~Paramendra Bhagat~
After getting unloaded in downtown St. Louis, Tim Brown sent messages over his highway master to inform his dispatcher he was empty, hoping to pick up a load and head home early for the weekend, if possible. He received a message from the company headquarters that was vague: “Call me ASAP.” No mention of load, no mention of where to go pick it up. But then sometimes Sue liked to do that over the phone if the data had not yet been entered into the computer, in which case the landline worked faster than satellite communication.
He called a few times but only got her voice mail; he left messages. There were no new messages on the highway master. He decided to drive his semi to the truck stop ten miles from downtown which would be a much better place to lay in wait anyway, especially if there was to be a delay. If he was lucky, his next load would be in that same direction. If not, ten miles is not too much of a distance. He had driven a few miles when the highway master went live: “New Message,” the speadker – “the lady” – said out loud. He pressed the buttons with his right hand to check the message, looking at the road ahead most of the time. He had been in the right lane so as not to miss the truck stop: he was not sure what exit it was off of. The message asked him to head out west on the interstate to a certain exit number immediately. No mention of load again. But then that too had happened before. At least, he was glad he had a load. Sometimes you could be at a truck stop an entire afternoon and still not have a load. Once he had been stuck for an entire weekend. He headed north on the bypass and then shot west. He did the calculation in his head. Where he was being sent to was probably an hour and a half away.
It was right before the St. Louis rush hour traffic, and he was glad to have skipped it. After he picked up the load and headed back, it would be past rush hour, he calculated, and he was glad for that. But city traffic tended to be heavy even at other hours, and he had a few slowdowns, but then he was out on the interstate in less than half an hour. He drove at a steady pace, doing the speed limit most of the time.
He had his radio off for no particular reason.
The cab looked neat inside. He had just been issued a relatively newer tractor. His old one had over 400,000 miles on it, this one had fewer than 100,000. This was a Volvo, the old one had been a Kenworth. The steering wheel was smoother, the engine noise was cut out more, and there was generally more space inside the cab. The dashboard was more appealing, the windscreen and the mirrors on the sides larger. His old cab did not have digital mile readers with which he could read the number of miles driven for a particular trip and the number of miles since the last fuel stop at the same time. The old one had the smell of an unkempt room that was not about to go away. This one was devoid of any such obvious obnoxious signs of previous occupancy. It was a 2001 make. “Newer than my car,” he thought often.
It was not always easy to end up with a choice tractor. At the company headquarters there were still many drivers who had been with the company longer who drove machines that were not as appealing. He considered himself lucky. But then he also drove hard, and generally got along well with his dispatcher, which worked in his favor.
As he drove, he was hoping Sue would send another message over the highway master to inform him where specifically he was going, but that did not happen. So about half an hour from the mentioned exit, he got off at a rest area and called again. This time Sue picked up the phone.
“Hey, there you are,” he said. “I have been driving an hour. I am half an hour from where you guys want me to go. But I still don’t know where I am going. Will you please give me the information? The merchant’s phone number perhaps.”
Mostly it worked that way. He would be given the name of the company, its general address, and, most important, its phone number that he would call up to get specific directions.
“You don’t know?” Sue asked. She sounded taut.
“Know what?”
“There has been an accident.”
He stayed calm, but visions flashed through his mind.
“Accident? Where?”
Sue put him on the phone with someone else who relayed that a company truck had hit an overpass at the exit that morning. Tim was talking to that driver’s dispatcher. “We tried to find someone else, but you are the closest company driver from there. Will you please go pick up that load and deliver it? It is to go to Memphis.”
Tim did not ask if anyone had been hurt. He wanted to wait until he got there to know if that had been the case. For now he got the driving directions to the wrecker service that had cleared the mess. They were right off the interstate, supposedly.
“Okay. I should be there in half an hour,” he informed and hung up. He drove his 18-wheeler back onto the interstate, and turned his radio on. If the accident had happened in the morning, that would be about eight hours earlier in the day, he thought, but he put the question on the truckers’ radio anyway.
“Eastbound, eastbound,” he addressed the truck drivers headed in the opposite direction. “Did any driver spot an accident at Exit 27?”
At first there was no response, and then a few voices came in. That yes, there had been a massive accident. The interstate had been shut off for a few hours.
“I don’t think the driver made it,” one voice said.
Like never before he noticed the difference between the cars on the road and the trucks. The cars were oblivious to the conversation, whereas the truckers drove like they were in some chat room online, that sense of community on the road for professionals who often stayed away from home, family and friends weeks at a time.
Tim still did not know what to feel. He was trying not to overreact. Chances were he did not know the driver; he hardly knew any drivers who worked for the company. When you bumped into them at truck stops, or said a brief hello to them as you passed them on the road, or even at the terminal, you met them once, and then you hardly ever saw them again. Road-runners did not stick around to socialize.
And it was important he focused on the driving with a cool head: accidents happened in seconds, he knew from experience. He also had a few hours of driving to do after he picked up the load, and he had to be mentally ready for that. So he tried to ward off thoughts, as much he could.
He had quit his factory job and come into trucking to make more money. Once in a while he would watch the trucks at the truck stops and think of all that metal that moved at all that speed for all those ceaseless hours, and then look at himself in the mirror when he went to take a shower at the truck stops, and put those together, and kind of shiver. In a happenstance, he did not stand a chance. Sometimes when he was driving a full load, he would think, that’s close to 80,000 pounds on my shoulders right there, held in place, but only if all goes right. Most of the time he tried to think in terms of only the steering wheel, and he tried to tell himself it was just like driving his car, or that wasn’t it wonderful to be able to go all over the country and watch all that landscape, and be making better money than he used to, but a few experiences before had got him nervous.
Once the top of the trailer tore up a little when he was backing late at night in some small town at a crossroad. The roof at the gas station whose space he was trying to make use of was not high enough, and he did not see in the dark. And he feared for his job, all that truck loan he still would have had to pay if he lost his job. The next time, after he had delivered a load and was on his way out in North Carolina, while backing up, his truck barely nudged a mailbox, and that went on to his record. Yet another time, while backing to park at a Knoxville truck stop, his trailer barely touched another truck, some paint came off, but the other driver called the police, and that went on his record as well, even though no insurance claim was made.
Then in April, while he was headed west in upstate New York, and he wanted to drive a few more hours after midnight after a fuel stop to catch up on hours, it had started to snow. He kept driving for two hours. The traffic had thinned out, but then at that time of the day, that usually happened. Winter having long gone on the calendar gave him false hopes, and he had driven in snow before. Snow and rain are fine, it is ice you don’t want to get on to, drivers often talked among themselves. And he could still see the snow flurry behind him which was good news, or so her remembered from truck school.
A few minutes after he passed the salt truck on his right, it happened and was over in three seconds. He felt the slide, and then his instinct led him to press on the brakes, and let go to steer, countersteer. The truck was about to slide leftwards, and then it slid right, and off the road, knocking down the metal railing on the side. It was a slope, and because the truck came to an immediate halt, he did not figure too much damage might have been done, but he later learned the metal wire of the railings had grabbed the air tanks, and so all brakes had locked up, luckily. The truck had jackknifed. The trailer had come from behind to the side and hit the tractor. The floor of the cab made a 45-degree angle. He managed to send an emergency message to the company. “Call me ASAP,” his message said.
“Not a scratch,” he reported when the voice on the other end asked. And some other company driver was able to take that same trailer the following day to its destination in Wisconsin. The load of huge paper rolls was fine; the trailer was fine enough. The cab had been disfigured, as if it had slid a feet to one side.
But he had been scared for his job, and his safety. About 50 feet ahead of the accident site was an electric grid tower. If the slide had occurred three minutes later, the truck stood the chance of going tens of feet down a steep slope, the wrecker service people shared. He kept thinking of all that metal at all that speed.
It cost him a few days he spent holed up in a motel waiting for another tractor to be sent to him. It had been determined the accident had not been his fault. Hitting a patch of ice was unfortunate, but the driver was not at fault. So he had retained his job, but he had been scared to the bones. He had bought life insurance for himself the next time he was at the company headquarters.
Right before the slide, he had passed through the Atlanta area heading up northeast through the densest fog he had ever seen on the road. The morning after in New York he had learned that over 100 vehicles, 25 of them semis, had collided in that fog along the Atlanta-Tennessee border, and he had shuddered at the visions of the happenstance. The fog had been dense too as he had driven north in South Carolina, but the traffic had been sparse, and he had turned his blinkers on as he had driven about five to ten miles below the speed limit.
So much metal moving at so much speed, the phrase would creep into his mind at random hours after that. But then months passed without any incidents. And he kept at it. He enjoyed the landscape that he got to see during those long hours of driving, especially when he got to go out West, as he went down Idaho once, on his way to the Bay Area from North Dakota, or when he drove through southern New Mexico on to Tucson, Arizona, where he was for a weekend when he dropped the trailer at the truck stop, and drove his tractor around the city, sight-seeing. The landscape was what he considered the best thing about his job, watching all that scenery, going from flat lands to mountains within a matter of days. The deserts have character, he told himself. He drove through downtown San Francisco and Manhattan for the heck of it, trailer attached. And he got to do coast to coast once, all the length from California to North Carolina. He was very tired at the end of the trip, but he was glad for having done it.
The money was better than with his previous job, and he had already sunk some of it into a new car for himself, and he was about to get himself a motorbike, for when he was home for the weekend. The steady girlfriend he had when he worked at the factory had since left him. He tried to call in often while he was on the road, but soon there was not much to talk about. It just was not the same, talking in person and talking on the phone. They had been living together; she moved out. He was surprised he was not in much pain when the relationship ended. He felt sorry for her, but then she had hooked up with someone else soon after, and he moved on. He liked being out on the road too much to not have moved on. His folks lived down the road, and they were a support system enough for when he got back whenever. And he would touch base from the road once in a while.
And there was an occasional fling, like when he went to a club right outside Dallas when he was stuck there for two days. The girl he danced with came over to his cab, parked outside. Her friend waited in their car while he spent some time with her. He felt particularly empty afterwards, and puked soon after she left. Perhaps it was the drink, he thought, or sometimes happens with one-night stands; the emotional distance torments the fun out of the act. But he had her phone number, and he did call her a few more times, but then that was that. And he was not one of those to look for “commercial company” at truck stops. He was too scared of diseases. A friend of his had contracted one, and the treatment was too arduous and iffy. If he was lucky down the road he might find someone who might go on the road with him, he thought, perhaps a co-driver. That is where the money is, many older drivers had said. Or if he got to become an owner operator, and had a woman partner, it might just work out, he thought. But he was in no hurry. The here and now was fine enough, and he looked forward to more time on the road. Unlike some homesick drivers he had met, he seemed to be made for those long runs; he thrived on it.
And then, one day, about six months later, it happened. It was late in the evening; he was at a junction waiting for his green light. The light rain made it appear darker than it was. And he moved ahead upon green. Either the car had been racing to beat the light from a distance, and had come too close to the intersection to come to a stop to the green that had turned into orange, and quickly to red, or the driver did not see the truck; it was too big to be seen. She expected a car or not, and so the truck just went over her vision of what she might have been expecting. Or the rain and the dark tricked her, or her car slid, for if the tire threads are gone, a little layer of water can act like a patch of ice, and she would have had no control. But this one car came straight at a right angle from his left, and it felt like it hit the trailer. He had not gained much speed, and he heard something hit the truck, and he stopped immediately. At first he saw nothing. And then he got out. The woman driver died on the spot, he later learned. The lower half of the car had gone under the trailer, and it was as if she had been decapitated. He called 911 on his cell phone, reported on the accident, and stayed away from the car. There were plenty of witnesses. It was determined the accident had not been his fault. His conscience weighed heavy for the longest time, but the accident did not go on his record.
He continued to drive long distances. He would think driving the enormous truck, in some ways, was like being drafted to go to war. The possibility of physical extermination loomed large with the smallest mistakes. And there were always stories that other drivers shared, many of them quite ugly.
As he approached the exit, he tried to clear his head of the thoughts that were by now scrambling there. For all practical reasons, he was just going to pick up the load. On-time delivery was the mantra the industry lived by, and the company was going to do its best despite the accident.
He got off at the exit, and followed the given directions. The road right off the exit was the one he stayed on. And there it was, he read the sign, a mile or two after getting off the interstate. He had been expected, so there were people to guide him. They blocked the traffic on the small road so he could back into the space allotted. The load was to be transferred from the other trailer to his empty one.
“What happened?” he asked with some alarm once he got off to noone in particular. He meant to ask if anyone had any idea how it had happened.
The representative of the insurance company approached him. He suspected the driver had been on substance, he said. The load was not heavy. A few other drivers with the same company coming from the same destination in Seattle were right behind him, and nothing happened to those others. The others, he said, did not even stop after the accident. They kept moving on. Later he learned this to not have been the case. The guy had been spinning a story.
He walked around. The people with the wrecker service quickly showed him around. It had taken over three hours to get the driver out from where his body was, pressed against the trailer. But he had been flown on a helicopter to the nearest university hospital, and if he was still breathing when they took him, that probably was good news, they surmised. Later he learned, the driver had lost a leg.
“He is lucky,” the insurance company representative said. He meant to say the driver was lucky to have survived at all, or that prompt emergency care had been available.
The cab was gone. The engine was there, the wheels were there, the bottom was there, but the red cab was gone. Everything they had collected was laid in a pile about thirty feet away. The steering wheel retained a semi circle, but the rest of it had become a straight line.
“The truck hit the concrete pillar at an angle,” someone said. Some other employee volunteered he had not yet visited the accident site.
“It had been raining in the morning,” someone else said.
He had opened the doors to his trailer, and the load was being transferred; looked like cartons of computer hardware. And while they shifted the load, he called Sue to inform her. Sue sounded shaken, so he did not go into too much detail, or did, but kept it brief. Noone else from the company had seen it for themselves, so he thought he had a responsibility to describe what he saw.
“Basically, the cab is gone. There just is no cab left. The driver’s body was pressed against the trailer. The steering wheel is bent, half of it into a straight line. The driver supposedly lost a leg, but he was still alive at the end of the three or four hours it took them to get him out of the mess.”
“Call me when you are loaded and ready to head to Memphis,” Sue had tried to maintain her usual professional demeanor.
He walked back and forth between the pile and the damaged tractor a few times. Life was fickle, but a truck looked even more so. So much metal moving at so much speed so little keeping it in place, he thought.
He left quickly after they got the load transferred. He was in a hurry. He was going to try and make it on time, despite the loss of hours. He drove to the overpass at the exit, and parked the truck on the ramp. Then he walked over to the accident site. Whatever had happened had happened very fast. The truck had gotten off the road, veered to its right, off the interstate, and into a ditch. As it had headed straight, its wheels on the right had ascended the small hill that supported the overpass, and the truck had hit the concrete pillar at an angle to its left, coming to a halt. He walked back and forth taking it all in, all the mark on the grass, the struggle of the wheels.
What might have happened, he tried to ask himself. It was an early morning hour. Had the driver been driving all night? Did he fall asleep for those few seconds?
He remembered he had himself found that his truck had moved over on to the shoulder as he jerked off from a split second sleep. At the next rest area, he had parked, and slept for a few hours before hitting the road again. That had been during one of those early months when he had just started.
Sometimes, if you are really tired, once the body falls asleep without giving you loud notice, it goes deep within a second: you are gone. Tim wondered if that was what had happened.
But he could not tell either way. It had been raining too. Did the truck slide? Did his right steer tire go flat while he was going at high speed? For that too had happened to Tim.
One lazy Sunday afternoon in eastern Kentucky, his left steer tire had gone flat, but then he had been in the right lane going at moderate speed, and there had hardly been any traffic, so he had managed to maintain control. And he had been only a mile away from the nearest exit, so he had sent an emergency message to the company, and had driven on the shoulder at about five miles per hour to the exit to the truck stop there. Nothing unwonted had happened, but it had been scary.
He had had several flat tires on his trailer, but the steer tires were the ones you were supposed to be able to count on. He had complained back at the shop, and they had replaced both his steer tires the next time he had passed through the terminal.
And then he drove off, east to St. Louis, and then south, Memphis bound. It rained most of the way along the Mississippi. In the morning he received a message from Sue again. Why was he still in St. Louis, she asked, when he was only an hour away from Memphis. Is everything okay? She was obviously still in some shock.
After he got to the parking lot at the consignee’s, he saw a few more trucks from his company. And, as was the custom among them, he approached the drivers. It appeared they all had been part of the same group coming from Seattle. They had picked up the load together, all new drivers; some had been on the road four weeks, some two months. All of them said they had not been home in over three weeks. The driver who lost his leg had been in an apparent hurry. He had been gaining hours every day. He had a wife and a kid he was desperate to see at the earliest. It was possible he drove non-stop for twice the legal limit, perhaps more, according to some estimates. The other drivers guessed the guy perhaps fell asleep.
Tim had to go pick up a load in Arkansas before he could head home. And he was to swap trailers with some other driver from the company half way between Nashville and Memphis at a truck stop. That driver had also been part of the group. He guessed it was the tire. The steer tire had gone flat, he guessed. The company is to be blamed for keeping drivers out for that long, he complained. They used to be better about home time, he said, not any more.
During other times, Tim would have driven a few more hours before calling it a day, and he had been wanting to get home for the weekend early this time, but for that day, he called it quits, and took it easy. He took a long, warm shower using his shower coupon from the fueling earlier in the day in West Memphis. And then he went to sleep around ten o’clock. The day after he got up feeling bad about all that less time he would finally be home. He had not yet realized it would be Sunday afternoon before he would be home. He had to stop to get his headlights fixed, and the load he had expected to deliver had to wait until Monday, he learned once he got to the destination. Amidst that confusion of unplanned stops and delays, his recurring regret was all that time he did not get to spend at home. He had been looking forward to the weekend. And it had been squeezed out somewhere on the road.
October 6, 2002
(Source : Parmendra Bhagat’s Blog )
