My journey with young Mike would provide a firsthand look at the current state of trucking and the kind of person in the driver’s seat now and into the near-term future. Mike embodied the Spirit of Trucking Present and a glimpse of the Spirit of Trucking Yet to Come, but I also needed an encounter with the Spirit of Trucking Past. I found him haunting a modular home park in Glendale, Arizona, on a hot early-autumn day.
Dale Weaver long-hauled for forty years. You name the truck, he’d driven it. Name the load, he’d hauled it. He’d been to all the states in the continental U.S. and to Canada—and almost to Alaska. He said he drove until the pavement ended in St. John, British Columbia; it was just mud after that. “If you go, go in the winter,” he advised.
I asked Dale when he first thought trucking was an option for him.
“I grew up in rural Maine. I was eleven, working in the hayfields. I knew I didn’t want to do that all my life. I was a tall kid, but very skinny—I couldn’t lift the hay bales. I started driving a gravel truck as soon as I was old enough.”
In a 2021 piece for NeuroscienceNews.com titled “The Preferred Jobs of Serial Killers and Psychopaths,” researcher Michael Arntfield, a professor and participant in the Murder Accountability Project, placed truckers among the most represented professions of known serial killers throughout history. Not accountants, not farmers—truckers. Dale Weaver represented a part of that history.
The nation was immersed in the Vietnam War when Dale turned twenty-one. The guys he knew who were drafted didn’t come back alive. So Dale decided the best way to avoid the draft and death was to volunteer and enlist. He joined the navy, and he liked it. At first, he requested submarines, with their months of silent, subsurface skulking—the navy’s equivalent of long-hauling. But, Dale lamented, “They said I wasn’t smart enough.” Instead, Dale worked on the flight deck of the USS Enterprise. He served three years plus one year of inactive reserves and fulfilled his obligation.
After the navy, Dale moved to Phoenix. But he couldn’t get a job there—you had to be in the union even to drive a truck. So he moved to Texas, a nonunion state. A friend from the navy lived in the Dallas–Fort Worth area and offered to let Dale stay with him. Dale got a job right away with Wales Transportation. He drove flatbeds and hauled loads of concrete pipe used in construction projects and in the oil industry. Dale spent five or six years with that company.
Wales let Dale buy his own truck, the dream of many a trucker. But it was a case of “Be careful what you wish for.” Wales wouldn’t help Dale maintain his truck. He started losing money just with the upkeep. Dale realized that the company had dumped an old truck on its driver and walked away from the cost of maintaining an aging vehicle. When his truck started to break down as it maxed out on miles, Dale couldn’t afford to stay at Wales.
Dale put 500,000 miles on that truck, which was a lot back then. Today’s trucks are better, higher-quality products that last longer—for example, Dale’s last truck racked up 1.6 million miles. That one was a 1996 model that already had 300K miles on it when he bought it.
“If you’re buying your own truck today, the odds are stacked against you. It’s simply too expensive a proposition for an individual. You better have at least twenty thousand dollars in the bank before you buy your own rig. The big companies have resources you can’t dream of having. Those big players even lease the tires on their trucks—they don’t buy them outright; they’re too expensive. The big boys buy their gas on discounted annual contracts. It’s a volume game, so the more trucks and routes a company has, the easier it is to leverage that volume into lower operating costs. A guy can’t do that by himself.”
Dale’s “been there, done that” in the universe of potential truck and load types. Trucks move over 72 percent of our country’s freight, and Dale was responsible for more than his fair share of that. He hauled flatbeds, lowboys, refrigerated reefers, giant earthmovers, and tankers filled with oxygen, argon, and nitrogen. The oxygen supplied hospitals; the nitrogen was used in fracking by the Halliburton corporation. Dale saw them dump twenty to thirty truckloads of nitrogen into an oil well. His repertoire expanded from nitrogen to nutrition when he hauled milk. One job had him transport milk from one side of a processing plant to the other side, half a mile away, where they turned it into cheese. He did those runs fifteen or twenty times a night.
We’ve all seen the escorted loads on the highway, the ones with the trail cars warning of wide load ahead or oversize load. Dale’s done those too. He hauled escorted loads with a pole car up ahead (it was called a pole car because it literally had a pole on it, fifteen feet tall) and a trail car in the rear. The pole car stayed well out in front of Dale so that if its pole smacked the overpass, the driver would radio back that Dale wasn’t going to make it through there.
Not surprisingly, Dale has encountered some trouble along the way. He was parked at a truck stop and heard a guy getting shot just two or three trucks over. It was a robbery. The thief had followed a driver on foot out of the restaurant and forced his way into the cab when the trucker unlocked the door. What the robber didn’t know was that the driver had a partner in the sleeper berth. That partner heard the commotion and shot the robber—who also had a gun. There was a big police response that kept Dale and everyone else locked down for hours inside the perimeter of the crime scene.
“I’ve spent a lifetime at truck stops,” Dale told me without any exaggeration. “They’ve evolved over the years. I used to get my salary sent to me via Western Union. Today, there are WUs at truck stops. But back then, often you’d have to find the WU downtown or someplace else that you couldn’t bring your rig. So sometimes I’d park my trailer at a truck stop, detach the trailer, and bobtail to the WU in just my truck cab. It was a nightmare.”
Dale couldn’t stomach what he called “truck-stop bullshit.” He kept to himself at truck stops. He would sit quietly in the corner of the restaurant and watch the truckers he referred to as “scraggly bastards—who hadn’t shaved for days—brag about how many prostitutes they picked up. Their trucks looked as bad as they did.”
My old-timer Dale spent a lot of time in Tennessee. He confirmed that the peak era for prostitution at truck stops seemed to be the 1970s and into the early 1980s. He said a trucker was “guaranteed action at truck stops in the seventies.” Dale would hear the girls all the time on the CB radio. “Hey, guys, want a date?” they’d broadcast. But usually, they were just right there in the lot.
“You might see a pimp at the truck-stop restaurant. He’d drop off a girl, and she’d work the lot for the night until she earned whatever he demanded of her.” There was a lot of this in Tennessee off I-40, Dale said. Terre Haute, Indiana, was a hotbed too. “The lot lizards would climb up on the passenger side of your truck because they could get a better view into the sleeper berth and see if you were really sleeping.” In fact, he said, after midnight in Tennessee, they’d beat on your door if they hadn’t yet earned their quota.
When Dale sold his own Kenworth truck in 1994 or ’95, he took six months off the road. “When you’re on the road for months at a time, you have to take this kind of time off or you won’t last.”
After that respite, Dale tried his best—he really did—to drive for one of the biggest of the big trucking companies, Werner. He lasted two weeks. They had him on a Nebraska-to-Houston route, but it seemed like the world of company trucking had transitioned to digital technology while Dale was driving his own rig. The whole electronic log thing might as well have been brain surgery. He couldn’t figure it out or keep up with it. “It’s all computers now. Today, long-hauling is all about tech. Cameras, sensors—they know if you’re going too fast, if you hit the brakes too hard. All of that sends alerts to whoever you’re working for,” he told me.
Since Dale struggled with the logs, tracking, and digital documentation, Werner had him call in two or three times a day. Dale was an ultra-experienced driver, certainly not used to being babysat by a bean counter on the other end of a phone. He couldn’t take it anymore. One day in 2014, with an empty truck, Dale called his corporate bosses and told them, “I don’t care if you don’t have a load for me—get me back home to Phoenix.” They told Dale they didn’t have a job that would take him to Phoenix. Dale replied, “Well, find one or not, I’m going to be leaving your truck in Phoenix.” That’s just what he did.
Dale wasn’t done with trucking, and trucking wasn’t done with him. There were still bills to pay and still—to my surprise—types of trucking Dale hadn’t tried. Most recently, Dale hauled U.S. mail between postal-distribution centers in Utah and Tucson, Arizona. Transporting big loads of mail was deadline-driven, not unlike driving a rig filled with fresh produce. You had fifteen minutes on either side of your scheduled pickup and off-load times, and if you didn’t make it, they wouldn’t be able to hold open the assigned loading-dock door for you. “You had better call them if you’re going to be late too,” he noted.
And to make it worse, all of it was night driving. That’s when our mail moves. Dale hauled the mail until he was seventy-four, then called it quits. Most truckers are between forty-five and fifty-four, but a surprising 7 percent are sixty-five or older. Dale said his brain didn’t want to do it anymore. He also knew that his required physical was coming up, and he didn’t think that would go well. Dale turned in his CDL and traded it for a regular license. Keeping his CDL meant passing mandatory physicals. No physical, no CDL.
Dale was seventy-nine when I spoke to him. He’d recently had a triple bypass and wasn’t supposed to lift over twenty or thirty pounds. The surgery cost over $350,000, and Dale battled with the Veterans Administration for four months before they paid a dime of it. The VA said Dale hadn’t gotten their permission for the procedure. Dale was incredulous. “How am I supposed to get permission when I’m having a heart attack at three a.m. in the morning? I called the ambulance, which, by the way, the VA never paid for. They don’t treat vets like they want everybody to think they do.”
The introverted, soft-spoken Dale started to open up. It took several hours of discussion for this to happen.
Dale saw a lot of drug use by drivers in his time. He never did coke or meth, but he did use these little black-and-red capsules that guys sold in jars, like candy, at truck stops. They always had rjs stamped on them. Dale said they were like speed or diet pills that kept you up for twenty-four hours straight, and they were everywhere. The RJS capsules lofted you high, then laid you out like a boxer knocked flat on the canvas. Yes, you could drive for twenty-four hours, but then came an inevitable crash that put you down for days. It just wasn’t worth it. Dale found he could make more miles without them.
Dale swore off black-and-red capsules after he and a couple of guys hauled a well casing from west Texas to the Pittsburgh area. They drove nonstop for two and a half days. His truck mates had jars of RJSs and shared them with Dale. He couldn’t fall asleep for four days. When Dale finally did fall asleep, he didn’t wake up for twenty-four hours. Dale’s sojourn into slumber was so profound that he peed the bed and didn’t know it. “I never took another pill after that.”
RJS capsules were a big deal in the 1970s. On the street, they were black mollies or black beauties. In a laboratory, they were amphetamines. In 1972, the New York Times1 called them the “most popular” black-market drug in America. Manufactured in Mexico for New York drugmaker Strasenburgh Pharmaceuticals, the capsules packed the punch of ten milligrams each of amphetamine and dextroamphetamine. The producer was so proud of the product that it stamped the initials of its founder, R. J. Strasenburgh, on every capsule. The stimulants went for a dollar fifty each in the United States, but if you purchased them across the border in Juarez, you might get them for as little as twenty-five cents apiece. In 1971 alone, a million pills a month made it across the border.
“Truckers combined RJS with vodka, which somehow kept them going even longer. I know it doesn’t make sense, but that’s what they did,” Dale said.
Fifty percent of the 3.5 million American drivers with a CDL must be tested for substance use every year. A recent U.S. DOT Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse report shows spikes in the use of the most common illegal drugs by truckers, with an almost 13 percent increase overall. In case you’re wondering how many CDL holders barreling by you on the freeway flunked their mandatory drug tests, the answer is over 72,000. That number represents more than 4 percent of tested drivers found to have methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana, or other prohibited drugs in their systems. The increase in positive drug tests year over year tells us there’s a problem. But these DOT stats don’t tell us what to do about it.
A 2023 report by American Addiction Centers found that “U.S. truckers had the highest frequency of positive alcohol tests in the world.” Ninety-one percent of truckers told interviewers they regularly consumed alcohol, and 27.6 percent admitted to using illegal substances, including amphetamines and cocaine. Nearly 10 percent of truckers reported drinking every day and almost 20 percent said they binge drank five or more drinks in a short period. One study found that 44 percent of long-haul truckers reported symptoms of depression in the previous twelve months. I’d say 100 percent of us should be concerned about how all of this affects everyone’s health and safety on the road.
Based on those stats, it was no surprise when Dale had something more to share with me. Something he wanted me to know. He hadn’t escaped his own demons.
“I’m an alcoholic. I have to have at least three drinks every night since I retired from trucking. I knew this would happen. I predicted it. That’s why it took me so long to retire—I was trying to avoid this. I was highly disciplined when I was driving. Now I have nothing and no one to be disciplined for. When I was driving, I drank only on my downtime, but now it’s every night.”
I wondered if Dale’s story was typical of most veteran long-haul truckers or if I had stumbled on a guy who ticked all or some of the boxes on a crime analyst’s HSK checklist: Loner, inability to maintain relationships, substance abuser, disdain for corporate trucking, gun owner. If Dale was typical, I could see a crime analyst’s dilemma—too many suspects in too many places. I also wondered, as I looked at Dale, whether I was looking at Mike’s future.