” he says. “It’s been a good old truck. But I got it, and I thought, this thing won’t hold enough dirt to suit me, so I found that old Mack over there.” Tippin nods toward a Mack B42 at the far end of the row. It has a black box, and a cab best described as “yaller.” “Bought it over in Dixon, Tennessee. Me and Smitty went out there and got it cranked, got it goin’, and away we went. It had dirty old fuel in it—I mean the fuel was like motor oil, and it was still runnin’! But it kept gettin’ slower and slower, so we stopped and put a new fuel filter in it, and Pow! She took off like a shot.
“That’s the funny thing about these old Macks. Generally, if they’re sittin’, in any condition similar to this, you hook a chain to ’em and in twenty feet, they’re runnin’. They wanna live more’n anything I’ve ever been around.” Tippin’s eyes are bright. “Now that is a spectacular feelin’. Tuggin’ on an ol’ truck, seein’ that smoke comin’ outta the stack, then she cracks, and then brrooom, it comes to life, and everybody that’s helpin’ can’t help but dance around and holler a little bit.”
Tippin points out a Mack B61 dump truck. “This one’s special. I got that from a good friend, Billy Ferguson. Billy did the whole campaign with Patton in World War Two…talk about stories! The Ferguson brothers got out of the war, came home and bought a dump truck. And now anybody in Mississippi knows the Ferguson Brothers company. They still run Macks.” Next in line is a faded red Mack tractor. “That’s an LJ,” says Tippin. “I believe it’s a forty-seven. The cab is built on a wood frame. It’s got a Cummins engine in it, which is unusual for a Mack. They tell me that’s one of the first over-the-road trucks built that’d do a hundred mile an hour. Buddy, that’s flyin’!” Next to the LJ, a Mack B67 is hooked to a lowboy. “I bought that off a guy in Missouri. It was out there rustin’ away. That’s an old forty-ton two-axle lowboy. Forty tons on two axles is unheard-of nowadays. I use it to haul my dozer.”
The other trucks in the semicircle include a ’61 White Mustang inline six-cylinder gas burner with a short dump box, and a pair of Mack H67 cabovers. “I figure I’d like to get me a cabover goin’,” says Tippin. “If you’re gonna haul equipment in tight places, you’re better off with a short wheelbase, and you can see a little better outta that thing, too.”
Tippin has been using his trucks (and a small fleet of excavation equipment) to complete several major projects on his farm, including the bus garage, a driveway that winds through the hills like a dusty Cumberland River, a clearing and basement for his new house, and soon, a runway. “In the end, I’d like to restore one or two of ’em,” s
ays Tippin, “but until we get done what we need done, they gotta work.”
Tippin’s love for working trucks was born early. “Six years old, growin’ up on the farm, I was too little to carry a bale of hay, so I got the steerin’ wheel of the truck. Dad put ’er in gear and she’d idle down through the field at three mile an hour and you just kept ’er straight.”
Tippin’s father was also a flier, and the youngster fell in love with airplanes. He got a pilot’s license and was steering toward a career as a commercial pilot when the 1980s’ energy crisis led to his being laid off and grounded his plans. And so, still in his early twenties, Tippin got his CDL. “I pulled for Cooper Motor Lines. Drove a White Road Commander. Then I drove a Jimmy for Carolina Western, haulin’ dry freight.” Between runs he took up serious bodybuilding and started playing honky-tonks, but the days when he would see his songs in the charts were still years away. So he kept working, accumulating experiences that influence his music to this day.
The bright lights have done little to fade the blue from his collar. When I ask him about the old green hard hat hanging in the shop, his voice drops, becomes almost reverent. “That’s my old construction hat. Sure is. That’s the real deal.” Tippin wore the helmet during years spent welding bridge girders and stainless-steel textile-mill equipment. Nowadays he dons a hard hat to open his shows. “Someone told me I should use my old construction hat, and I said, ‘No, that hat ain’t for fun. It’s for real.’”
This topic brings about a moment of truth: I once wrote in a review that the hard hat reminded me of long-lost novelty act the Village People. I tell Tippin so. It’s not a comfortable moment, facing someone you’ve criticized in print, but after a short pause (seemed long to me), Tippin chuckles. “Yeah, that’s why I wear it for one song and then get it off!” But then the grin fades, and he looks me straight in the eye. “I’ve been whupped and whupped by people who write stories about how corny it is, but obviously, to the crowd, it’s not corny. I do ‘Workin’ Man’s Ph.D.,’ or ‘I Got It Honest,’ and they’re on their feet. They get it the same way I feel it. That’s important to me…that’s who I’m tryin’ to please.”
Off Main Street Page 9