We are up. Groggy, but awake. It was a long, short night. Mike snored and farted in his sleep, which didn’t help matters. He tells me it’s time to inspect the truck before we launch. We both climb down—more of a controlled fall—out of his cab and into the bracing Illinois cold.
Mike has his thick fist wrapped around a wooden billy club. He smacks each of the truck’s tires to listen for the telltale sound of low air pressure. There are so many tires that you wouldn’t know if one was going flat unless you thumped each of them. He has me try it so I can learn the sound of full inflation. While I’m doing that, Mike relieves himself in the gravel behind the trailer; I follow suit.
Back up in the truck, we take our seats, buckle in, and prepare to roll. We’re now among the four million semitrucks on our nation’s highways. Mike learned from dispatch that we’ll start our journey close by, about fifty miles away in Waukegan, Illinois, where we’ll pick up a load of gypsum pressed into drywall. That’s always the goal, to minimize the time you drive with no load, what truckers call deadheading.
My first full day of long-haul learning begins.
“I run flatbed,” Mike tells me. He confesses that he had to look up what that meant when he was told the kind of truck he’d be driving. He says he’s hauled everything, including bulldozers—“That was pretty cool.” He continues, “Some loads are easier than others. You throw a few straps, you’re done. Other loads, you got to climb on top, use all your straps.”
Other truckers consider their flatbed colleagues badasses. At least that’s how flatbedders (or maybe just Mike) see themselves. That’s because it’s hands-on trucking with tarps, chains, and straps, and load configuration is mostly the responsibility and handiwork of the driver. It certainly isn’t like hauling cases of Kleenex without lifting a finger to load or unload like those “dry-van people,” as Mike calls them with a note of ridicule.
Mike’s company runs all brand-new Volvos. Our ride is a 2021 Volvo VNL 760 pulling a fifty-three-foot flatbed trailer. Empty, we weigh 32,000 pounds. I take this all in, but with no coffee—Mike is not particularly interested in stopping for it—my brain is in low gear.
Mike points to his dashboard to show me his special trucker’s GPS—he calls it his “main chick”—then he points out the standard GPS on his mounted iPhone 13, which he refers to as his “side chick.” He explains the trucker GPS warns of the roads where truckers can’t go. That sounds important. It displays upcoming truck stops and weigh stations as well as height and weight limits up ahead. Every good trucker always knows the truck’s height and weight and is hypervigilant about overpasses and country roads. If they’re not good truckers, they end up going viral on a YouTube video with their load wedged under a bridge.
Mike earns as much as three thousand dollars a week, which makes him one of the top drivers at Ox and Eagle. In fact, it places Mike in the top tier of truckers in the country, since the median salary for all truckers is just over $47,000.
“They pay me top dollar. I double what some old-time truckers make at a company they’ve been with for their whole career.”
The company started Mike—like all its new drivers—at a rate of 25 percent of the value of his loads. Other companies might start out drivers at varying rates per their experience levels, but at Mike’s place, you have to prove yourself to the boss. Some companies pay drivers cents per mile, but the better deal is when a trucker earns a percentage of the company’s gross for each load. Mike quickly jumped to a higher percentage and then to an even higher percentage. He proved himself.
Mike’s best single-pay day was a triple load—meaning a pickup for three different customers—from JFK airport. That load maxed out his allowable weight at 80,000 pounds and put $2,000 in Mike’s wallet.
After his near-death training torment in the Rockies, Mike won’t drive the mountain states in winter. “I’m a Florida boy,” he proclaims. Nevertheless, Mike certainly encounters snow in other locales. He always keeps a winter kit in the truck with extra water, packets of tuna, candles for warmth, and a lantern in case power to the truck is lost. He says he’s prepared to be trapped for days on a blizzard-blocked or avalanche-addled highway.
Mike has traversed the cross-country routes to California multiple times. And he’s made lots of trips to Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. “You know,” he said, “the manufacturing states that make stuff.”
As we pull out of the lot, Mike lets me know that his electronic log starts registering as driving the second the truck exceeds five miles an hour. There are buttons to push for on duty, for loading, and for off duty. Loading could also be electronically entered as part of the mandatory thirty-minute break every eight hours. The log knows all and sees all—what you want it to know and, often, what you don’t. You can hit the designation for on duty—fuel, or on duty—pre-trip inspection (we just did that), or on duty—post-trip inspection.
Mike says there’s also “off-duty break for when I’m taking a shit or eating.”
Hopefully not at the same time, I think.
His dispatch and his boss man can remotely track how fast Mike goes. The boss back in Chicago can remotely turn on the truck’s camera and see what traffic Mike is battling. “One time I called the boss about bad traffic, and he replied, ‘Yeah, I see that.’”
Mike says he knows truckers who have drones they fly out the window to scope out a traffic jam or check out an accident up ahead.
The logbook, or ELD (electronic log device), is in a perpetual electronic handshake with our truck. It knows the zip code we pass through. If Mike tries to extend his legal driving time by turning off the logbook and then turning it back on within the same zip code, it won’t snitch on him. But if he turns the logbook off in one zip code and back on in another, an inspector or state trooper who stops and checks the log will know he tried to hide something.
At a big company—bigger than Mike’s—hitting the rumble strip on the side of the highway alerts a company safety coordinator, who then calls the driver. Every night there’s a legally mandated ten-hour “reset”—downtime—and every Saturday, Mike begins his required thirty-four hours off. That means no driving wherever Mike happens to be.
I figure with all this corporate tracking, there’s far less of a chance that serial killers are company drivers. According to TruckInfo.net, only about 9 percent of truckers are owner-operators—truckers who drive their own trucks and answer only to themselves. If my theory is correct, that shrinks the pool of FBI HSK suspects down to only about 350,000 truckers. Then again, maybe not.
There’s at least one case where a trucker parked in a truck stop but rented a car to meet his victim. His truck stayed put while he beat and raped a trafficked woman. Renting a car was his regular practice, which facilitated his other practice: hunting for victims during his mandated downtime. There are also cases where the trucker picked up a victim during a quick stop, then committed his crimes along his route without significant delays. If those truckers were corporate, it might be easier to catch them based on their proximity to a dump site, but being company drivers certainly wouldn’t rule them out as suspects. So much for my theory.
There are other safety features in Mike’s semi. For instance, when he engages his turn signal, a horn blares inside the cab if there’s someone in the next lane. It jolted the bejesus out of me the first time it happened. A good driver learns to instinctively scan all his many mirrors to maintain constant situational awareness and especially before he makes any moves. There are top and bottom mirrors on each side of the cab, and there are mirrors on the front hood corners. The big side mirror on top gives Mike a view to the rear of the trailer; the smaller bottom mirror displays the scene behind our cab.
“Look, this guy’s not going to let me in—ha.”
Mike is right—there’s a car that won’t yield to us.
“I am going to get in this lane. It’s only a matter of time.”
When he is finally able to maneuver all the way into the lane because another trucker lets him in, Mike flashes the exterior rear lights to thank him. It’s a common practice that I see often.
Mike isn’t dressed in what most people, like me or other truckers, think long-haulers are supposed to wear. Regardless of how cold it gets outside his cab, he’s “a slipper-and-shorts guy, for comfort. I laugh at these guys driving box trucks [because they don’t load or unload] but they wear the boots, the jeans, the button-down shirt: ‘Look, I’m a truck driver.’ When I pick up a load, of course, I’ll quickly scan the yard. If everyone’s in protective gear—safety vest and hard hat—then so am I. But otherwise, why be uncomfortable?”
Plus, Mike adds, “I sweat a lot when I’m strapping, chaining, and tarping a load.”
(I confirm that claim later in our journey.)
Mike begins to explain his work rhythm and some of the rules that govern drive time. He drives for no more than eleven hours a day, works a total of fourteen hours six days a week, sometimes for two or three months at a stretch. “In reality you’re really driving to your destination only about nine hours a day. The other hour you’re often searching for a place to park for the night.”
Which, I would come to learn, was easier said than done. If Mike drives less than eleven hours, the log knows and doesn’t require him to rest and sleep for the full ten hours. It gives him the time back to start driving earlier the next morning. The log giveth, and the log taketh away.
I note that these hours of driving mean a lot of sedentary time in the seat.
“Yeah, I gained too much weight last year—thirty-one pounds.” He attributes that not so much to being inactive but to finally having money: “I wasn’t used to having money—I was eating whatever I wanted. That’s changed.”
Indeed it has, because Mike and I already collaborated on a list of healthy groceries we’ll pick up later so the CIA-trained chef turned trucker can cook some of our meals right in his rig.
I learn more about Mike BT—before trucking. He isn’t hesitant to confide that he was a bad kid while growing up. There was fighting, stealing, bad grades, suspensions, and being booted out of class. “In middle school, I’d steal snacks out of stores just to sell them, make a buck. I’d break into cars—bring a backpack and steal all the change in everybody’s consoles. Me and my friends would end up with fifty or sixty bucks’ spending money. We’d have to hit a lot of cars to get that.”
Mike began to shape up a bit in high school when he started wrestling. His brother was a very successful wrestler; he got Mike interested, and the coach recruited Mike because he needed someone in Mike’s weight class. The coach was in his face a lot, which, Mike said, helped him “mature” and become more of a man.
“In my first tournament I went three and one. I had no idea what I was doing. But I would just grab them and throw them to the ground and pin them. Brute force and grit.” This boosted Mike’s confidence in a big way. “I wanted to beat the shit out of more people.”
The discipline from his coach, which Mike said was often brutal and probably wouldn’t be tolerated today, Mike loved. He thrived on it. It “put hair on my chest,” Mike told me.
The story of Mike’s coach prompts me to ask him about his father.
“My dad wanted two things—to provide for his family and to have a motorcycle that went really fast. My dad taught me to fight in the backyard. He told me, ‘Don’t ever throw the first punch. Don’t let me hear that you were the first to lay hands on someone. But if they hit you first, you have my permission to beat the living shit out of them. In fact, if you do, I’ll buy you a steak dinner. If you throw the first punch, you will be grounded.’”
While we talk, we roll past a disabled truck cab on the shoulder hooked up to a wrecker. Mike spontaneously mutters, as if telepathically communicating to a fellow driver he’s never met, “Oh, I’m sorry, brother, I’m so sorry.”
Mike feels this guy’s pain. He explains that this trucker’s breakdown translates to at least a day of downtime and maybe a load or two lost. “Definitely dollars down the drain.” Hence Mike’s empathy.
Mike owns a motorcycle. In any spare time back home, he works on his car-engine project. When he finishes that project, he plans to take his refurbished auto out on the racetrack, but he’s quick to add he won’t speed with it on the highway.
“I can’t risk a ticket and getting fired by the boss man.”
Mike clearly likes and respects his boss, Andrei, who owns the company. Andrei is from Moldova, and his life has the hallmarks of a hardworking-immigrant success story.
Andrei had nothing when he came to America. According to Mike, Andrei drove a flatbed for about seven years, then found out he was going to be a father. He bought his own truck, which was cheap, and it broke down. Andrei bought a better used truck, then eventually bought a new truck, and he recruited drivers for those trucks.
Now Andrei owns five trucks, his brother owns two, and his cousin owns two, all under Andrei’s company name. It’s something Mike aspires to.
Interestingly, the dispatch team for Mike’s company lives mostly in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. They sleep and wake in sync with American time. The lead dispatcher, Stefan, speaks English well, and Mike enjoys chatting with him during long drives. The first time Mike realized Stefan wasn’t Chicago-based was when, during one of their many phone conversations, Mike offered to buy him a drink next time he passed through the city. “That would be nice,” Stefan replied, “but I live in Romania.”
Different immigrants and ethnicities are attracted to American trucking for a variety of reasons. Over the decades, old man Dale saw an increasingly diverse mix of ethnic groups in trucking—“Indians, Iranians, Middle Easterners,” he told me. While over 72 percent of truckers are white and 12 percent are Black, it’s easy to see why trucking increasingly attracts a kaleidoscope of cultures. The job offers decent income without demanding an American education or fluency in English. When people from a family or a village experience success, all their friends and relatives come to join them. Often, Dale observed, those ethnic groups, initially wary of the unfamiliar American culture, take a team approach to driving. They drive two or three at a time in the truck. Safety in numbers, perhaps; maybe sanity too.
Andrei pays his drivers more than other truck-company owners do. The good wages plus the trust Andrei builds with his team pay off in the form of respect. Mike describes Andrei as “a class act, a beautiful soul.” He gives me an example of why he holds Andrei in such high esteem:
“I’d been on the road for two months and needed to go home to Florida. First, I had to drop off a load in Nashville, pick up my next load, then get the truck back to Chicago and fly home from there. When I get to my stop in Nashville, these people tell me, ‘We weren’t expecting you—we don’t have a forklift here.’ It was Friday; they couldn’t unload me till Monday. The only way I’ll get to Chicago in time for my flight is if I drop my load, get my next load, and drive back to Chicago. Andrei tells me he’s willing to buy me a ticket from Nashville to go home. He said he would fly there himself, sleep in my truck, and unload it himself. He was about to book me on American Airlines. I told him no, stay home with your family. That impressed me.”
Mike is chasing cash, and that means constantly cajoling the dispatchers on his phone headset to give him the highest-paying loads. Those are the tarped loads, the cargo that a client insists must be covered, as well as any bulky or awkward loads that have to be secured by heavy, thick chains. “Some guys just want an easy load but it won’t pay well.”
One of his most challenging loads—eight hot tubs in the pouring rain of Green Bay, Wisconsin—was difficult to secure because those supersize spas weren’t designed to travel propped up on their sides like amoeba-shaped dominoes. It didn’t help that they had taken on rainwater. He almost walked away from that load, but that wouldn’t have been Mike.
Old man Dale certainly hauled plenty of odd-size loads. His most awkward was a sugar mill out of Houston. It was twenty feet wide. Dale recalled it and other such loads with a sense of pride.
“We did it at night. Had highway patrol escort us to Baton Rouge.” He said he’d hauled airline wing spars—the skeletons of aircraft wings—out of Boeing in Seattle, to Oklahoma City, and to Wichita, Kansas. “I’ve hauled a lot of farm equipment too, John Deere and tractor combines. Big industrial air conditioners; I hauled some of those all the way from Detroit to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. They were twenty to thirty feet long and eight feet wide.”
Flatbedders like Mike call unwieldy loads sketchy. “But sketchy really depends on the driver, how you choose to secure it. Probably the coolest load I’ve had was six Bobcats at one time. I had to lay ten chains. I’d rather lay tarps and straps than chains, but chained loads usually pay more, so fine with me.”
There’s also what truckers call suicide coils—densely heavy, gargantuan rolls of steel or aluminum that, if not properly secured, could break loose and barrel right through the back of the cab. Before our week is done, we’ll haul one of those.
The law establishes the minimum number of required points of securement (I learned a new phrase) based on load weight and length, but Mike isn’t a bare-minimum guy. “I’ll over-secure a load with extra chains and straps.”
Each one of the several thick braids of chains—pooled like pythons in the darkened den of a steel locker behind the cab—can secure ten thousand pounds. More commonly used are wide yellow winch straps, rolled up on winches that look like fat fishing reels anchored every few feet along each side of the trailer. They’re good for five thousand pounds each.
“My maximum load for this trailer is forty-seven thousand pounds. I can handle forty-eight to fifty thousand, but I never want them to overload me. I also calculate the weight of remaining fuel in my tanks. Sometimes I’m so close on weight limit that I can’t fully fuel up. There’s also maximum weight per axle, so properly positioning the load is key. My company rule is that if I pick up a load of over forty thousand pounds, I stop at the nearest weigh station to verify it.”
Who knew truckers had to be mathematicians?
There’s another factor in how much a load pays—it’s how fast the client needs it delivered. “Chicago to Houston is an eighteen-hour drive—that’s not legal” for one driver to do alone. If the client wants it in the same day, a trucker has to have a partner who will take some of the drive while he’s sleeping.
The same is true for a Friday load that must be delivered before closing time and ready for client use on Monday morning. A customer pays big bucks for that.
Today is Monday. Mike says that once we load what he calls our gypsum—which is actually drywall—we’re going four hundred miles for a $1,900 load. He gets 30 percent of that. But he’d rather go six hundred miles for a better-paying load. “For me, it’s about how much money am I making today? More is better.”
As we talk about getting somewhere fast, I ask Mike how fast our rig can go.
“I can only go sixty-nine with cruise control, but if I use the gas pedal, I can get to seventy-one.” A lot of the speed constraints for trucks have to do with fuel efficiency—which means they have to do with money.
“If I was allowed to go faster, I might squeeze in another load every week. But I’ll burn more fuel. The company decided how they set the governor. Companies differ a little on this.”
On the topic of money, Mike feels strongly that truckers don’t know what they are worth. He says the big companies treat their drivers like they’re expendable. “Just a number—if they quit, they quit.” He names some names. “J. B. Hunt, C. R. England, and those guys—they pay half or less of what I’m paid. The governors on their gas pedals are set at sixty-seven miles per hour to save gas, which slows them down and leads to them making even less money. They’ll say it’s for safety, but it’s more likely about saving money.”
Mike tells the story of an old trucker at a truck stop he saw wearing a Schneider jacket. With about ninety years in the industry and nearly 20,000 employees, Schneider is a major player with a good reputation. The company hauls almost 20,000 loads a day in over 10,000 of its trucks. This trucker’s jacket was covered in patches that denoted thirty-one years of service, plus he had safety-award patches—the guy looked like a highly decorated war veteran.
Mike couldn’t resist asking him, politely, carefully, how he liked working there. The seasoned driver said that his company treated him all right. Eventually, Mike worked up the courage to ask his fellow road warrior how much he made per mile.
“Seventy-one cents,” the man said proudly.
Young rookie Mike didn’t have the heart to tell the old guy that he was paid by the load, not the mile, and averaged a dollar a mile at about 3,100 miles a week.
As the week progresses, I come to realize that compensation is more complex than Mike’s initial description. He is single with no kids, and—to my chagrin—he thinks he doesn’t need the health insurance that bigger firms provide. The big company guys are considered employees, so they get health care and other benefits for their families. Maybe the old guy in the jacket had put four kids through doctor and dentist visits and took paid vacation days with his family. Maybe that grizzled trucker didn’t have to pay much at all for surgeries and MRIs.
The father in me wants to lecture Mike on the risk he’s taking, but I hold off—for now.
Besides benefits, there might be another reason why certain truckers tolerate lower pay—they might be out of options. For example, Mike tells me that Western Express is considered a “second-chance” company—with a reputation for hiring a lot of ex-cons. He claims they aren’t the only company that does this; in fact, Mike says, it’s quite common in the industry. “A lot of felons. They’ll hire you with a lot of speeding tickets too.”
An app called Trucker Path shows truckers the way to truck stops like Flying J and Pilot (where Mike’s company membership scores him free showers and points) and to Love’s. The app even points to the best truck-friendly Walmarts,1 the ones with plenty of room for parking and that don’t post the dreaded no truck parking signs. It even shares real-time intel from other truckers on how many spots are still open and has reviews of the food and showers at even the smallest mom-and-pop truck stops. Mike opines that there are too few truck stops for the number of truckers on the road. Before our week is out, I find myself in total agreement.
If you’ve ever seen trucks lined up along highways and off-ramps, here is Mike’s take:
“Good luck finding a spot for the night after seven p.m. That’s why you see trucks lined up all along highway on- and off-ramps. I got an eighty-dollar ticket for that during a check operation. That’s a mark against me and the company. They have to create more places where we can shut down and sleep for the night. Sometimes I’ll end up sleeping on a ramp at a rest stop. It’s still not legit, but it’s supposed to be a rest stop! We also have what we call a makeshift stop—somewhere on a truck-stop property that’s not actual parking but it’s also not blocking someone in. I sleep a lot better when I’m in a good spot.”
When he’s parked overnight at a rest area run by the state, the county, the feds, he says, “You’re asking for an inspection and a ticket.” That’s because they literally own the place. At a private truck stop like Love’s or Pilot, you’re less likely to be inspected. In Mike’s company, if a driver gets inspected and passes, the boss electronically sends him a hundred dollars on the spot. Mike said, “I’ve been inspected twice, and I got a hundred bucks on Apple Pay each time from the boss man. The company gets good points in the government’s system for me passing, bad points for me failing.”
Long-haul flatbed truckers move tons of gypsum, huge cable spools, iron, and steel. There are two even more respected badass-trucker types. First, the heavy-load guys—the drivers who haul over 80,000 pounds that you see carrying wind-turbine blades or giant generators, sometimes with lead and follow cars warning other drivers of a wide load or a heavy load. Then there are the lowboys—the ones whose trailers seem just inches off the ground because they haul outlandishly tall freight, like earthmovers or excavators.
There’s another thing that sets flatbedders apart, and this is a point of pride for Mike.
“I can do a dry trucker’s job with just a day of training to learn how to open and close the trailer door. But those guys would need a month and a half of training to learn all the particulars of securing different flatbed loads and the related DOT securement laws.”
That means a flatbedder can get a dry trucker’s job with ease, but not vice versa.
We arrive in Waukegan at one of the big gypsum plants to load 47,000 pounds of drywall. This place is “been there, done that” for Mike. As with this and each of our subsequent stops, when I’m not chatting with Mike, I spend some time on the internet learning something about our destination town, the company client, or the product we’ll haul. It turns out that gypsum (calcium sulfate dihydrate), which is used to make drywall, is the connective tissue of the home-building industry. That means it’s also a cash cow for the trucking industry. Truckers have nicknamed it “gypsy.” As in, “I’m headed to pick up a load of gypsy.”
Unless you live in a tent and work outdoors, chances are high that you’re surrounded by drywall. The COVID pandemic slowed gypsum production and construction, so now home builders are screaming for gypsy. Mike and I have become a small part of a rekindled builders’ supply chain. You’re welcome.
It’s still early, and I see only three trucks ahead of us. Two are already inside the giant loading doors. Outside, there’s one other truck waiting. We pull up to start what will become a queue. Signs announce that hard hats and safety vests are mandatory, so we throw on our neon mesh attire, like we’re flying colors for some garish street gang partial to orange and yellow.
Mike and I walk in through the human door next to the gaping garage portals. He shows his papers to some guy seated in the cramped office, whose unfazed response is “Yeah, go wait in your truck.”
I try to take in the vastness of the operation through hazy white dust and the din of drywall being mixed, cooked, pressed, dried, and maneuvered onto waiting trailers by a small squad of workers wearing eye and ear protection and masks.
While we wait in the truck, more trucks join us. This is when I start to learn that patience is a prerequisite of the long-haul game. I ask Mike how long he thinks we’ll be here.
“Well, almost everywhere we go, we’ll be told the process takes an hour. If it goes over two or three hours, my company will increase its rate—it’s called detention pay—and a small percentage of it will come to me, but not enough to make me whole for the downtime. I don’t let the waiting get to me. It used to, but not anymore.”
It’s already gotten to me, and I just got here.
In about half an hour, the trucks ahead of us are loaded and it’s our turn to pass through the towering bay doors, which stay mostly closed against the raw wind whipping off Lake Michigan, a couple hundred yards away. Mike pulls his rig out of our waiting spot, points the cab away from the garage, then angles the cab away from the trailer. He checks his mirrors, then slowly works the steering wheel until, somehow, we back straight into the loading bay; no easy task in this surprisingly small lot. I tell him I’m impressed and try to figure out how he did that.
Once inside, we dismount and watch as forklifts drop their towering stacks of drywall atop our flatbed until it literally groans under twenty-three tons of weight. I watch Mike as he stares at the forklift.
“See how he’s bumping into the side of my trailer every time he drops a stack? That’s going to leave marks on my trailer.”
Mike doesn’t want any trouble here. The forklift operator doesn’t strike us as someone who is particularly jovial. Mike walks over and tries to talk with the forklift guy above the din of the factory noise. Mike gestures toward the trailer and motions his arms left and right, mostly left, toward the front of our trailer. Mike walks back to me, and I ask him what’s up.
“I’m not thrilled with the position of this load. I like it a bit further forward on the trailer, just in case it’s heavier than we think. But the guy promises it’s not more than forty-seven K.”
I make a mental note to ask Mike what this all means later, when we don’t have to deal with the noise of the gypsy place. As it turns out, I learn precisely what it means, but it takes a while.
Loading takes maybe another half hour. Gypsy must be covered; even a brief bit of rain will ruin it. Mike keeps his thick, heavy black tarps rolled and strapped on the rear of his trailer. He frees them now so they can be unfurled by a worker suspended from a safety harness high up on our mammoth drywall mountain. Over the racket of factory and forklifts, Mike explains that this place hasn’t always required the harness. He heard that someone fell off a stack like this and died. My eyes scan from the worker up top to the concrete floor below. It’s a long way down.
For Mike, this is an easy load, because, as I will later experience, most of the time Mike is the guy who must climb up the load, secure it with clear plastic and then a tarp, then throw his winch straps to hold it all together.
Once the truck is loaded, we pull out of the bay and find a place behind the building where we can secure the tarps and tighten the straps down just like Mike wants them. We’re just feet from the damp industrial shore of Lake Michigan. The sky darkens; the wind picks up; and seagulls take shelter under our truck. A solo raindrop finds my face.
“You feeling rain?” I ask Mike.
“Yep. Let’s do this quickly,” he replies.
With the speed and confidence of a seasoned pro, Mike raises aloft red plastic edge protectors that teeter on the end of a very long PVC stick, a system he devised to minimize having to climb on top of high loads. He places the protectors every few feet along the top edges of the stacks. The protectors sit over the protective tarp, but they’ll be under the soon-to-come straps so that when we launch those straps up over the load and cinch them down tight, they won’t dig in and damage the soft, impressionable drywall.
Last, Mike takes photos of the perfectly finished load and sends them to the boss man. This way, if anything goes wrong with the load, we have proof of what it looked like at the start of the journey. Then he punches driving into the electronic log—as if it doesn’t already know. With this much weight behind us, we will hit the first weigh station we see to ensure we are safe and accurate. We head for the open road.
“Look, I’m wide open on the pedal right now.” Mike is letting me know just how heavy we are. Despite the fact that Mike has the gas pedal down to the floor, I feel barely any surge in power or speed; the speedometer says we are capped out at thirty miles per hour. It’s about the load we’re hauling. Mike seizes the teachable moment for me.
“That’s all we have. People don’t understand when they’re cutting in and out around you on the highway how little power you have when you’re loaded, how long it takes you to speed up and slow down. I can’t get out of the way.”
We’re at a total weight of about 80,000 pounds and barely crawling as we hit a slight incline on the entrance ramp to 94 East. Mike puts his hazard flashers on as a warning to others, announcing, We’re coming, we’re slow, we’re heavy.
Almost two hours south of Waukegan, we stop at a weigh station in Gary, Indiana. I know of Gary’s reputation from my FBI days. Back then, the city had almost twice as much crime as the average U.S. city. Gary also lives up to its reputation when it comes to internet sites that advertise sex for sale. Anyone surfing those sites will find pages of local Gary ads and a handful targeting truckers.
You can’t help but wonder if any of the women in those ads will be some trucker’s next victim.
Mike and I pull onto the certified scales at the Pilot truck stop. In the old days, truckers used to have to go inside and get paper. Today, there’s an app for that. Despite Gary’s crime rate—which I hear has dropped—I’m not going to say that nothing good happens here; that wouldn’t be fair. But I will say that nothing good happens to us. The weigh-in didn’t go well. We are 1,000 pounds overweight. Mike calls his boss man.
This weight issue is more complex than I thought. Our problem isn’t our gross weight. The “steers” axle under the cab of the truck can handle about 12,000 pounds. Back under the flatbed trailer, there’s about ten feet between each axle. Those front and rear axles can each be loaded with 34,000 pounds. It’s all about weight distribution. We are overweight on the rear trailer axle.
This happened during the load-up—of course it did. The drywall was placed too far back on the trailer, but Mike was assured the load was only 47,000 total, so how bad can it be? Maybe it is 47,000 pounds, maybe it isn’t—but now it almost doesn’t matter. Too much of our weight is on one axle. I can almost see the wheels spinning in Mike’s head as he tries to troubleshoot this. His expression soon changes; he has an idea.
We try fueling up, right here at the truck stop, to increase the weight of the cab, which might take weight off the trailer. Once our tank is filled, we pull onto the scale again. But all that does is increase our gross weight.
One of the differences between a flatbed and a dry-van rig is that the flatbed’s axles can’t be adjusted. A dry van—the big box trailer—can slide its axles back and forth to redistribute weight. We can’t do that, but we might be able to shift some weight if we adjust the connection between our load and the cab. So we decide to try moving what’s called the fifth wheel, which sits under and between the trailer and the cab. It’s a horseshoe-shaped plate on a pivot with a locking pin that connects the truck to the trailer. We try to slide that forward, but it’s stuck, so we take turns slamming it with a mallet that Mike pulls from the truck. For the third time, we get on the scale. For the third time, we have a weight problem. It helped a little but not enough. Mike calls the boss man.
Consistent with Mike’s description of the boss man as a stand-up guy, the boss decides not to risk the possibility of Mike’s truck getting stopped while overweight. The boss doesn’t want the ding against his company’s record, and he doesn’t want Mike to get a ticket. Dispatch calls the gypsum place that screwed up our load. Even though it’s only two p.m., the loading crew has gone home for the day.
As is often the case in life, doing the right thing will hurt. We will again spend the night in the truck in Chicago so we can be in Waukegan bright and early tomorrow morning to have our load repositioned. This means Mike will likely haul one less load this week and not reach his target of a load per day.
But it also means there will be one less overweight truck moving across the states this week. How many other truckers and bosses do the right thing? How many overweight trucks are out there right now? Maybe one of them is that truck in front of or behind your own family’s car.
Off we go, north on I-90 toward Chicago, an hour and a half away. Mike alerts me to something I have never paid any attention to, because I’ve never had to. It’s a green highway sign that reads weigh station. Mike reacts. “Shit.”
It hits me: If we get pulled into a mandatory weigh-in, we’ll have a problem.
Here’s how weigh-ins work. There’s a device called a PrePass in the cab above Mike’s windshield. It looks a lot like an E-ZPass toll transponder. There’s a little light on it. About a mile before the weigh station, an electronic reader identifies our truck, checks its safety and credential status, and decides if we should be weighed. All this happens in about a second. If Mike’s PrePass light turns red, he has to pull into the weigh station. If it turns green, he can keep going. Mike told me there are times when he approaches an official weigh station and the light doesn’t do anything. When that happens, Mike doesn’t take chances; his practice is to pull in.
“Green,” Mike says then.
Immediately, as if to confirm our good fortune, we see the weigh station and a sign that announces closed; we both breathe a sigh of relief. Mike explains that even if we were found to be overweight, a ticket is not a certainty. He would have shown a trooper or inspector his app, which would prove that as soon as we weighed ourselves at the truck stop and realized that we had an issue, we headed back to where we’d picked up the load. Our story would likely allow us to avoid a ticket. Maybe.
But our luck doesn’t last long.
An alarm goes off in the cab. It’s brief but piercingly loud. I ask Mike what’s happening. He glances down at his dash.
“The sensors on these new trucks are too sensitive. These alarms go off sometimes. Look, the warning light went on for engine coolant. It’s probably nothing.”
Sure enough, the warning light turns off, and the alarm doesn’t come back on until, a few minutes later, it does—with a vengeance. It won’t stop blaring. Mike checks Trucker Path for the nearest truck stop. Mercifully, there is a small stop up ahead.
Once we pull in and bail out of the truck, I spot a pool of amber liquid on the pavement under the engine. Liquid is cascading from the truck in an audible stream. Mike comes over to my side of the cab. If you’ve never opened the hood of a semitruck, it’s not like popping the hood on your Honda Accord.
First, Mike pulls the release lever inside the truck at the bottom of the steering column, which releases the hood-latch locks behind each front wheel cover. Next, he folds the front grille guard down on its hinges, away from the grille. Last, he puts one foot up on the front bumper for leverage, braces his chest against the grille, and throws his arm over the top of the hood. Mike eases his body weight down, which causes the grille to go nose-down and raises the back of the hood skyward, exposing an angry engine awash in hot coolant fluid.
I spot it first. There’s a fat hose that leads to the coolant reservoir. The hose has a small hole in it the size of a ballpoint-pen puncture. It’s still spraying. Mike calls the boss man.
Lucky for us that we’re in the Chicagoland area. The boss man is well connected here in his own backyard; he knows a guy. It’s late in the day, but the boss man’s contact promises to keep his shop open and wait for us. We run inside the truck-stop store, buy a bottle of coolant, refill our reservoir, and head for help.
The place looks more like a graveyard where trucks go to die than a hospital where rigs get revived. It smells even worse. The odor of raw sewage gags us. Like the boss man, this shop guy is Moldovan; he talks to us with a thick accent.
“I have bad news about this hose. It’s the new kind of hose. I don’t have in stock. I have to get from dealer.”
Mike, ever the optimist, asks him: “Do you have any good news?”
The guy thinks for a moment and then, with an almost evil grin, says, “You can sleep here tonight.”
The blank expressions on our faces must signal that we are not amused, because the Moldovan comes up with another idea. “You have the Gorilla Tape?”
“Huh?” Mike responds.
“You know, the Gorilla Tape,” the guy repeats.
Mike and I forage through the cabinets on his truck, but he is all out of the kind of tape the shop guy needs. Yet when we reenter the shop, the guy smiles and holds up the hose like a proud angler who’s just fished a two-foot-long walleye out of Lake Michigan. He found his own Gorilla Tape and wound it tightly around the hole in the hose.
“You are good,” the guy assures us.
“We are good?” Mike asks.
“You are good,” the shop man confirms.
We’ll be good until the Gorilla Tape gives up the ghost, I think. The boss man, who mysteriously already knows what happened, calls Mike and tells him that this quick fix should put us back on the road to Waukegan and then to our delivery site in Ohio, and whenever Mike’s route returns us to Chicago, we’ll have a brand-new hose. I have my doubts about this, but I’m not the boss man.
Back in the truck, Mike assures me that the three things we experienced today—a weight issue, a stuck fifth wheel, and the coolant leak—are unprecedented. “Never happened. Never all in one day.”
I tell him, genuinely, that it’s good for me to learn about all these things, that this is why I want to ride along. But I’m wondering how long the tape on this hose will hold. It’s getting late and dark, past the time most truckers have found a place to shut down for the night.
Our only option is the Gurnee truck stop, a small mom-and-pop place in rural Gurnee, Illinois. Real-time reporting from truckers indicates only three of the fifteen spots are occupied. The Trucker Path app gives rave reviews to Donny’s Diner next door. We find a parking space and pull in. It’s seven thirty p.m.—we’re hungry and tired.
We walk into Donny’s, but no one is there. Not a customer, not an employee. After we spend a few eerie minutes inside an unlocked business without a soul in sight, a woman enters the front door surrounded by the pungent waft of weed. She makes an announcement: “The grill is closed.”
So much for that. Mike suggests we order delivery from Grubhub.
“Do you do that a lot?” I inquire.
“All the time,” he says.
We place an order for Middle Eastern chicken and beef shawarma. We figure since it is protein and rice, it’s a relatively healthy meal, as long as we skip the pita bread.
Since it’s now Monday night, and neither of us has showered for thirty-six hours, we decide to use the truck-stop showers while we wait for our food delivery. The attendant behind the store counter is older, with longish unkempt hair, untrimmed fingernails, and flesh that is the kind of pale that comes from never seeing daylight. He has a pendant hanging from his neck and the creepy vibe of someone you wouldn’t want near young children.
He tells us it will be ten bucks for a shower, and ten bucks more—refundable—for the key to get into the shower. Although the place has two showers, for some reason he only charges us for one. Mike clarifies something with the man. “You know we’re not showering together.”
The guy gives us a ghoulish grin.
“Where’s the towels?” Mike asks.
Neither of us likes the response: “I only have two and they’re dirty,” says Dracula.
Mike has one towel in his truck. He offers me two of his clean undershirts to use as towels, and I accept. The shower feels good, as does brushing my teeth and changing my clothes. I’ll come to appreciate these things more as the days progress.
It’s places like this that recently convinced Mike to order an Isinwheel electric scooter. It offers Mike freedom for about four hundred bucks. When it arrives, he plans to store it in his truck, and when he needs to get to a Walmart or a restaurant or even explore a city on his down weekends, he’ll park his rig and transition to two wheels. The boss man told him it will be no problem to keep the scooter in the truck. In fact, the boss man told Mike to ship it to the boss’s house in Chicago and pick it up there. Mike figures he’ll save a ton on Uber rides.
The Grubhub food arrives, and it’s tasty and plentiful. I just want to go to bed after getting almost no sleep Sunday night. I’m never able to sleep right after dinner, but Mike can turn off like a light switch. He starts snoring as soon as his head hits the pillow. I catch about six hours, then wake up at three a.m., thinking it is much later. Nevertheless, I’m up. I slip quietly out of the cab and head into the 24/7 store.
There’s a different guy behind the counter, less vampire, more ex-con. I pour myself a hot coffee so I can warm up. Despite the late April date, temperatures are still in the thirties. As I sip, I scan the shelves stocked with instant soup, ramen noodles, cereal, candy, nuts, beef jerky, and liquor. A refrigerated case holds sodas, energy drinks, and beer.
I watch as a male customer strolls in and goes through a door marked casino into a room attached to the store. Several minutes later, a woman, alone, enters the casino too. I head back to the rig, where Mike is still asleep.
Mike was a good choice to expose me to the real-time life on the road, but he is unaware of the long history of killings. If I want to learn the history of homicides on our highways and the coordinated pursuit of the offenders, only one person will do: the trailblazing Oklahoma criminal analyst Terri Turner.