We pulled into Morton’s Travel Plaza off East Cheyenne Avenue in Las Vegas, Nevada early on a Saturday in December 2017. The stop was a few miles off the Strip, which loomed in the hazy distance. Tractor trailers of all sorts were parked at diagonals for what looked like entire city blocks.
We had flown in at dawn from New York. Both of us had finished two weeks’ worth of fall exams in a weekend so we could fit in another road trip before the holidays. Jordan was back at Yale Law School for his final semester, and both of us were set to graduate in the spring. It had been four months since our last swing through California, Arizona, and Nevada.
The day before, Chris had confirmed our arrival with Peter Mylen, a 57-year-old truck driver from Daytona Beach, Florida, who would be our host for the week.
We were trying to chase down the feeling we had in Page, Arizona, and spend more time with people who might show us something we couldn’t find in our daily lives.
We stood in the parking lot, blinking at the fleet before us in the morning chill. A horn blast cut through the air. It came from a blue truck with a New York Giants logo on its flank.
“Need a ride?” a man shouted down at us from an open window.
He climbed down from the cab, and there was Peter.
He was a tall, stocky man with strong forearms, dun skin, a bristling mustache, and thin eyeglasses. His presence was enormous.
“Welcome, boys,” he said and shook our hands vigorously. Two prominent green-black tattoos ran up and down his forearms—one of an American flag behind an eagle, the other of a baroque cross.
“Peter,” he said warmly. “Nice to meet you.”
As Peter spoke, he opened his arms and revealed MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN plastered across the chest of his crimson shirt.
“I wore it for you guys,” Peter explained, noticing us eyeing it. “I told my wife, ‘Make it red so when they start shooting at me, they’ll hit their target.’” He laughed heartily—a deep, hoarse sound.
The plan for the week was simple enough. Peter had agreed to take us along for a shipment of a family’s belongings from Las Vegas to Gulfport, Mississippi, a journey of 1,800 miles. Peter was a bedbugger—in trucker patois, someone who moves people’s household belongings.
This trip would take us through Arizona and New Mexico; across the Texas Panhandle and along the state’s eastern ridgelike border with Oklahoma; through Shreveport, Louisiana; and, ultimately, across the Delta and into Mississippi. We had four days to make it.
Jordan settled into the jump seat across from Peter, and Chris plopped down on the mattress of the bunk bed behind the two of them, feet dangling. Satisfied with the state of his idling rig—a gleaming Volvo VNL 780—Peter pressed the air brake. It released with a hiss that rose above the grinding turnover of the engine. Pete, as we would come to call him, put the tractor into gear.
“Here we go,” he said, and with a shudder of the rig, he maneuvered us out of the parking lot, through an intersection, and out onto the open highway.
* * *
With one hand on the wheel, Pete pulled out an orange pack of Pall Malls and a red lighter. He cracked the window and lit one as the wind off the interstate between Las Vegas and Albuquerque screamed through the cab.
“I don’t go anywhere unless that trailer is absolutely chock full,” Pete said. When he talked, he turned his whole torso to face us.
“Because I get 55 percent,” he continued, “and all the expenses come out of my pocket. The insurance, fuel, workers’ comp. I’m just not one of those guys that runs a quarter-empty. On my way back from Connecticut, one time, I had mattresses strapped to the back and 2,000 pounds of cargo on my upper bunk here.”
Pete’s truck was already cramped. The two jump seats took up half the cab, rocking and squealing on their suspension. On the broad dash from window to window, Pete kept an assortment of items: mini-calendars, notepads and pens, sunflower seeds, trinkets hanging from the mirror, a plastic statuette of Jesus—arms outstretched—and an ever-present coffee mug. Behind the jump seats was a refrigerator, a small television, and two bunk beds. The bottom one was for Pete. The upper bunk was for his helpers—or in this case, for us.
Joining Pete for a ride-along had been Chris’s idea. If we were going to get away from politics, Chris surmised, we should meet people where they lived and worked. Chris had always enjoyed reading Studs Terkel’s interviews in his weathered copy of Working, and where better to start than with long-haul trucks? As far as Chris knew from Terkel’s book, it was a gritty job—one that could teach us something not only about work but about the pockets of America we had yet to see. Jordan was intrigued by the idea. He imagined truckers shared a lot in common with the troops he knew.
Truck drivers are an integral part of American life. Each year, three million truckers transport more than $700 billion worth of goods across the branching veins of America’s interstate highways. Without them, commerce would grind to a halt. Yet the industry is on the margins of society. Today, if reported on at all, trucking is most readily invoked in conversations about the supposedly imminent arrival of self-driving vehicles.
Eventually Chris found his way to Finn Murphy, a former trucker and author of The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road, who told us he would find someone to take us along for a ride.
A few weeks later, Finn got back to us. “I have your man,” he wrote, and included a phone number.
After a 30-minute phone conversation with Pete, we decided Finn was right. Pete was loud, opinionated, and welcoming. “You don’t have enough ink in your printer to get down all my thoughts,” Pete had yelled over the phone with a belly laugh audible above the scream of highway air behind him.
“So,” Chris said from a lawn chair Pete had jerry-rigged for us behind the two jump seats as we drove through Nevada. “How do you know Finn?”
“Finn?” Pete said. “You know, I’ve never met Finn.”
“Really?” Jordan said.
“Yeah, don’t know him from Adam.”
“How’d you connect with him?” Chris asked.
“I think he knew our local dispatcher,” Pete explained. “He reached out to her and said, ‘Hey, I got these guys. You know any driver that might be willing to help out?’ She just said, ‘Hey, Pete. I think this sounds like you.’”
We were miles southeast of Las Vegas by then, gunning down a highway into the long stretch of desert between Las Vegas and Arizona with a complete stranger—a raucous, surly man with a Trump T-shirt who laughed at his own bawdy jokes and careered with speed down hills with thousands of pounds of furniture lashed to the hitch on the tractor’s back end.
Just then a sedan sped onto the road from a highway entrance ramp, and its driver peered up at us as it slowly passed the cab. We looked down, fascinated by our new towering vantage. Pete noticed too, and leaned across the cab at a perilous angle. With one hand on the wheel, he pulled his shirt up and flashed a nipple, flicking it with his free hand and letting out a baritone howl, one we would come to know well.
“They love it,” he said to us, shirt once again pooling at his waist, as he bounced in his jump seat over the uneven road, a cigarette still smoldering between his fingers.
* * *
Pete drove hard. He whisked in and out of lanes with ease, peeling around smaller cars and lumbering trucks and swooping back into the fast lane. For such an enormous vehicle, the semi moved deftly under his hand. All told, Pete had navigated some three million miles in his more than 40 years on the road. He started as a helper, or road dog as they are called, sleeping in the back of tractor trailers, and for the past 33 years as the owner-operator of his own rig.
Yet this journey would be a new experience even for a veteran driver like him. A recent regulation was about to change Pete’s industry. The Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2012, required the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to develop a rule mandating all truckers carry electronic logging devices, known as ELDs. The ELDs would help enforce long-standing rules limiting the number of hours a trucker could drive in a single day. Now, after years of deliberation, the new requirements were set to go into effect on December 18, 2017—three days after the start of our journey.
“I pretty much expect all hell to break loose that day,” Pete said.
A poll conducted by Fleet Owner magazine found that only one-third of all truckers had complied with the mandate to carry an ELD. For a deadline set to affect more than three million people in a few days’ time, this was a concerning number. Penalties for noncompliance could be steep, including fines and citations. By April, a noncompliant driver could be put out of service.
Pete sported an ELD on the windshield above the dash. Fitted with a GPS, ELDs are essentially tracking devices. The electronic log monitored Pete’s progress to the minute, creating a precise record that the government and his dispatcher could scrutinize. Before ELDs, truckers would jot down their hours with a pen and notebook. When we first joined Pete in Las Vegas, he was filling out just such a journal.
“These logs are a pain in my ass,” Pete had said before we pulled away from Morton’s Travel Plaza. He was ticking away at a form with a byzantine series of lined grids on a clipboard. “I log down everything I do in this here notebook,” Pete explained.
Until the deadline, Pete would still jot on the clipboard, looking back and forth from a pocket notebook full of dates and times that he used to calculate how far he had driven, the time he had started, and when he had pulled off for a nap. While not perfect, the system was tolerable because drivers could “adjust” the books to the realities of the road when regulations became too cumbersome. Pete told us how it had once taken a full 11-hour shift to load his trailer. He was exhausted and reeked. But it would have been illegal for him to drive back to the truck stop for a shower. By law, he was required to stay put and spend the night in front of the client’s house. Instead, he scratched off duty into his logbook and made the drive to the truck stop.
“They make you lie,” he said, barreling in and out of a lane to avoid a sluggish car in the wilds of Arizona. “No one who’s ever trucked made these laws.”
Now the ELD was set to change all that, and the anger among truckers was palpable. On our trip, the two of us would hear complaints from a dozen or so truckers we met on the road. Protests were breaking out all over the country. Three hundred trucks had driven down a highway from Sacramento to Fresno at five miles per hour to protest the new ELD mandate. In Washington, D.C., others parked along Constitution Avenue and in front of the U.S. Department of Transportation. Many threatened to quit trucking altogether.
Pete was sympathetic, but he didn’t take part in the protests.
“I’ve got a family to support,” he said. “I’m out here to run and to make my money.”
It was a perspective many truckers likely shared. One recent industry poll found that 78 percent of them felt underpaid.
The weight of it all sat heavy on Pete’s shoulders. He talked frequently about the pressure he felt because of the many rules on the road. It was like a boot on his neck, he explained.
“Every single day, I’m looking over my shoulder. What am I doing wrong? What are they gonna get me for? How much is that gonna cost me? And that all comes from regulation piled upon regulation just to smother us, dominate us, and break our spirit.”
This resonated with Jordan, who was often skeptical of the federal government’s ability to manage life in a country as large and complex as the United States. While well-intentioned, he believed, federal regulations could lead to second- and third-order consequences that often made life harder for the “little guy”—the small business owners, the owner-operators, and anyone else who couldn’t hire a legion of lawyers. There is a time and place for regulation, but bureaucracy has a tendency to overreach—and when it gets in the way of honest work, it has let down the society it was meant to protect.
Chris sympathized with Pete’s lament, but he also felt a twinge of disbelief. Watching Pete drive was not exactly a soothing experience. Everyone—no matter how experienced—needs rules on the road. Truckers, as a group, aren’t always the safest drivers, either. In 2016, at least 4,400 semis were involved in fatal accidents on U.S. highways. Thirty-seven years prior, however, that number had been north of 6,400. The state may have been the bad guy to Pete, a man Chris had decided to trust with his life, but its dictates seemed like a necessary evil for a system responsible for keeping an eye on a fleet of millions of drivers.
“They make us feel like criminals out here,” Pete concluded.
For decades, trucking represented something rough but decent in the American imagination. In the 1960s, the trucker was the marooned driver’s savior and the noble of the open road. But this national fascination began to fade in the 1980s, especially after the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 deregulated the industry and opened the highways to cutthroat competition and non-union fleets.
But Pete kept on.
As afternoon subsided into night, the view was breathtaking. Arizona’s red rocks and imposing valley walls were touched with sun. “This is my office,” Pete said and gestured out over the landscape that stretched golden for miles and butted up against a craggy mountain range. Pete tapped at his first pack of Pall Malls and, seeing it empty, discarded it.
“I’ve got nothing to do but drive down the highway communing with myself and the Spirit.”
Chris had settled down for a nap after seeing the exit for Page. When he awoke, the sun was down and Pete had pulled over in a dirt parking lot in Winslow, Arizona. Jordan had stepped out to check into a nearby motel. Pete was thumbing through his phone.
“Do you want a room?” Chris asked.
Pete shook his head.
“Sometimes when I’m home, I’ll sleep out here,” he said. “And when I’m on the road, if I can’t sleep, I’ll get up at two in the morning and come out and sit right here in this chair,” he patted the side of the arm rest.
“Fair enough,” Chris said and followed Jordan into the motel.
* * *
Morning came quickly on our second day. The two of us reluctantly climbed into the cab just after 4 a.m. We found Pete wide awake and apologetic. The ELD had yet to zero out, so we had to sit for another ten minutes until his legally mandated rest period expired.
“We don’t actually have to wait,” Pete said. “The mandate doesn’t go into effect until tomorrow. But I’m training myself.”
As we watched the clock count down, Pete laid out the rules of his craft. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration allowed him to drive 11 hours in a day, but he had to do so in a 14-hour window. And within six hours of starting his drive, he had to take a 30-minute break, no matter what. He could drive a total of 70 hours in an eight-day week before having to take a few days off. The government would brook nothing less.
“I don’t think astronauts go through this bullshit,” Pete grumbled as we waited.
Soon enough, we made our way down a long stretch of road and pulled over at a truck stop for coffee and supplies. Truckers can stop only in certain places. Their lumbering tractors are too cumbersome to navigate most city streets. The Petro, Speedway, and Pilot Flying J truck stops that dot highway exits are concrete oases for these interstate nomads.
As Jordan and Pete perused the hot offerings inside, Chris walked the length of Pete’s truck. It was white and ribbed with support beams. Blue and red markings mottled the siding. Across the back of the cab, the phrase PRAISE THE LORD was etched in Gothic letters. The gargantuan New York Giants insignia adorned a large segment of the trailer. “Gives me something to yak about with the guys,” Pete had said earlier in the day. Jordan joined Chris, and Pete noticed us admiring the truck. He strode around the side and pulled open the middle door with the swipe of a hand. He patted the cardboard boxes cinched in tight from floor to ceiling and explained the finer points of fastening down the guts of a rig.
Loading a truck is complicated. You have to be thoughtful to maximize density, which maximizes tonnage, which is the only way to maximize profit. It requires finesse, a good team of labor, and experience. Know-how is the tried and true method of fitting a tricycle in snugly beside a toaster oven.
Back on the road, Pete tapped out another Pall Mall and lit it in the darkened cab, steering with his elbows as he went. We were passing through New Mexico in the fading black. Predawn was Pete’s favorite time to drive. He was rested then, and there was no sun in his eyes. He had his first cup of coffee with sugar and milk, which sloshed around in his grounds-encrusted mug—one he refused to clean. It was a meditative time. The lights of the oncoming trucks and the glow of the dividers were pretty much all one could see.
“How’s New Haven?” Pete asked us without the same punch to his voice. “I used to roam the New Haven Green when I was 14, 15 years old. Down there at Chapel and—”
He searched for the street name.
“Temple?” Jordan offered.
“Temple.”
For a time, Pete had described himself as “born on a mountain, raised in a cave” on his Facebook page. Now it’s “work hard, play hard, pray hard,” a change he made after a few aunts took exception to that characterization of his childhood. Pete grew up in Milford, Connecticut, the son of an alcoholic mother who adored her children but could never take care of them. His father, Jim, was an engineer who got full custody of Pete and his sisters in the divorce. Jim was a career man, Pete said, who neglected his children and his new wife—who, in turn, terrorized her stepchildren. She fastened a padlock to the refrigerator. The house was kept locked, too, and the children were welcome inside only when she was home.
So at 15 years old, Pete ran away. Lost in southern Connecticut, he needed a place to stay and discovered a truck stop in Milford where for 25 cents a night he could get a mattress and clean sheets to throw on the floor in a cavernous room with dozens of truckers. One of them asked Pete if he wanted to help load his truck. A big teenager, Pete did it with ease. So the man took him to California. Soon Pete was a road dog, traveling in the cab and sleeping in the trailer at night with a transistor radio for company.
These days, there are almost no bunkhouses like the one in Milford. They went away in the 1970s when sleepers—trucks outfitted with bunks—became more common on the market, changing the industry forever.
Pete may have found his calling early, but his youth wasn’t serene. His troubles started with groups of friends at the Rocky Horror Picture Show, passing around flasks of brown liquor and hand-rolled cigarettes. Later, when he wasn’t working, he and a pack of like-minded guys would follow the Grateful Dead up and down the East Coast. He lived in the back of a pickup truck, sleeping on lawns and washing himself in creeks and gullies. On the night Jerry Garcia died, Pete attended a candlelight vigil on the New Haven Green.
He had children, and they became estranged. He worked and eventually got his own truck, but he wasn’t clean. There were vices on the road, and Pete was not immune to them. From time to time, when it all became too much, he tried moving to other parts of Connecticut to escape the dealers and friends. It didn’t work. They always found him again. And the substances took their toll.
Until one day, he got sober.
Chris was incredulous.
“You just stopped?”
“Sure did,” Pete said. And he’s been sober ever since.
As we drove, Pete told us how he recently met his first son, Pete Jr., after decades apart. His son had called him, drunk, in the middle of the night, and Pete had told him they should get a meal.
“I know you are mad,” Pete said to his son when they met. “You’re mad about my absence. Mad that I was away.”
Pete offered his son one swing.
“I’ll keep my hands behind my back, and you can hit me across the face,” Pete had said. Pete Jr. asked if he could bank it, but his old man said no. It was an expiring offer, and Pete Jr. chose not to take it. It was the start of their reconciliation.
Pete began to cry as he told us the story. Pete often cried when we discussed family or faith. For years now he had styled himself a good family man—the kind of father and husband who emerges only after years spent ruing a family’s absence.
At one point we passed a young man with his thumb up walking down the side of the highway. He wore dirty clothing and his hair was long and matted. Pete normally would have picked him up, he said, but with the two of us in the cab there was no space. As a stray once himself, Pete often tried to help lost kids on the road. His wife calls these hitchhikers his “special charity cases.”
Pete’s wife was omnipresent in the cab. She was his fourth. The life of a trucker can be rough on a relationship. Pete was on the road 28 days of every month. It takes a unique kind of spouse to put up with that sort of life.
“Each wife who I was married to I was madly in love with,” he said. “I’m still good friends with every one of them. I let each of them know that the time they were a part of my life was a huge blessing to me. And I hope that I was a blessing to them. Now, okay, the blessings have ended. We gotta go our separate ways and hopefully you’ll have blessings with someone else. But the time I had with each one of them was wonderful.”
Yet to hear Pete tell it, his current wife was something special.
“I love my wife so much,” he repeated over and over. They had been together for 15 years, and Pete claimed there hadn’t been a single day of anger.
“Like I tell her, I’m the best husband in the world,” he laughed. “I come home once every month. You cook me a steak, do one load of laundry, then I’m out of here. Okay? And then you get 2,000 dollars a week for that. So, really, how bad can it be being married to me?”
* * *
“This one of yours?”
Pete held up a small lime-green pocket Bible after a coffee break. It was just after seven in the morning on our second full day, and sleep still weighted our eyes as the dawn light entered the cab.
“It’s mine,” Chris said.
It was a new possession for Chris. A man on the street had handed it to him. Chris had put it in a pouch designed for water bottles on the side of his backpack, and it must have slipped out onto the thin mattress in the back of Pete’s 18-wheeler.
“A man of God?”
Chris shook his head.
“I was born skeptical but not faithless,” Chris said. “At this point, I just haven’t had something to believe in yet.”
Seeing the disappointment in Pete’s face, Chris mentioned his Saint Christopher’s pendant. His mother gave it to him when he turned 21, and the saint’s story had resonated with him. He told Pete and Jordan how, like Saint Christopher, if he were ever to find faith it would be in service to this world, not the next.
Pete, though, was practically brimming with faith. It was in his greetings, his hopes and dreams, his politics. He saw God on the road, in the sunset and the landscape ahead of him. God was why he picked up hitchhikers and called his family every night and sought their forgiveness when he did wrong. Everything is a blessing, Pete told us, and God, well, God is love and his word is love.
We spent an hour digesting how the Bible instructed him to love all mankind and, at the same time, prohibited same-sex relationships, including both his sister’s and stepdaughter’s. He was conflicted over this, racked by the gravity of what he had to do: disobey one commandment in service to another. But ultimately Pete came around to the conclusion that if God was love, how could a loving relationship be wrong? It hurt him to reject a passage of the Bible, but he found a greater cause in supporting his sister and stepdaughter in their relationships, even if it might leave him damned one day.
Pete’s faith was in the runaways he took in, too. “With young people who I see out here traveling the road, struggling,” Pete told us, “I really think that God is gonna give me the words to say what they need to hear, you know what I mean?” Pete was an evangelist for compassion. Over and over, he told us how all he wanted was to love and to help the people in his life, as Christ did for him when he was locked out of his childhood home or when the liquor left him all-consumed or when his children needed his advice.
Pete picked up a camouflage pocket Bible from the dash, where cigarette boxes were stacked alongside his wallet. He opened it at random. “Would you read it at some point?” Chris asked. Pete tried then and there, but couldn’t focus on the words while driving. So he handed it over to Chris, who put his finger on the jostled pages and read aloud.
“‘Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?’” Chris read. “‘Are you not the result of my work in the Lord? Even though I may not be an apostle to others, surely I am to you. This is my defense to those who scrutinize me. Have we no right to food and to drink?’”
Jordan put his hand on Chris’s shoulder.
“Isn’t that Pete in a nutshell?”
“I was thinking the exact same thing.”
“Tell me what that doesn’t say about right now, right here, our discussion that we’re having,” Pete said, “to randomly open that book, and you tell me the Lord doesn’t exist or doesn’t intervene on our behalf in situations right now? That shit don’t happen by accident. Thank you, Jesus.”
We didn’t know Pete well, but it all felt fitting. Pete was no saint. He was rough around the edges and seemed to take pride in his vulgarity. But Pete was a servant of the God he knew, and to the people he met. In his impiety was a deep piety.
Pete quietly teared up as the light of the sun took over the world in front of us. The clouds were pink, and the mountains were still purple. The golden sawgrass along the highway divider practically glowed in the brilliant dawn.
* * *
The ELD had become Kafkaesque since crossing into Texas. It spat out numbers that made little sense. The mandated break came too late, and the device had seemingly shaved three hours off his total drive time. Pete waved aloft a 50-page manual that showed how to use the ELD only with an Android phone, not an inset device like the one he had.
“This doesn’t work for inbred truckers,” Pete growled. “That’s what you get for 700 bucks.”
Conversations with Pete were a meandering experience. One moment the topic would be quantum mechanics. The next it would be politics, or football, or the Dead Sea Scrolls. Music—especially the 1970s rock he listened to on the radio—was another kind of education. Character, Pete said, was built by music.
We were in the Texas Panhandle now, and bound for Louisiana and Mississippi.
As we drove, Pete confessed to us that he had prayed that morning for God to give him the words to say something insightful. He prayed every day, and his humble ask as he sat in the dark waiting for us to emerge was to say something that would enrich us. He prayed for it three times before the sun came up.
Pete was self-conscious about the two of us being in his rig, he admitted. Perhaps our presence was some sort of test. A way to prove the merits of an autodidact’s highway scholastics. His education had come to an end after eighth grade, but with countless hours to kill on the road he had turned to educating himself. He read. He watched the History Channel. Dr. Phil was a source of inspiration. He had days on end to think as he trucked, and he tried it all on as we spoke.
We came to know Pete as an enigmatic thinker, and no more so than in the realm of politics. Trump inevitably came up in conversation, and we were surprised by Pete’s opening statement.
“You know,” he said, his MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN shirt still stretched across his chest and belly, “my biggest problem with him is that he doesn’t acknowledge climate change.”
The diesel engine roared as Pete gunned past a doddering car that was skittishly attempting to merge onto the road.
Pete went on to lament Trump’s sexism. He unloaded on the inequity of white privilege. He told us how he regretted what Trump had said about immigrants and Muslims, both on the campaign trail and since.
Two days after the 9/11 attacks, Pete recalled, he was inching down the New Jersey Turnpike in his rig. Pete had arrayed his dashboard with miniature American flags, as many other drivers had. As he approached a ticket booth, headed for New York City, he noticed a man waving at him from the next lane. The driver was Muslim, Pete said, and he told Pete he feared going into New York without a flag.
“He was afraid for his life,” Pete said. “So I gave him a handful of flags. Must have had 30 or so on my dashboard. He’d worked his whole life in Brooklyn or something, and now he had to fear for his life.”
Pete voted for Trump nonetheless.
“I really don’t think he gives a shit about anything,” Pete said—and he meant it as something to admire. “He says what pops into his head. He’s not a trained politician.”
Pete was upset about how the FBI was trying to undermine the president. He thought Hillary Clinton should have been charged with a crime. He thought disability and welfare created incentives not to work—that they bred a sense of entitlement that kept people out of the workforce. He lamented that Americans were losing their sense of responsibility and liberty, that they weren’t providing for themselves through hard work. But he believed that affordable health care should be a right. It was just too important. Most of all, he bemoaned the lack of a moral education among the next generation.
“The kids are lost,” he said. There is so much political correctness, he continued, that we don’t say the right things as well as the wrong things. It meant we were losing the bearings that would keep the country going in the right direction.
“The kind of nation that our forefathers envisioned for us has been corrupted,” he said.
But no matter what complaints he had, Pete was proud of his country. His criticisms were those of someone who felt passionately about the subject matter. “I love America,” Pete would say over and over again without a hint of irony or self-consciousness. He said it like John Wayne would have: entirely sure of its rightness. He was unwavering in his faith that this mantra, and the patriotism it represented, would never fail him. That if tested, it would never falter. That his faith in his nation—in the idea of America as he knew it—would never be misplaced.
It was a pillar of his life—a north star. “God and country,” he said at one point. “The two things I care most about, other than my wife and kids.”
* * *
Later that day we were on I-40 East, driving through the Texas Panhandle on the way to Amarillo. Amarillo is trucker friendly, Pete explained. There are scores of places to park, and a steakhouse that offered a free 72-ounce slab of meat to any trucker who could finish it. We saw a faded sign for it emerge from a cotton field as we drove.
“This machine is struggling to stay alive,” Pete said. He was checking the ELD. “I powered it on and off in hopes that it would reset, you know.”
“Are you in trouble if it’s not working?” Chris asked.
“I hope I’m not in trouble,” Pete said after a moment, lighting another cigarette. “I have a paper backup and that’s what the law says.”
He seemed stressed.
“Well, it’s not going to work,” Pete said, giving up again and tossing it aside.
* * *
At one point, Pete had called truckers the “last of the cowboys.” They lived for the freedom of the open road. That’s who they were in the 1970s, before deregulation and cutthroat competition stripped the industry of its frontier ethos. Now men like Pete felt yoked. Regulations, state troopers, and “four-wheelers” all haunted their tracks, hassling them on their journeys down the highways.
“Pete, what does the American Dream mean to you?” Jordan asked.
“It’s hard for me to describe the American Dream in less than half a book,” he said.
“We’ve got time,” Chris said.
“I want the American Dream to be the freedom to choose your course in life. To be free from the tyranny of the government. I think that people can rule themselves 90 percent of the time. Do we need guidelines? Yes. But you have to let people live their lives.”
“Do you think you’ve achieved it?” Jordan asked again.
“Not my American Dream, no,” Pete said.
Pete lamented the regulations that made it difficult to generate a profit and the taxes that siphoned off his pay. He admitted to having little money tucked away for retirement. “When I’m laying in bed at night and thinking about how things are gonna pan out in my later years, it’s sad to say my main concern is my wife. What happens to her if I go down? Is she gonna be taken care of?”
The American Dream is different for everyone, Pete concluded. “But who draws the line and says, Now you’re a success? My line is when I’ve made sure that everybody around me—my family, my friends—when they know I love them, when they know I have taken care of them.”
Pete then turned the question back on us. He wanted to know our conclusions about it based on our travels.
“Chris and I come at it differently,” Jordan said, “which I think is reflected in the Marine versus the journalist. My mission is more active. I want people to believe in the American Dream. I want people to see the best of America. Dreams are aspirational—they’re never guaranteed. But you have to believe that they are possible. I think Chris’s mission is more exploratory than mine. His approach is to say, Let’s see what we find and lay it out, so that people can decide for themselves based on what we see. Even if that means showing that it no longer exists.”
It was a distinction the two of us had discussed at length. Jordan believed we would find positive signs for America wherever we went. He believed the dream was alive and well. In the Marines, he had served with men and women of every different race, ethnicity, religion, and class. Most of them were 18 or 19 years old, and many of them got into trouble more often than not. But when faced with the most difficult challenges, they performed selflessly and heroically. They didn’t always get along, but they united when it mattered. That spirit, Jordan believed, was uniquely American, and he expected to find it everywhere among the people we met.
Chris was far less confident than Jordan. From afar he saw fractures and inequities that cast a pall over the country, and braced himself to see them manifest at every stop. Chris worried about the structural reasons why too many Americans—based on nothing more than an accident of birth—were excluded from the country’s riches and how that affected what felt like an unbridgeable chasm that stood between so many Americans. As we made our way across the country, Chris worried we would witness America’s dissolution in real time—a tragedy with no salvation.
“I guess I’ve achieved some semblance of the American Dream,” Pete concluded on second thought. He had struggled, yes, but he also had a wonderful wife, and they had a home together in Daytona. Work was plentiful. He was often on the road, but he could support his children. He was scraping by, but overall things were good. And they were good because he loved trucking.
Chris asked him how long he wanted to keep doing it.
“Until I’m 70,” he said. “Or until I die on the road.”
* * *
By late afternoon we had driven deep into Texas and were approaching the Louisiana border. The ELD was still on the fritz, and Pete was getting frustrated. So when we pulled into a truck stop the two of us decided to give him a wide berth. We sat in silence, watching Pete busy himself with one of a hundred undone tasks. Finally, Pete looked over at us.
“So, who wants to drive this thing?”
We looked at each other.
“You first,” Chris said.
Jordan and Pete switched seats.
“Get your camera out here, Chris,” Pete said, “because you don’t know what the hell will happen when we do this stuff.”
Pete gave instructions. Jordan adjusted the seat and looked at the pedals and buttons in front of him.
“Should I not be pressing the brake right now?” Jordan said with concern as the truck wheezed.
“It’s pretty foolproof,” Pete said. “Not that you’re a fool.”
“I wish I had a seat belt,” Chris said from the back.
Jordan pressed the air brake, which released with a hiss.
“Oh boy,” Chris murmured.
“You’re freestyling now,” Pete said.
Jordan tentatively touched the accelerator, and the truck lurched forward with a roar.
“Gun it, baby!” Pete said.
Jordan crawled out into the lot with two hands on the enormous wheel.
“Hang her left,” Pete said, and Jordan did as he was told. We sailed out across the parking lot, wet with fog, and among the trucks—to the amusement of the few men sipping coffee under the eaves of the convenience store.
“Why don’t you come around and give it a big U-turn so you can get a sense for the angle of the dangle?” Pete said.
“Around that way?”
“Tell you what, go up there,” Pete said. “Steer toward me until the last minute. Now straighten her out. Good. There, that’s good. Now put her in reverse.”
Jordan looked at him.
“Let’s back her into that big hole back there next to that green truck.”
Jordan slowly worked the rig backward. The tractor would knife out at severe angles with each twist of the wheel, and Jordan would correct. A few minutes later and we were in the spot—only somewhat askew.
“Again, man!”
Jordan pulled the rig back out into the open lot, then backed it into the space between two trucks again, this time with more ease.
Pete made Chris follow.
“Throw it into Drive,” Pete said. “Do it, baby.”
Chris trundled out into the lot.
“Cut through this hole,” Pete said, and Chris slashed between two trucks parked in a line. He slalomed back through the two parked trucks and swung around them into the same space Jordan had backed into. Pete made Chris back in twice. As Chris took his second stab, this time a little faster, a little more confident, Pete answered his phone as it rang.
“Oh, you know,” he said, “I got these two Yalies driving my rig. Nearly destroyed a Peterbilt.”
* * *
“Today the world is supposed to end,” Pete posted in a trucker’s group on Facebook. It was our third morning on the road, and we had awoken again before dawn. The ELD mandate had gone into effect at midnight. And the day truckers had dreaded was here.
“It will be a big clusterfuck,” Pete had said the night before. “We’ll wing it tomorrow.”
The day wasn’t off to a promising start. Pete walloped the ELD. Still no sign of life.
“I should be okay,” Pete said. “I have the paper log as a backup.”
It seemed like he was rehearsing an excuse.
The fog was thick in Louisiana. Highway signs came up out of the ether with less than a truck’s length of warning. The air was cold.
“Doesn’t it smell different down here? Can you smell the bogs?” Pete asked.
“Yeah,” Jordan said.
“Me too.”
We cut through bayous and groves of piney trees.
Now that we were within striking distance of our destination, Pete began making preparations. Movers often outpace their clients, so they will leave a load with a storage company—called a destination agent—that makes the final delivery once the client is settled. Finding help to unload can be difficult, though, and Pete started making calls to workers. Chris would dial off a spreadsheet from the jump seat and hand Pete the phone. By then, the two of us felt like honest-to-god road dogs.
Pete’s ELD was back working, at least partially: the screen showed the truck moving down the highway, but the log was still bum. Pete didn’t seem to mind, though. Earlier that day, we had approached the notorious Shreveport weigh station in tense silence. Pete had a transponder above his dash. When an inspection site required him to stop, it would flash red. Green meant a bypass had been granted. The three of us watched it. When it flashed green, we took a collective breath in unison. Salvation. We had passed the scales and evaded the state. The road was mercifully free, at least for now.
But Pete had other issues. After crossing into Louisiana, he had called ahead to the destination agent’s warehouse in Gulfport, Mississippi, only to find out it was full. So Pete called the firm that booked his dispatcher and asked for a new drop point. We were told to head for Slidell, Louisiana, 40 minutes northeast of New Orleans, and we updated the GPS. Just 100 more miles to go.
“We’re going to slide into Slidell with some ’70s music,” Pete said, twisting the radio knob. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Heard It Through the Grapevine” had come on.
“You know,” Chris said, “these guys, Creedence, they sound like they’re from down here. But they grew up just a few blocks from my childhood home in El Cerrito. Went to school across the street from where I did.”
“Really?” Pete said, incredulously. “Hoy-erd it through the grapevine?”
Night fell as we drove the last 100 miles of straight highway, which passed through swamps coated in a layer of fog that lingered over the mud beaches and canal berms. There was traffic through Baton Rouge. The eerie first notes of “Children of the Sun” vibrated through the cab, lit red by the brake lights of the freight tractor ahead of us.
Around nightfall each day, Pete would start making phone calls. Our conversations would lull—the day fully chewed over—and he’d drape his headset over his scalp and start dialing. It was a common pastime for a trucker with nothing but time on his hands.
One night he called a nephew. “I love you, buddy,” he said loudly into a voice-mail box.
“Call Kit-Kat,” he told his phone next and checked in with Katie, presumably a cousin or daughter or granddaughter. “Thinking about you,” he said.
No one answered for a spell, until he called his wife around 7 p.m. It was their evening ritual. Every night at the same time, he would speak to her in hushed tones, smoking a cigarette.
“How was your day, baby? Good? Do you mean it?”
Only one more morning before we reached Slidell.
* * *
The warehouse was in a commercial district on a small street flanked by muddy ditches and pines draped with moss. As we arrived the next morning, the rumble of a train sounded not far off. The air was wet and thick and the pines along the frontage road practically dripped with condensation from the feverish mist that haunted the branches and colored the sky a sickly gray.
Pete exchanged paperwork with a woman at the front desk, then sat down at a round table where we joined him. All three of us slumped low, weary from the jostled drive. We sat wordlessly for a moment in that sterile room off the warehouse, which resembled a portable housing unit squeezed into an airplane hangar. Pete opened his phone and set a timer for two hours.
“Everyone’s got me on the clock down to the minute,” he said. “Might as well put them on it too. And when it zeroes out? That’s when I start screaming and making all kinds of gestures.”
The office seemed designed to remind drivers of their second-class status. The walls were covered with instructions and dire warnings: THIS COMPANY TOLERATES NO ALCOHOL OR DRUG USE. NO LUNCH BREAKS AFTER TWO O’CLOCK. ALL DRIVERS MUST OBEY FOG RULES. The driver’s bathroom was outside the office, in the hangar. The door stuck and peeled away from the jam. Its lock was a thick, aging rubber band that one could wrap around a foot and pull tight while sitting down.
Pete stood up.
“I’m going to see if I can get around these office people and get to the real working-class folk. You’d be amazed what $20 can get you.”
And he set off.
Soon enough, Pete was marshaling the effort to unload his truck. Six men were working it, scuttling in and out of the warehouse. They balanced mattresses above their heads and rugs like scales across their shoulders. A ramp descended from the open back of the truck to an impromptu staging area. Two men were carrying furniture and cardboard boxes between the truck and the warehouse, where four other laborers would take command and stack items in wooden boxes along walls of exposed insulation.
In the warehouse the workers cackled and chatted. Outside, they dodged Pete’s glare and worked silently, save for the occasional mumbled question or two about what goes where.
“Hey, hey, driver,” the foreman said from the sloping lawn next to the warehouse door. His name was Craig, and he was taking a smoke break.
“Yeah?” Pete said.
“I’ma get a big New Orleans fleur-de-lis and paste it right over that there helmet,” he said, gesturing at the blue Giants helmet on Pete’s rig.
“Do it and I’ll drive my rig right through your building.”
The work motored on, but Pete was no longer the only driver on site. Others had begun to collect around the warehouse, mingling like gulls perched on the gunwale of a fishing boat.
One driver with a long scraggly beard limped over to us. He wore a Trump hat, black jeans, and work boots smeared with muck. He was rangy, nearly toothless, and tall.
“Been to the Chinese place up the road?” he asked Pete.
“Nope,” Pete said. “Good stuff?”
“Yeah, steak actually tastes like steak,” the man said. He seemed intent on a conversation, no matter how busy Pete made himself with the unload.
“What you running?” Pete asked offhandedly.
“Eight loads or so. Wouldn’t believe it. This one woman has 20 bookshelves. Had to break it all down.”
Pete grumbled a note of commiseration and kept folding mats.
“Man, I’m way over my hours,” the other trucker continued. “I’m trying to cheat my logbook, man. I’m still running paper.”
“You don’t have an ELD?”
“Naw, not yet. They really start fucking with us in April. My man said he’d get me one next week, and I’m like, ‘You ain’t gonna see me ’til April.’”
The driver’s dog, a Blue Heeler with mangy hair, stalked the ground beside us and settled on its side in a wet patch of grass, where it panted uncontrollably. The driver’s helper, a man with a large paunch, wandered about with the now-familiar joy of a man who had occupied the cramped cab of a truck too long. He stood across the street, near their rig, unsure of what to do with his hands.
“You know, my brother tried to drive for you up there,” the driver said, noticing the company logo on Pete’s truck. “Filled out an application and everything.”
“What happened?”
“They saw his driving record.”
“Giants fans, huh?” a second driver said loudly, noticing the Giants logo just as the foreman had.
“We all Saints down here,” he said to Pete, his here sounding more like he-ah.
“Yeah,” Pete quipped, “you sure look like Saints.”
The second driver, the one ribbing Pete, had wet hair, matted and thin. His eyes were sunken from the “barroom,” as he put it, the night before.
“Practically have halos over your heads,” Pete said.
The driver with the long beard talked incessantly. He picked up steam as he spoke, as if it had been days—weeks—of total silence on the road, as if this was his last opportunity to tell his story.
“You shown them anything fun? Any girls? Drugs?” he asked Pete, who tried his best to ignore him.
The man hooted with the thought. Then he told us how he had fooled around with the wife of a friend and sawed off her state-issued ankle tracker, only to abandon her at a truck stop after she found naked photos of herself on his phone and had stolen his keys and a wad of money. Then came tales of delinquent fatherhood and kids scattered across the country.
As the work wound down, we realized we’d soon be leaving Pete. The two of us were ready to be free of the cigarette smoke and the long, brutal days. But our affection for Pete had solidified over days spent together in that cabin.
Pete came over. We made small talk, trying to avoid the inevitable goodbyes. Jordan asked Pete if he was itching to get home. He would be there for Christmas after all. “I’m excited,” he said. “Then, after a few days, I’ll be excited to leave.”
We were huddled on the far side of the truck, away from the truckers and the labor. It was quiet on that side—just the three of us again, as if we were back on the road. Pete looked at us. “I had to walk away,” he said, and we knew what he meant. “Now you see the whole thing. We have the family-orientated guys, the business types, and—” he paused. “Even the riffraff. Like anywhere else.”
Pete was from a different world than us, but he was now a friend—a man we both felt deep affection for, like some distant relative rediscovered.
“You know,” Pete said. “You were always worried about being an imposition on me, but you weren’t.” He was tearing up just as he had when we spoke about God and blessings, runaways, and his wife.
“Drive safe out there,” said Pete, his lip quivering.
* * *
We took an Uber from Slidell over Lake Pontchartrain and into New Orleans that afternoon. The same dense fog hung tight over the placid waters, and by the time we burst into East New Orleans it had only just begun to burn off under the winter sun. As we rode, we both thought about Pete.
Chris’s thoughts returned to our last meal together, the night before. The three of us had sat together at a truck-stop diner in Hammond, Louisiana. Pete, ever energetic, had pushed his phone across the orange table toward the two of us, who were sick with fatigue.
“Look at this,” he said and played a video.
The dinner was practically a gourmet affair compared with our earlier meals at nearly empty fast-food joints across the Southwest. We had stopped at the palatial Petro station because it was Pete’s favorite. It was abuzz with the sounds of truckers catching up and stretching creaky joints while dozens of engines grumbled in neutral in the parking lot.
Pete gestured down at the video.
“Look, look,” he said.
It was a series of clips from a magistrate court in Providence, Rhode Island. The judge, Frank Caprio, heard a number of cases involving parking tickets, delinquent court payments, and other petty crimes, citations, and misdemeanors.
As the video played, the judge presided with verve.
At one point, Caprio faced a single mother practically swimming in parking tickets. “How much can you pay?” he asked. “Not much,” she responded.
“Okay,” the judge said. “I order you to pay not too much for eight weeks.”
In the video, Caprio scolded a high-school basketball player who had run a red light and told him to stay in school. He threw out a parking ticket issued a minute before parking was permitted. He invited young children up to the bench to set the fee for their parents’ citations. And he refused to take a young woman’s last five dollars.
Pete chortled with happiness as each courtroom exchange played out. There was something about the judge that Pete found irresistible. He was wise, a hero. But his dripping Rhodie accent and dry wit made him an everyman, too. Most of all, the judge was empathetic. He was a man clothed in power who also possessed grace.
“He’s like Solomon,” Pete had said as our food arrived.
The freedom of the highways could be seen as an escapist fantasy for men who can’t be socialized or don’t want to be. Yet a truck is no hermitage. Pete served the very society in which he seemed so ill at ease. He may have slept fitfully while at home and often sought the comfort of his rig on nights that others might rather have spent in their own beds. He may have preferred the diners and the array of tiled showers of truck stops to the higher pressure of the pipes at home, but he served home, community, and country all the same.
In the end, Pete’s presence had enriched us, just as he had prayed it would.