Lament of a Trucker's Kid

My father worked a variety of different jobs when I was a boy but he always returned to driving trucks. It was in his blood, he said. But he warned me; if I ever became a trucker he would kick my tail. It was many years before I would understand. It was not his intent to deny me the adventure of a boy’s dream; he wanted only to spare me the anguish of a lonely life spent separated from family and friends.

His introduction to trucking was as a bread man, delivering fresh loaves and pastries to homes each morning. My father was intelligent and inventive. He suggested several marketing innovations and was rewarded with a promotion to district sales manager. But, he became bored with office routine and soon returned to the freedom he enjoyed working behind the wheel. This became a pattern over his lifetime; to begin as a driver, move up to the office, and then return to the truck. He valued his independence and the opportunity to travel and meet people.

Dad spent his time on the road in a succession of trucks; concrete mixers, delivery vans, dump trucks, fuel oil tankers. My favorites were the tractor-trailer rigs. He drove Macks, long-nosed LF and JT models with sleeper cabs, followed by a variety of early cab-over models like the Gs and Hs. I remember an awesome old Autocar with bullet-shaped headlights mounted on its fenders, a tilt-cab International, several shiny new Peterbilts and a road-worn Freightliner. I especially liked a simple red Mack B-61 with rounded black fenders and an aluminum add-on sleeper compartment.

My father was like an artist when shifting gears. He glided the twin floor-mounted shift levers single handedly through their pattern in a choreography of wrist and hand movements. I watched in awe as he shifted without using the clutch, listening instead for the engine’s RPMs to drop in pitch until they matched those of the transmission. The shift lever then would slip smoothly into the next gear, coaxed by just the slightest nudge. It was like poetry.

I rode with him during the summers when school was out. He would wake me quietly at four in the morning to get a head start on traffic. We dressed alike, white T-shirts with a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes folded up in the sleeve; jeans with rolled cuffs, black engineer boots. It was the 1950s, a time before CB radios. Passing in opposite directions on single lane roads the drivers communicated with each other by a cryptic language of hand signals and headlight flashes.

Dad said he brought me along to keep him awake. But I believe he really just wanted the company. Life over the road could be lonely. A single trip might last more than a week. Nights were spent in the parking lot of a truck stop, choking on the acrid diesel fumes of the idling rigs around us, trying to ignore the frequent groan and hiss of air brakes and the roar of departing trucks running through their gears.

We took our meals at roadside diners with other drivers; strangers sharing food, a smoke and a far off look in their eyes earned from years of staring through a windshield. I learned to drink my coffee black, laugh at bad jokes and spend long hours in silence, watching an endless lines of utility poles and road stripes merge in the center of the big side mirror.

More than anything I wanted to drive trucks like my Dad when I grew up. The long hours and loneliness and boredom did nothing to discourage me. Years spent beside him as a passenger had earned me my own place behind the wheel. I wanted to run through gears without a clutch and feel the vibration of the engine through the floorboard of the cab. It was never his intention but my father’s invitation to travel the road with him had exposed me to the highway’s contagion. I was infected. Truck driving was in my blood too.

It was not fear of being kicked in the tail that kept me from climbing up behind the wheel. It was the look in his eyes as he warned me not to follow. He had wanted a better future for his son than the lonely trucker’s life he chose for himself. I honored his wish, but I never lost the longing. The sound of a distant truck passing in the night is a siren’s song to my soul. My imagination is carried back decades to the passenger seat of a red and black B-61 Mack, straining to haul a loaded flatbed up the single-lane switchbacks of a lonely mountain road.