Trucking in English

CHAPTER 1: IF ALL ELSE FAILS

It was slick, slippery and dark. We were hauling the maximum allowable load, 80,000 lbs gross. The snowploughs had been by clearing surface drifts but snowploughs leave icy droppings. As they passed they mashed the remaining mess of snow, oil and gravel down into a solid layer of scariness.

The road east from Marathon, Ontario was windy, bendy and hilly as well as icy. I bravely managed about 80 kph on the straight runs, a lot less on the hills and bends. I slowed to an irritating crawl on the downhill grades with bends at the bottom. We’d been warned in school, trucks can end up in trouble on slippery hills with bends at the bottom. Apparently they can end up in lakes and/or ravines as well as the vaguer sorts of trouble. Overtly I was being responsible but truthfully I was being pathetic. No, what I was being was terrified.

Other trucks with presumably more experienced and less wimpy drivers flew past us when and where they could. This wasn’t frequent. I switched off the CB, not really wanting to hear what everybody thought of my speed, my mother or my physical attributes. After a couple of hours we were stopped by yet another police cordon... another road closure.

A day’s worth of Highway 17 traffic was neatly corralled into the nearest truck stop. Should you wish to consult a map with a magnifying glass you may spot Wawa, Ontario, somewhere north of Lake Superior. It has a truck stop. That is all. As we drank tolerable coffee and ate tolerable chips we heard the gossip, a truck had ‘parked in the ditch’ in front of us. Behind us the road that had held us up all night—having been closed by the police due to snowdrifts and whiteouts—was closed again, a seventeen truck pile-up with fires and people killed. All of a sudden I didn’t mind being the sort of cowardly rookie who drives slowly on ice. Not dying seemed to be sufficient achievement, careful wimps might live to drive this awful road again.

The offending truck was winched out of the ditch eventually and we all trooped off in a grumpy conga line of tired and late freight. I waited for the back of the line, who needs more abuse? The road remained slick. It snowed.  The whiteouts came and went with every turn into the wind. In brief moments when the visibility cleared, you could see waves on the lake flash-frozen into little grey mountains.

It took all day and most of the night to round the rest of Lake Superior and emerge from the dreaded weather system that is a Lake Effect Winter Storm. We were exhausted, anxious, and late. But we emerged, which is more than some did.

***

Why would a fifty-something, nicely brought-up mother suddenly decide to go trucking? It was a good question and like most good questions it had answers both simple and complex. “It sounds like fun,” just made people who didn’t know me roll their eyes. I did a bit better with “it’s a traditional immigrant job,” and with “well, I can earn more money in a truck than I can with a Master’s degree.” These explanations merely made me sound serious about finding work and supporting my family, not defiantly odd, just a traditional immigrant to Canada indeed. And they were partially true, since emigrating from England I'd struggled to find employment in the things I was actually qualified to do.

My son and I had arrived in Ontario from London posing as entrepreneurs five years earlier. The bed and breakfast I’d bought as my ticket to Canadian citizenship had bitten the dust when I’d realised there was more to running a successful business than looking up entrepreneur in the dictionary. I did need a new project but to be honest the trucking thing was more about preferring to play with wheeled toys than do real work. I’d driven ambulances and stretch limos in the past so if I wanted to get bigger and better it was going to have to be something like a truck or a plane.

Trucking school was cheaper, and I’d been eyeing those massive beasties on the roads ever since landing here. I blame my Dad. He wanted a boy. Psychotherapy aside, adding to my list of excuses that it seemed like a great angle for a book helped a bit when explaining to people with no imagination, but not much.