A Trucker's Tale

by Ed Miller

  I saw all this and more from up on my trucks, and I also dealt with Vietnamese vehicles. Buses resembling Volkswagen campers, designed to carry maybe twenty passengers, carried at least sixty adults plus the passengers’ kids, chickens, and pigs. The bus drivers seemed to only utilize one speed, full speed ahead, and the riders would cling to the sides of the busses as they flew down the road. If the busses weren’t flying, they were stopped. Upon approaching the rear of one of these buses, while driving a truck, which seldom happened because the drivers all drove like bats out of hell, I was sure to keep a considerable distance behind it, ever mindful that one of the passengers sitting on the bus’s roof could fall onto the roadway.

  One of my great memories from Vietnam is of the time I had an unexpected run-in. I was holding the screen door of our chow hall open for an Army soldier a few steps behind me. The guy was hunched over because he was wearing a heavy flak jacket, while carrying his M16, a Colt 45, an M79 grenade launcher, an enormous backpack full of who-knows-what, and several web belts full of various types of ammunition, including hand grenades. But he wasn’t just any Army guy, he was a friend who grew up a half mile from my childhood home. We were thirteen thousand miles away from home, and somehow happened to cross paths. He had come out of the jungle for a few days and was very glad to eat something other than C rations. We ate together and reminisced about growing up on Airport Road. He made a point of telling me how lucky I was to be able to eat in my chow hall every day instead of eating out of a can while sitting in the jungle in the ever-present rain. Despite everything around us, being together was a reminder of home. For just a moment my mind flashed back to Obie’s farms and tractors; but after my friend left it was time to head out to my flatbed filled with highway-building supplies.

  Our battalion’s tour of South Vietnam was eight months long. When we arrived back to the chaotic USA, we were greeted in San Francisco by Hare Krishna chanters calling for world peace, and some hippies who spat at us. We were granted thirty days of leave and most everyone headed home to see his family. After leave, we were to spend the next six months in California, preparing for another eight-month deployment to South Vietnam.

  Six weeks prior to our redeployment, we were notified of a troop reduction directive, which stated, among other things, that if the date of our release from active duty fell on or before a certain date, then we were immediately released from active duty. I made the cut-off date by ten days. I had signed on the dotted line to serve in the Seabees for two-and-a-half years, but thanks to this early out, I spent only twenty months and nineteen days on active duty.

  While in California, I lived in an apartment with another North Carolina fellow, who also made the early out cut-off date. On December 19, 1969, we loaded my motorcycle and his guitars and amps into the trailer he towed behind his car, and headed home to enjoy the rest of our lives.

  Part Three

  College Trucking

  Before enlisting in the Seabees, I attended college for one year. Upon release from active military duty in 1969, I returned to East Carolina University located in North Carolina. Over the next several years, each time my veteran’s benefits money ran short, which unfortunately happened pretty often, I would leave school for three months, a quarter of an academic year, to either drive tractor trailers or operate heavy equipment. I would save most of what I earned, and then return to classes until poverty dictated that I needed to work again.

  At one point I decided that I needed to take a few months off to make money. An opportunity arose when my high school girlfriend’s brother-in-law (who owned a marina thirty miles away from my college) and his father decided they wanted to open a trucking company. They needed drivers and knew my trucking background, so it seemed like a good fit.

  Unfortunately for me, their company used old, worn-down trucking equipment, which came with many perils. The first trip I made for them was supposed to be relatively short, hauling a load of plywood from Eastern North Carolina to North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, but the equipment didn’t hold up as it should have. When I was within thirty miles of North Wilkesboro, I looked out of my passenger-side mirror and saw heavy light blue smoke. I pulled over at a wide spot to figure out where it was coming from, and saw that the smoke was billowing from the right rear wheel of the tractor’s tag axle. It’s called a “tag axle” because it’s not connected to the truck’s driveshaft, so it has no pulling power and essentially just tags along.

  When I climbed out of the cab, I took the fire extinguisher with me in case the wheel caught fire.

  It’s a good thing I had a wide spot to pull over on, because a wrecker needed to get close to the wheel on the right side. When the wrecker lifted the axle, the entire wheel assembly, brake drum and all, fell off and rolled into a ditch, as the wheel had broken off of the axle. Inspection showed that the bearings had become so hot that they were fused onto the axle. While the wrecker held the axle up, I chained it to the tractor’s frame. When the wrecker lowered the axle, it returned to the height it would have been if the wheel had stayed on the axle. I then had the wrecker pull the wheel assembly out of the ditch and place it onto the rear of the trailer, where I also chained it down.

  With the axle more or less able to do its job again, albeit missing a wheel, I slowly traveled the rest of the way to North Wilkesboro. When I arrived at the building supply store, the drop-off spot, it was clear that the employees and customers must have never before seen a wheel-less tractor with a chained-up axle. Everyone in the building came out back to take a look. On my way back to Eastern North Carolina, I learned that the enforcement community doesn’t have a problem with a chained-up axle, as I was waved through the weigh station on the northbound side of I-85, just south of Durham, North Carolina.

  The next morning, when I spoke with the father, it became pretty clear to me that I wouldn’t work for these fellows for very long. He told me the bearings had run out of grease, which had caused them to get very hot, due to my incomplete pre-trip inspection the day before. I objected, but figured it would be pointless to argue with his incorrect assessment. The assessment of the mechanical problem was correct, but the claim that I’d done an incomplete inspection was incredulous. A driver’s pre-trip inspection does not include a mechanic’s job of pulling a wheel to inspect that the bearings have sufficient grease.

  I ran another one or two trips for these guys before I quit working for them, and within a week after I quit, I went to work for a construction company. Having operated scrapers, better known as “pans” in Vietnam, I spent the next two months running a scraper—a tractor used for digging, moving, and leveling ground—on the property of a chemical company. I would load between eighteen and twenty cubic yards of red clay at a borrow pit, haul it over a dirt road for close to a mile, and then dump each load on the top side of a deep ravine. As I would head for another load, another employee would operate a bulldozer to push this red clay over into the ravine. We were covering up fifty-five-gallon drums of some unknown-to-me chemicals that a company had dumped. I was skeptical about what would happen if, and when, the drums rusted open, but I didn’t raise my concerns. I was getting a paycheck. Not too many years later, there was a pollution contamination catastrophe at the Love Canal neighborhood landfill in upstate New York. Hundreds of residents were sickened and the event culminated in an extensive cleanup operation by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund Task Force. This made me wonder if I had been a party to that same kind of environmental tragedy, and, evidently, I still think about it today.

  After another few months at college, I began working for WMTS Trucking. WMTS’s management was okay with me driving for a few months at a time and then returning to college in between. They didn’t remove my driver files when I went back to school, so periodically, I would also run short trips on weekends. I was very fortunate to have found such a decent group of trucking folks for work for. After forty-five years, I am honored to still have them as f
riends.

  The company was both a flatbed and closed van operation. I mostly stuck with flatbeds, and I tip my hat to all truck drivers who pull flatbed trailers. The work is hard enough in good weather, and worse when it’s hot, cold, raining, or snowing. Many times, after getting filthy while tarping and securing loads, drivers have to change into clean, dry clothes before getting behind the wheel. My limited experience pulling flatbeds taught me to respect their work. The adage “Someone’s gotta do it” does not fit the flatbedder’s mentality. They do it because they are good at their jobs, and they enjoy getting a job done well.

  WMTS hauled an awful lot of lumber, and most of those loads were both easy to load and relatively easy for the driver to chain and tarp. Having previously had my ass chewed out royally by the Army colonel, I never left a shipper without making damned sure the load was properly secured. If there were enough chains, binders, and nylon straps available, they were all put to use for holding the load in place.

  An example of an easy load would be a truckload of pressure-­treated lumber. These loads do not require tarps, so the driver uses six to eight nylon straps and then he is on his way. Of course, there is always that shipper who causes you to bitch and moan when you get dispatched to its place of business. For me, it was a lumber mill that shipped finished tongue-and-groove lumber, which is as slippery as hot molasses, or other adjectives I will refrain from using.

  Carrying my first load of this shit—what we drivers affectionately called it—was an educational experience. To begin with, after the forklift placed all the various sized bundles on my trailer, it looked to me to be over the legal height limit of 13´6˝. I was sure the load was too high, so I asked the forklift driver if he could measure it, and was disheartened to see that it measured exactly 13´6˝ from the ground. I let out a long inward groan for being wrong, while the fellow who’d measured just right was grinning.

  If I remember correctly, the flatbed chains that had one end welded to the rub rail had half-inch links. A trailer’s rub rails protect the vehicle in the event it rubs against something, like a barrier or a wall. They’re important assets when carrying a load because they protect the chains, straps, and ropes that secure it. One end of each of the eight chains was welded so they would not be stolen, or slide off the trailer. Due to the chains being too heavy to throw up and over a tall load, the only way to get the chains across it was to throw a rope over the lumber from the driver side to the passenger side of the trailer. On the passenger side, you would tie the rope to the end of a chain, and then on the driver side, you would pull the rope-attached chain across the load of lumber. Then, all you had to do was repeat this process seven more times, for each of the other chains. Before hooking the chain binders, the driver had to climb on top of the load in order to place corner protectors under each chain, otherwise, the chain would bite into and damage the lumber.

  For my first load from the shipper of the finished tongue-and-groove lumber, I wanted to be extra cautious. I reckoned that tighter chains always worked best in securing a load, so I used a three-foot-long pipe, known as a binder pipe, on the chain binders to make sure the chains were secure. When I was finished, by God, those chains were tight. The next step was to tarp this expensive load of flooring. WMTS’s canvas tarps had ropes threaded through steel grommets (eyelets) spaced every twenty-four inches. These grommets protected the tarp from being torn. After rolling out the tarp on top of the lumber, I would pull the sides down until they were equal on both sides of the trailer. Using the ropes, I would then begin the process of cinching each one by tying knots to the rub rails on both sides of the trailer. I could only hit the road after completing this whole routine,

  These ropes led to an especially good time when you arrived at your delivery destination after driving through snow and ice, and found that your carefully hand-tied knots were frozen solid. Creativity was your best friend when dealing with frozen knots, and the best way to untie them was to find a way to thaw the knots. One time I used the receiver’s bathroom to fill gallon jugs with hot water to douse the knots. It took quite a few trips, getting water and dowsing, and repeating, but it got the job done. Another time, when delivering to a building supply store, I had to thaw the knots by purchasing a small propane torch. On one occasion, my only solution was to cut every single rope. Thankfully, flatbed trucking has come a long way since the days of the canvas tarps. Ropes have been replaced by rubber bungee cords, and today, many flatbed trailers employ a tarp attached to an aluminum structure, which can be rolled forward from the rear to the front, thereby opening the trailer bed for loading and unloading.

  After leaving the tongue-and-groove lumber mill, I traveled about one hundred miles before I noticed in my mirrors what seemed to be bulges under the tarps on each side of the trailer. I found a place to pull over to inspect the load, got out, and saw that the lumber bundles had worked outward and were bulging out from under the tarp. The load looked pregnant. I had tightened the chains so tightly that the bundles were actually flattening on the top, while at the same time being squeezed out at the sides. I learned a life lesson that day: When hauling finished tongue-and-groove lumber, only tighten chains so there is no play in them. Do NOT tighten the shit out of them!

  Listening to other drivers’ stories proved I was not the only one who hated hauling finished lumber. It was so ornery to transport that sometimes, even though you were sure the load was securely tightened, the lumber would seem to develop a life of its own. While trucking down the highway, individual lumber pieces would begin working their way out of the middle of the top bundles on the back of the trailer. These rogue pieces would “telescope” so much that they would poke holes in the canvas tarps.

  I was a rookie at hauling finished lumber, so I was certain several drivers were pulling my leg when they said there was a truck stop north of Richmond, Virginia, that had an outside brick wall on one side of its repair shop, which everyone used when they hauled finished lumber. I thought, Yeah, right! What idiot would back their truck into a brick wall? But when this first load did, in fact, telescope, I learned they weren’t kidding. I pulled into the truck stop and then slowly backed my trailer up against its brick wall, thereby pushing the offending telescoped pieces back into their bundles. I was thankful at that moment, but it didn’t change my feeling overall. I’m sure older flatbed operators would agree that slick, finished lumber was among the top ten most aggravating commodities to transport.

  I was never overjoyed to learn that it was my turn to be dispatched to pick up a load from this lumber shipper, but I never again had as much trouble as I did with that inaugural load. I even learned the trick of doubling the tarp over the end of the load, which helped create more of a barrier that kept the lumber from telescoping. There were times, however, that even that didn’t do the trick.

  Another life lesson learned during a hiatus from college was that traffic circles have posted speed limits to alert drivers that they need to slow down for good reason. One time while pulling a closed van and hauling a palletized load of cut paper stacked on pallets with four-inch-high “feet” (small blocks of wood that raise the height of the pallet), I entered the only traffic circle in Newton Grove, North Carolina. (At the time, it may have been the only traffic circle in North Carolina, at least that I was aware of.) I was clearly going too fast: while rounding the circle, I checked my driver’s side mirror to make sure I was missing the curb, and, lo and behold, I saw that my driver’s-side trailer wheels had come off the ground.

  I am positive I yelled either, “Oh, shit!” or “Oh, fuck!” and I am certain that shouting these words caused the trailer wheels to sit back down on the pavement. After successfully making it through the circle and pulling over to the side of the highway, I was horrified to see that the front of my trailer was tilting over and damned nearly sitting on the passenger-side tractor tires. I opened one of the trailer doors and I’m sure all sorts of cusswords were released since all the pallet
s of paper were sitting against the right-hand wall. All the four-inch feet, which I had never seen used before, had broken off when the pallets shifted. I badly wished I had observed those speed limit signs, because the next several days proved awfully damned agonizing.

  The next morning, I asked some local folks if there was anywhere in town that regularly received shipments from tractor trailers, and one of them recommended a certain feedstore, which had everything I needed: a loading dock, available warehouse space, and a decent forklift. The very nice and helpful proprietor said he didn’t have time to help me, but I was welcome to use the facilities and equipment on my own. It took most of the day for me to rework the load. I had to unload each pallet of paper, and due to the fact that the feet were broken all to hell, I had to raise each pallet high enough that I could use both a claw hammer and a pry bar to remove the broken pieces from under each pallet. I also made sure I didn’t place my body too far under the pallets, just in case the forklift dropped, which would have smashed me flat. I reloaded the pallets after completing the foot surgery, and secured the load from shifting by nailing two-by-fours beside each pallet. Thankfully, I could do this because the trailer had a wooden floor.

  The following morning, I arrived at the printing plant in Manhattan. In the way that only a true New Yorker could, the receiver greeted me by saying, “What the fuck is wrong with that fucking paper mill? These fucking pallets were supposed to have fucking four-inch feet on the bottoms, so we can unload the fucking things with our pallet jack. We can’t get our fucking jack under these fucking pallets! What a way to start the fucking day!”

  After I told him what happened, he said, “Fucking truck drivers!”

  Of course, he refused the load because the pallets had no feet. Several hours later, I delivered the fucking load to a warehouse in Jersey fucking City. This fucking warehouse installed new four-inch feet on each pallet and then redelivered the load to the paper plant in the city. I blamed everything on that fucking traffic circle.