I'm sorry I've been missing in action,
but I'm trying to return to this little exercise. It really is a
serious discipline to do this. I am usually so tired at the end of
each day that I just don't feel like trying to write. I like to be
creative, but when you are dead tired it doesn't come very easily.
So much has happened since I posted
last that there is no way for me to tell about everything. Doing
this job is akin to living three or four lifetimes in one. You see
so many different things, come across such diverse peoples, and
basically end up moving along like a gypsy through three or four
states each day that it all becomes a whirlwind experience that
almost seems like an addiction. The fact that you are always on the
move begins to feel as though you have a need to be on the move. It
is a difficult thing to just do this for your job, because it very
easily becomes your lifestyle – that of always being on the move,
never settling anywhere, never calling anything home. There is a
certain aspect of it that is a reminder of the fact that we are
strangers in a foreign land, longing for our home – pilgrims, whose
journey is not complete until we cross that final river, and rejoice
in the victory our King secured for us over that final enemy.
I'll just give you a brief look at a
few highlights of the last few weeks since I last posted about going
to Limerick, PA. My trip into Limerick was crazy. Pennsylvania,
while beautiful, is a treacherous place for big trucks if you end up
getting off the interstates. Their roads, at times have very sharp
curves and steep grades, in fact there are many of them where trucks
are not even allowed because of the dangers inherent for a big rig.
I came into Limerick in the dark and I ended up on some of those
crazy mountain roads of theirs, but I made it safely with only one
problem where I had to make a sharp right curve and the impatient car
at the intersection decided to cut the corner and get between me and
the power poles on the right side of my truck. They could have
gotten easily crushed in there by making such a hasty foolish move,
but I kept my cool while they acted like a fool. They finally
realized how dumb that move was and hit the gas and went careening
into the ditch and back up and out and swerved around the back of my
truck to get out of the path of danger that they had chosen.
When I finished that load up in
Farmington, Connecticut I picked up a back haul load at Cressona, PA
and delivered it to a Great Dane trailer manufacturing facility in
Georgia. The aluminum material on my truck was 53 feet long! Here I
am backed into the building at the Great Dane plant.
And here is what is going on inside
that door where they are unloading me with an overhead crane.
The snow in Farmington was still about
six feet deep, and they told me that when it begins to melt that they
had a truck load of returns for me to take back to Delhi one of these
days, but they were buried in the snow right now so that the
fork-lift could not even get to them to load the truck.
Here's an interesting sight that I saw
in Virginia recently. I came through after a very heavy snow storm.
I waited for the storm to pass before I came through, and I'm glad
that I did, for this is what I saw – four different trucks
just like this on the side of the road looking like they had simply
gotten tired and laid down on their sides for a nap.
Here's what happened to them. They
tried to drive through blizzard conditions where at times you simply
can't see anything – this is called white-out conditions. I've
told you before how dangerous it is to pull over in a snow storm
because the next vehicle coming up on you sees your tail lights and
fearing that they have wandered off the pavement moves over behind
you and then runs right into the back of your parked truck. Well,
these guys tried to get far enough over off the edge of the road to
avoid that and got themselves into a different problem. They got all
the tires on one side of their truck and trailer over off the
shoulder and into the grass. Well, there has been so much snow melt
up here lately that the ground is very wet and soft. So, as they sat
there waiting for the white-out conditions to stop, one side of their
truck was slowly sinking into the very soft ground... and next thing
they know they have reached the tipping point. Not a good day for a
truck driver! These trucks need to stay on the pavement – they are
just too heavy to take a risk like that.
Tonight I am in Springfield, Missouri.
I'm sleeping in the parking lot at Efco, a manufacturer of glass door
and window frames who uses a lot of the aluminum extrusions that SAPA
produces in their product. I will be delivering my truck load of
aluminum to them at six o'clock in the morning, and then I will be
dead-heading back to Delhi, LA to see what's next on the agenda.
Here's one more shot of a recent back-haul load I had. This was picked up in Pennsylvania and delivered down to Beaumont, Texas, This is two pieces of steel sometimes called billets, or ingots. These two pieces weigh twenty thousand pounds each. I picked them up at a foundry and delivered them to a machine shop.
