Frozen!

That name of a popular movie right now is all I could think of for a title to this post. I find it intriguing that C.S. Lewis associated evil with bitter cold weather in his “Chronicles of Narnia”. I seriously thought I wasn't going to be able to get my load unstrapped and ready to be off-loaded when I got to the Caterpillar plant in Aurora, IL. It is so cold up here. It was about 6 or 7 degrees with a stiff wind blowing the whole time I was trying to get things ready. I have some very good winter time clothing and gloves, but still my toes and fingers began to ache and my poor mustache would have broken in half if I had tried to smile or change my facial expression.

I had a 3:00 appointment to get to the plant, and the further North I traveled the weather just got worse. I started getting into some snow and ice on the highway and then I started noticing cars stuck on the sides of the highway where they had slid off. Then I saw the one thing I was dreading – flashing lights ahead. I simply didn't have time for a traffic delay and still be able to make it on time. It was critical that I get this stuff off so that I could get another load. If I can't make it then I'm stuck until Monday morning. The flashing lights were emergency vehicles and we got choked down to one lane because of several big trucks that were jack-knifed on the interstate. Once I got on up to the Lincoln Highway the traffic slowed even more just because it was Friday afternoon and lots of ice on the roadway. Consequently I got to Caterpillar at 3:45. It took them a little while to figure out what to do because the shift changes at 3:30 and there was now no one there in the particular department that was to receive these blocks. At first they told me I would have to wait until Monday, but thankfully after talking with a helpful supervisor, they got a forklift operator from another department to come unload me. He wasn't too cheerful about it, but I still expressed my sincere gratitude to him.

The weather plays an integral part in the problems faced daily by an over the road truck driver. Frankly, it can be quite unnerving at times – trying to manage a vehicle that is so large and so heavy through all kinds of road conditions will test your limits. Ice is particularly challenging. It was 8 degrees here when I arrived. When I bedded down last night it was zero, and I awoke this morning to 8 below zero. With the famous winds that come off of Lake Michigan up here, that makes it very difficult to be outside the truck securing my loads. Which brings me to the news about my next load. It starts in downtown Chicago, and then has two additional pick-ups in Lombard, and Addison – suburbs of Chicago. I'm not real excited about having three pick-up locations in this weather, which of course means three different times I will have to be outside making sure this stuff can ride all the way down to Houston, Texas without falling off the truck.

Oh well, enough about my difficulties. Let me tell you about one of the pleasures of this job. I start early on most days, it just makes sense to get things done so that you can move on to something else. It is purely my choice, and somewhat of a business decision. A truck driver makes his own decisions and those decisions have a big impact on his earning potential. It is a performance based job, which suits my personality well. A side benefit to getting started early is that you get to see the dawning of each new day. Some are more spectacular than others, but that fresh first peek of daylight rising above the horizon is always a welcome sight to me. It is like the promising and powerful statement of our King when he declared “I make all things new”. Here's what I was greeted with this morning as I was leaving Missouri.

I love seeing the morning take shape - it is almost like a new birth, or a promise that the darkness will not prevail.  Light is always special, but nothing compares to when we first see it overcoming the darkness.

I don't have to get to my first pick-up today until noon, so I'm taking the time to make this post and just sort of taking it easy here in the confines of my little rolling house.  It is cramped quarters to be sure, but it is toasty warm in here right now, so I'm not even going to crack a door open.

Calamity Jane Rides Again!

It always amazes me just how much I move around with this crazy job. Last night I slept in southern Mississippi near the Gulf of Mexico, yet tomorrow night I will be in Chicago, Illinois near the shores of Lake Michigan. It's like a whirlwind, a couple more nights and I'll probably be right back down in the swamps of Louisiana.

I had to laugh at myself today, here I am giving it all I can, within the limits of the government's “Hours of Service” regulations for truck drivers, trying to get to “the Windy City”. I felt like Doris Day in “Calamity Jane” racing up to “Chicaggy” to fetch Adelaide Adams! It's silly I know, but sometimes your mind just entertains itself with silly notions like that when you spend so much time alone on the open road. I realized also that I tend to talk to myself when I'm out here all alone on the highway. I noticed it after being home for a couple of weeks during the Christmas break. You just get lonely, and sometimes the sound of your own voice helps ease the separation from your own family.

It is unnatural to be separated for such lengthy periods of time. I mean, if you didn't have a good marriage it might be alright, but every time I go home it only confirms for me that I have the finest woman God ever blessed a man with. She makes me a better man. Somehow, in a mystery, He teaches us of the depths of His grace through the trials we go through together. She not only makes me a better man, she gives me a great desire to be a better man. That can only be accomplished through the power of Christ at work within me. He has conquered so much of me, and yet the more of me that is put to death the more I realize there are greater battles to be won. One thing I know for sure is that He is the Victor.

I was reading in Joshua today and came upon the place where Joshua encountered a heavenly helper and inquired whether he was “for us or against us” - he replied simply that he was neither, he was here as commander of the Lord's army. I'm so glad that the government of His kingdom rests on His shoulders. I have proven to be a poor manager of many things, even when I was convinced I could be good. I love that He has come to be Victor over all, and I am glad that everything in me that I despise is a part of that great “all” that He will conquer.

Well, I'm rambling on and on and hopping around with so many different thoughts that I'm probably sounding incoherent. I promised to tell you about this load, and it is 45,000 pounds of wooden blocks. That's right, 40 pallets of approximately 8” x 8” wooden blocks. The gentleman who loaded me this morning said that they are used at the Caterpillar plant as spacers when building some type of flooring in one of the large pieces of equipment they manufacture there.

I'm going to bed now, going to get up early in the morning and see if I can get this load delivered tomorrow so I can move on to something else that is hopefully headed south! It's too cold up here. I'm in Steele Missouri tonight on I-55 at the Deerefield Travel Center.

Rolling Down The Highway Again

I'm back on the job today after a nice lengthy stay at my comfortable little house. It is January the 7^th, and I've been home since Dec. 23^rd. I so enjoyed this nice break with my dear family, and getting to see many of my close friends at church was a nice reward also. It really is unheard of for an over the road truck driver to have this kind of a break at home. When I arrived at the SAPA plant today I asked my dispatcher if this sort of thing takes place every year at Christmas, and he said yes. Apparently they close the plant for a week for maintenance and re-tooling of the equipment. So once they get the plant back up and running there is still a lag in time until they are pumping out their product at the rate we are accustomed to. Consequently it is really slow this time of year for the drivers like me who are dedicated to keeping this account's freight moving across the country.

Even though they asked me to come back today it turned out that they didn't have a load for me to get after all, so they found me a regular flat-bed load that I can haul that picks up in Richton, MS and delivers to Aurora, IL. I've been to Aurora many times, it is a suburb of Chicago. The weather ought to be really tough up there this time of year. I'm parked tonight at a truck stop about thirty miles outside of Richton, and I will be starting my day tomorrow around 4:30 in the morning. I'm picking up at a place called American Wood, and delivering it to a Caterpillar plant in Aurora. I don't know yet what I'm getting, but I'm assuming it is some lumber or wood of some sort. It could be the lumber that the Caterpillar plant uses to make crates with – I don't know, but I'll let you know what I've got with my next post.

I'm pulling a “Connestoga” trailer that had some tears in the fabric. My dispatcher asked me if I could repair it and I said yes, so I took some PVC glue that I had on my truck and some old scrap pieces of tarp that I keep on board for this very purpose and made an extra 45 dollars today in about an hours worth of work. He said he would put it on my pay listed as a local delivery. Not bad for doing my dispatcher a favor!

It's about 8:00 p.m. And I'm getting ready to go to bed – I want to be well rested for my early start tomorrow. I will drive as much as I legally can tomorrow, then shut down for ten hours and start early again on Friday so that I can get up to Chicago and get unloaded on Friday with hopefully enough time left to catch a load for the weekend. The last thing I want to do is sit up in Chicago for the weekend. I'll let you know how those best laid plans of mice and men turn out.

Home For The Holidays

It is December 30th and I arrived home on the 23rd of the month - I have been home for an entire week!  This is unheard of, but I am really enjoying it!  I was planning on starting back to work yesterday, but I got an unexpected call from my dispatcher saying that it was a little slow this week and if I wanted I could stay home for a few more days!  Well, I jumped at that chance - it is very seldom an over the road truck driver gets this much time at home, but when opportunity knocks I'm throwing the door wide open.

I really do enjoy my job, and of course I'm only getting paid when the wheels are turning, but I have thoroughly enjoyed being home with my wife and children this week.  Since I am now working on a dedicated account (SAPA Aluminum) I am somewhat at the mercy of the demands of their workload. At this time of the year they are just getting back to work from their holiday break and the factory at Delhi, Louisiana is just now getting fired back up to start filling orders so there is a slight delay after the holidays before things are hot and heavy.  It is one of the many benefits of this new job that I hadn't realized would be available until now.  Next year I can plan more appropriately for it if I find the situation to be the same.  Part of it this year was the day of the week that Christmas fell on.

I've had such a nice time at home, it was so nice stepping into my house and seeing the way my wife and daughters had it all decorated up so festively.  The sights, sounds, and delicious smells of Christmas were abundant in our snug little home, but the best thing for me was just being able to relax and enjoy the comfort of being near the people I hold dear - that includes my close friends of 30 plus years at our church.  We enjoyed an intimate little dinner at the Alston's house in Nacogdoches just a few days after we had a brief Christmas Eve visit with our relatives down in Seabrook, Texas.

As you can see the house was completely decorated right down to the deer heads on the wall!  We have had a very nice time together and I really hate to see it come to a halt, but halt it must.  I will be gone for another month when I start rolling again, with a plan on being home for my birthday at the end of January/beginning of February.  I will begin this new year with a resolve to watch my caloric intake a little closer and see what I can do about losing a little weight.  I'm not excessively over weight, but as a truck driver it can creep up on you quite unawares.  I've seen too many of my peers out there on the road who can barely waddle in and out of the truck stops.  I refuse to let myself get like that.

I'll start posting again as soon as I leave home.

Dyslexic Paperwork Blues

It is Sunday afternoon and I have parked my truck in the empty parking lot of an abandoned shopping center to spend the night here in Baker, Louisiana. Baker is a small community on the outskirts of Baton Rouge. I have on my truck some material called Flex-a-mat which is used for erosion control. This is what I picked up at the place where the grumpy old guy, who was going to be late for his date, berated me with his sour attitude and bitter tongue.

Yesterday and today were very pleasant days, just as weekends often are for me, since I am usually not dealing with shippers or receivers. They were days where all you have to do is drive. My plan was to get in here during the middle of the day so that I would have daylight hours to find a place to park, and so I could locate the place I will be delivering to on Monday morning. Parking for Big Trucks is really limited down in the New Orleans and Baton Rouge areas. My little truck stop guide book showed there to be a truck stop in Baker, but I discovered it to be out of business when I arrived with signs all around warning you not to park there unless you want to get towed.

It turned out to be a good plan to get in here early like I did because the information on my paperwork was totally useless. The numbers in both the address and the phone number were transposed so that I could not find the “job site”, which is the only information I had for the location – no company name or contractor name was provided. And the phone number which was supposed to be my contact named Aaron, went to someone named Pierre who was just some individual who didn't have a clue what I was even talking about. After several hours of fruitless phone calls to various personnel who might could help, I finally managed to figure out that it was going to an Exxon refinery, so I got on the internet and discovered there were only six Exxon refineries in this area!

I will say that good fortune smiled on my efforts though, as the first refinery I went to, so that I could inquire for a little more information, was the proper location, and the guard even helped me get the proper numbers together so that I could make contact with the contractor. Driving a truck is easy, it is all the other stuff that goes along with the job that can make it a frustrating job for the naive souls who think all they've got to do is hold that steering wheel and point it in the right direction.

Here's what the Flex-a-mat looks like on the back of my trailer. You can't see it well because the material is rolled up, but the other side of it has little concrete waffle looking squares on it to give it some weight to hold it in place while it is doing it's job of controlling the soil erosion.

As you can see, I am pulling gone of those "Connestoga Wagon" trailers.  They are very nice in that they eliminate the need for dealing with those heavy tarps.  Almost all the loads that I pull for Sapa must be tarped.  This is a back haul load that didn't require tarping, but it got protected any way due to the equipment I had with me at the time I got dispatched on the load.

Meeting The Challenges

Well it's Saturday morning and I just woke up to a gentle snow here at the T/A truck stop in Florence Kentucky.  Friday went really well for me with only a slight disturbance near the end of my day which I will tell you about later in this tale of a truck driver's day.  As I was making my way from St. Louis up to Indianapolis I was formulating a plan for the next day in which I decided I would sleep in Hoosier Trim's parking lot so I could get unloaded first thing in the morning.  I've been there once before and I was thinking they had a large enough parking area where I could sneak in there and bed down for the night.  But, just to make sure I stopped at a rest area and pulled up "Google Earth" to take a look at the site from a "bird's eye" view, which thankfully reminded me that there is a gate at this plant and they close it at night.  So plan B took shape which was to find a truck stop just outside of Indianapolis and get some rest there.

I woke up on Friday to an early morning foreboding looking grey and wintry sky.  From the drivers seat of my truck I nibbled away at my bowl of Raisin Bran cereal as I watched the trucks rolling in and out of the truck stop, thinking about how to manage my time for the day ahead.  I don't know what I'm doing after I finish this load, which is information that always helps me when planning, but since my regular dispatcher is out this week, I'm having to make do with whatever tidbits of information I can get from the person who is halfheartedly standing in for him.  I don't mean to sound critical - I'm sure this gentleman has his other responsibilities to tend to also this week, it's just the way it is, and I certainly can deal with it for a week or two.  I got everything done on Friday and sent my empty call in over the qualcomm at about 1:30 from the parking lot of my final stop in Edgerton, Ohio.  Then my phone starts ringing and it is the temporary dispatcher letting me know that they have a back haul for me that picks up in Sharonville, Ohio and delivers to a job site in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  That's great except for the part where I have to be there in three hours and it is four hours away on little state highways that run through small towns with stop signs and traffic signals all along the way.

So, I have to make some phone calls while on the road to let people know I will be late, and so far it appears that they are fine with waiting for me, as I will be the fourth truck load going out from there today to this job site, and it is critical that we all get the product delivered on Monday.  I actually got there thirty minutes ahead of the ETA I had given them, but I was immediately given a royal cussing out by the grumpy old guy who had been forced to wait on me by the boss.  I literally had to bite my tongue to keep myself from going off on this guy and let him know that I didn't really care if his load got delivered or not, and as far as I was concerned he could find someone else to pull it.  It really made me angry - he was accusing me of "dragging my ass" all day and making him be late for his "date" tonight, when the truth is that I have been giving it my all since probably long before he even got out of bed this morning, and I would just about give anything in this world to have just a few minutes with the woman I love.  But I remained calm and just grinned at him, gladly knowing that the power of Christ in me has thankfully made me a new creature which doesn't react to unkindness in a like fashion.  This of course just proved to make him more angry.  I'll spare you all the details of getting loaded, but after I left there I was stuck in a traffic jam on I-75 south for hours due to a bad accident.  As soon as I could I got myself into the T/A here in Florence Kentucky, I crashed in the bed exhausted from a very long day with a trying end to it.

But here it is, a new day with a fresh start.  I have the whole weekend ahead to make my way down to the Southern most parts of this great land, and I will be two or three days closer to getting home for Christmas by the time I deliver this load down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

On Time - Barely!

It's Thursday night and I am bedding down in my sleeper in Indianapolis, Indiana at the Love's Truck Stop.  When I returned to Delhi on Tuesday they had my next load ready to go about four o'clock that afternoon.  It is a load headed for Edgerton, Ohio and it has it's first stop in St. Louis at a place called French Gerleman.  They stop receiving at 3:00 and by the time I got my load secured and ready to roll at Delhi I had about five legal hours to drive, which I used as carefully as I could to get myself up to Marion, Arkansas where I stopped for my required ten hour break.  Then just as soon as I could I got myself back on the road and made it into the Shipping/Receiving clerk's door at ten minutes to three!

Sometimes it helps to make friends with these people who have the power to really mess up your day, and I knew I was pushing all the limits by rolling in here at quitting time, but what else could I do?  I had done everything in my power to get here on time, but the folks who give this stuff to me don't really understand what all we do to make things happen, or if they did I would think they would try to get these loads ready a little sooner so we aren't breaking our necks to make their company look good to it's customers.  The receiving clerk just rolled his eyes and then looked up at the clock on the wall and asked me "You do know it is quitting time don't you?"  So I tried my best to be comical with him and said "Yes sir, and I am very sorry about that, but if you only knew what I went through to get this to you on time, then you would probably agree that it is nothing short of miraculous that I am here as early as I am.  Now surely you wouldn't take a guy who just experienced a miracle to get this to you on time and tell him that you are not going to unload him would you?  He tried to hide his smile as he told me which door of the huge warehouse to back my truck into.

As soon as we got his stuff off I headed on to Indianapolis where I will deliver all but five of the pieces left on my truck to Hoosier Trim first thing in the morning.  Then I will make my way over into Edgerton, Ohio where I will empty out my trailer and then find out what I am doing next.  It snowed on me a little bit at St, Louis, but then it cleared as I started heading out to Indianapolis.