CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY The only reality is the road before you and the truck that’s grown up through the seats sometime in the last several thousand miles and fused with your coccyx so thoroughly that when you hobble across the parking lot to another truckstop for more tasteless food and lousy coffee you feel disembodied, like your torso’s still seated behind the wheel, patiently waiting for your head and stomach to return and get this show on the road. Crawling from the sleeper after four short hours of rest as we wind through the Colorado Rockies: “ Nice mountains. How’s the road?” Owen favors the snowclad panorama with a quick glance out the side window. “ Slicker’n dogshit,” he says. So much for scenery. Still yawning, I climb behind the wheel. Owen rolls into the sleeper. His snores harmonize with the gutter- al hammer of the diesel and I wonder how I ever ended up here. It’s not my mother’s fault. She wanted me to be a teacher, but the idea of being trapped in an overheated classroom with 36 junior high students never held much charm for me. God knows my wife’s no fan of the truckdriving life. The only thing wrong with the energy crisis far as she’s concerned is that we can still get diesel. I guess I should blame the Old Man. He owned a little outlaw outfit that hauled cement around the Inland Empire. I was baptized in used DELO 30 before they got to me with water. Most of his rigs were 68,000 gross 4-71 Jimmies. Pulling a loaded bulker over the Fourth of July summit back in those days meant nearly an hour of grinding along in second direct, but they rolled and I went with them. The diesel fumes entered my brain and worked some subtle change, connected synapses so whenever I smell hot transmission grease I salivate, and I’ll turn away from a beautiful lady in a bikini to watch some tired old semi make a tight corner in heavy traffic the way a pilot will stop everything to watch an airplane land. By the time I was fourteen and old enough, according to the Old Man, to learn to drive, he had a rock quarry instead of the trucking outfit, so I learned on a tandem-axle dumptruck with a five-speed transmission and three-speed brownie. To shift from fourth direct to third over you looped your left arm through the wheel and steered with your elbow while you shifted with both hands. That morning the Old Man put me in the driver’s seat, climbed in on the passenger side and glared at me over the stump of a chewed cigar. TWO things,” he said, holding up an index finger and the middle finger that ended in a stump above the first knuckle (the rest of the finger’s in McNary dam, lost while unloading an augur-driven bulker at a batch plant in the middle of the night when the drive chain jumped off its gear and he tried to put it back without stopping the engine and snick, there it went down into the hopper with the cement): “ First, get it there and bring it back in one piece.” I nodded. It seemed logical. “ Second: A truck driver who uses the clutch is a plumber.” I nodded again because he was the Old Man and you didn’t argue with him. 1 didn’t blow that transmission or rear end, though God, Spicer and Eaton deserve more credit than me, and I’ve never torn one up since (knock on wood and spit three times to prevent a hex) so there must be something to it. How? Quite simple, really. A 350 Cummins should be operated between 1600 and 2600 rpm, and you should be in a gear that holds comfortably against the grade at 2000- 2100. Let’s say you’re in eighth and not holding, so you let it drop to 1700, take the weight off the gears and slide it into neutral. You know you have 1000 rpm between gears and you’ve lost speed to the equivalent of 1600 during this maneuver, so you speed up the engine until the tach says you’re turning 2600 and move the gearshift into seventh. The gears are turning at the same speed, so they mesh without grinding. After you’ve ground enough gears it’ll all make sense, simple as the Tao Te Ching. I drove that damn truck nearly five years, four hours a day after school, ten hours a day on weekends and all summer. THE RUN was a little under three miles down a steep twisting grade to the loading ramp where the rock was dumped in gondola cars and When youhobbleacrossthebarking lot toanother truckstop formoretastelessfoodandlousycoffeeyoufeeldisembodied, like your torso’sstill seatedbehindthewheel, patientlywaitingfor your headandstomachtoreturnandget thisshowontheroad. back to the quarry, two or three trips an hour. Perhaps due to my mangling in the early stages of my career, the transmission had a tendency to jump out of fourth, the ideal gear for rolling down the hill,-so the options were to go down in third over, which was too slow, or ride the brakes and hold it in gear all the way down. Since we never crossed a scale, the trucks were always overloaded by a good ton, so the morning I roared over the top in fourth direct, stomped down on the brakes and bounced the pedal off the floorboard, I knew I was in trouble. I was already going too fast to grab third and the emergency brake lever was pure decoration. I jammed the heel of my hand against the gearshift knob as hard as I could and watched the S-curves in the middle of the grade come closer. I lost the battle with the gearshift long before we reached the first turn. We were rolling free in neutral and going so fast it wouldn’t go into fifth direct. I was too scared to turn loose of the wheel long enough to try fifth over, which probably wouldn’t have helped anyway, so I just hung on, muttered the trucker’s prayer (Dear God please not today) and headed into those corners at seventy miles an hour. I’d been told: Don’t steer through a corner. Pick a line and hold it. Either the truck’ll do it or you’re a gone goose. I bit my lower lip, picked a line and tried not to scream. Rock flew over the sideboards and we leaned. . . . Then we were around the first one and the bend to the left was coming up—pick a line and hold o n . . . I could see daylight under the rear rivers and knew if we even grazed the narrow gravel shoulder it was all over but the fifty-foot ride through midair to the bottom. I made it and zoomed past the turnoff to the loading ramp at a little over eighty, let it roll itself out on the long flat by the river, turned around and drove back to the quarry. “ What happened?” the Old Man wanted to know. “ Lost my brakes.” He looked the truck over carefully. Over half the load had been hurled out onto the shoulders. He lit his cigar. “ You okay?” “ Yep,” I said and that was it. I drove into Colville in the pickup, got a new brake line and a gallon of fluid and was rolling down the hill again by noon—in third over. AT eighteen I shot out of the Colville valley like someone set my tailfeathers on fire. 1 was sick of the inside of a truck cab. I was going to college goddamnit and make something of myself. To this day I probably hold the record for number of miles driven by the editor of a college newspaper. The trip to the printers was some sixty miles and I drove it two or three times a week, ferrying copy, type, and layout. Mostly I remember those wintry nights wallowing along a glazed highway with the back seat of my ’49 Mercury full of newspapers. I spent four years at it and what I thought 1made myself into was a journalist. Out in the real world I covered council meetings and fires. The fires were okay. But the council meetings did me in. This was fifteen years ago in Bremerton and Gordon Walgren was right under my nose, but Bernstein and Woodward 1was not and he got away with it for years before Dixy set him up, poor bastard. My stint in Bremerton over, 1 bought a ’46 Dodge milkwagon with 8.25 x 16 duals, a diamond plate bed and a little flathead six that cranked so tight at 45 mph I was glad it didn’t have a tach, converted it to a camper and herded it all over the west until I ran out of money in Aspen (which is a lot like running out of gas in an airplane) and drove a dogsled all one winter. Back to Seattle we went in the spring. I still hadn’t caught on. I took a job as a copywriter, home furnishings for a big retail chain, me and one other guy in an office with 45 women. 1got a divorce, dropped acid and got canned for screwing a co-worker. But there was a war on, so I went and served my country as editor of an underground newspaper in San Francisco for a while, but Crazy Ed did all the driving and couldn’t set type for shit and that’s Another Story. Back in Seattle I lived on boats around Lake Union (several more Another Stories), poked around and hung out and met the lady who was to become my second wife and drug her off to eastern Washington. TIMES were hard then, children. the economy was surfeit with young adults who’d survived the war and no matter where you’d been or what you’d been through it had all been pretty horrendous and there was little happening in anyone’s head but a loud buzz like a faulty vacuum tube. We scammed a little money and trekked around the country some more, driving, always driving, a ’56 Plymouth station wagon this time, with a huge plywood box that looked like a double coffin strapped to the roof, slopping around on broken springs and bald tires. Stayed in the Skykomish Valley a year or so, drove a lot of wrecker and a little logging truck. Driving a wrecker’s depressing. There’s too much gore. I don’t talk about it unless I start to get maudlin. Take me for a walk, buy me some coffee, change the subject. As for logging trucks, the trouble with them is, they’re mostly driven by loggers. Forgive me, you poor misplace souls who suffer from this gross generalization, thinking that truckers are truckers no matter what they drive. You’re sadly mistaken. Loggers own logging companies, therefore logging trucks, and tend to man them with ex-loggers—mostly those who zigged when they should have stayed in the crummy, got creamed by a log and couldn’t get around on the slopes anymore. They’re amazing on some of the skid paths that pass for roads up there and the only ones I know who can find a use for the bottom gears on a five- and-four, but once they hit the pavement their raw courage could stand tempering with a little healthy fear. It got me started again anyway, a few jobs here and there, which is about all 1 wanted because I’d finally figured out how to write novels and was I wasgoingtoofast tograbthirdand theemergency brake leverwas decoration... I lust hungon, muttered thetruckdriver's prayer andheaded intothosecorners at seventymilesan hour. Illustration by Steve Sandstrom 37
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