Light at the End of the Tunnel

 

I turned in my notice today. I gave them a week. They only deserve a week. My girlfriend thinks I'm being too generous, that they don't deserve a notice at all. She wishes that I'd wait until the busy season and then just walk out.

She's got a point. They did me wrong. But waiting until the busy season, as quickly as it will actually be here is out of the question. I've already waited enough. The final straw occured back in November. I started looking for another job back then, and was inundated with offers. Drivers are in demand. But I quickly found a position working in a stone mill, not driving at all. I jumped at the chance to get out from behind the wheel. The only problem was that the job wouldn't begin until the spring. One more winter at Stone Belt, one more winter in hell. The worst part was that my employers must have thought that I was all good with their schinanigans, that I wanted to stay. NOT.

Believe me, there are a lot of things wrong with my current job. I've recounted some of the challenges in these pages but what I've described are problems endemic to just being a flatbed truck driver; like having irregular and often long hours, working out in the elements, rain snow or heat wave, and having to deal with traffic. There are many flaws with the company itself, and not all of them trivial; things like bounced pay checks, expensive and poor insurance, inconsistent expectations, and logistical choices that make the job harder, not easier. Oh, I've got a good one, though it is trivial: The yard is across the street from the sewage treatment plant. I don't usually spend a whole lot of time there, but I know it when I do! Welcome home.

There were some good things about the job too, and I've recounted some of those here. Things like driving around Southern Indiana, meeting the people at the quarries and the mills, as well as other places, and keeping active climbing up and down on the trailer, throwing straps and chains and pulling tarps. But the main reason that I stayed with this job was the weekend. I have enjoyed having both Saturday and Sunday completely off. That's rare in a driving job.

And then I discoverd what they'd been doing for the last five years. I took them at their word but something happened that made me investigate and what I found out was that, to make a long story short, they'd been lying to me and cheating me, and everyone in management was aware and complicit. Oh, it's been hard to show up and work for those people these last few months. Afraid that I'd expose them they gave me $4,000 back pay, but that only covers two of the five years. Still, they must think I'm down with it because I really don't know any other way to do my job than well. Then there's the customers who don't deserve a disgruntled employee treating their freight lightly, and of course the safety issue, it's important that the loads I pick up for the other drivers are adequately secured. But I didn't want to start another job somewhere else just to quit in the spring, so I've stuck it out.

It's over now though, if I can just make it through Friday! Light at the end of the tunnel. I'm taking a couple of weeks off and then starting my new job. I'll be starting at the same rate of pay that I now enjoy (not really that great by industry standards for drivers, but I lose nothing), will have a regular schedule working 4 tens and a half day on Friday. Overtime every week and a good start on the weekend. Both Saturday and Sunday off still, I won't have to work out in the elements, and won't have to do crazy stupid stuff like climb around on an uneven load covered with slippery plastic while I try to pull tarps in the wind. The only downside that I can see right now is that it will be boring, a line job, repetative. There are challenges with every job, of course, that's why they call it work.

I'll let you know how it goes.

 

Groundhog Day

 

I was around Switz City on my way to Linton this morning, at about 8:30, when I saw the great Sandhill Crane migration. There were thousands of them! They were in V formations the apex of which was the side of another, that connected to another on and on, cascading across the sky. And their lines were fluid, not straight, but wavering, sometimes breaking up and forming a new V. The best part was how the sun would catch the bright underside of their wings on the upstroke creating a flash of white, setting the whole sky sparkling.

It's not like they filled the sky like they talk about what used to happen in the pre-industrial world. I could see them in the distance and watched as I approached, but I could not see the beginning nor the end of the column. They stretched from horizon to horizon. I should have looked at the odometer while I was under them to see how wide the column was. It was at least a mile, I'm sure. I rolled my window down but was disappointed that I couldn't hear their distinctive trilling over the roar of the wind and my engine.

When I got to my delivery at Bender Lumber in Linton the workers there confirmed that it was the Sandhill Cranes. "They've been around here for about a week," I was told. I don't think they're going to be around there any longer. An hour later, on my way back toward Bloomington they were still passing over, going north. This was a lesser column though, I could see the apex of this group, though I still couldn't see its tail.

It seems a little early for them to be heading north, but then what do I know. Did the groundhog see its shadow today?

 

Eminent Domain

 

As much as I was against the construction of a new terrain highway across Southwestern Indiana I have to admit that after delivering a load in Evansville at 5:00 PM, their time, it sure is nice being able to jump on a super highway and cruise back to the yard. The same was true during our recent trip to Texas. We drove straight through on the return. I shudder to think of those last 100 miles over small highways, tired and stiff. And in the morning on my way to work it's grand to have no stoplights to contend with.

It's a pleasant ride too. Well, in town there's the stress of traffic and merging vehicles (I've got some words on that), but the segment from Bloomington to US 231 is gorgeous. The hills of Southern Indiana clothed in trees and spotted with barns and houses. In one stretch of about five miles there is nothing visible except forest; not a road, not a building of any kind, not even a telephone pole or communication tower. It's beautiful, exhilarating, until you remember that this isn't a picture show, that where you are driving, that very spot was until recently forest too. The two sides were one uninterrupted wild space. Do we even know the consequences of disrupting that contiguity, with so little of our forest land left?

The break is a quarter of a mile wide, bulldozed and steamrolled; take off the hilltops and fill in the valleys. When the road was under construction, the trees removed but the grading not yet started, I couldn't see it. Where IN 45 crossed the barren place the hills to the west were too jumbled. How, I wondered, could a highway be put there? They did it, of course. All that is left of that complex geography is the butt ends of the hills leaning back at a lazy angle from the right of way; one big hump on one side, three smaller ones on the other.

Yup, they had fun with their heavy equipment. I sometimes wonder if that wasn't the point, for them. Harmony Road crosses the highway over a bridge that's a hundred feet high, if it's an inch (actual height: 92 feet). The highway climbs toward it, levels off, declines a little before passing under then begins to climb again. I'm not an engineer, have no idea what exigency may have dictated the shape of the present road, but couldn't they have kept a smooth arc, perhaps at a slightly steeper grade, and built a smaller bridge? Maybe they were just playing around with our tax dollars. One thing's for certain: I don't want to be on that overpass during an earthquake.

Nor is it a smooth ride. In this day in age you'd think they'd know how to make the road surface meet the level of the bridges. Apparently not. There was a jarring bump at each crossing, sometimes so severe that it could cause vehicle damage. Over time they've mitigated this effect either by adding pavement, shaving pavement off or both. These efforts have had varying degrees of success. There's one crossing that I still brace myself for to this day.

Oh, I could go on and on, landslides on the shoulder, collapsed coal mine underneath the road, but I fear that I'm merely bitching again. One last consequence of the highway that I want to mention though; what it has taken from me, personally. It's amazing, really, how much industry there is in the Southern Indiana hills: Quarries, stone mills, saw mills, manufacturing of wood products, the Amish and their enterprising endeavors. I spend a lot of time in some beautiful and remote areas. I'd need to get to them via small Indiana highways, winding through the hills. When I was an over the road driver I hated the small highways, they were so much slower and harder to negotiate while I got paid the same as if I'd breezed in on the freeway. Now I get paid by the hour and it's the interstates that I hate, all that jockeying for position among the big trucks and the four wheelers whipping in and out. On the small highways I get to see the countryside, intimate with the passing year. It was on one such small highway that I had my peak experience. Now, however, I just jump on I 69 for the majority of those trips.

 

Love in the Time of Covid 19

 

Howdy ho you random reader. I'm sure that I have no dedicated following anymore, after my long absences. Blogging used to be my lifeline to sanity, when I was an over the road trucker. I had designed my own webpage back then, as my ISP only offered unstructured space as a home page. It was entitled The Reluctant Trucker. I only became a driver because I needed a job, not for any romantic notion of the open road. When I came in off the road I changed my ISP but didn't like the format of the pre-structured homepage that Comcast offered, so I came over here to blogspot. I was still driving a truck, but instead of moving randomly around the Lower 48 and Canada I reported each day to the same location; my recurring nightmare.

I'm pretty much down with it now, it's not such a nightmare anymore, going into work. There are still aspects of the job that are hellish, to be sure, but overall it's not bad, even sometimes enjoyable. I've got to keep my guard up though, it is precisely when a driver gets comfortable behind the wheel that he is most at risk. We all know that the nightmare could return in less than a second.

So, I find myself with some time on my hands, what with Indiana's stay at home order. I've often contemplated checking in here, but the times I do have grown farther and farther apart, and yet the site remains; so here I am. What, working from home? Not possible, I'm a truck driver, remember? In fact transportation is considered essential and my company is still operating. With Indiana's lax restrictions most businesses other than restaurants are still open too, business as usual. After all, they are each essential unto themselves, right? There's plenty of work for me to do.

No, my isolation is voluntary. I was wondering what the stay at home order was going to mean for my job when I was handed a sheet of paper declaring that I was part of the "Essential Team" of Stone Belt Freight Lines; a development I met with mixed emotions. On the one hand I can little afford to be out of work, on the other I doubt that public health officials are trashing the world economy for nothing, shouldn't we all be doing our part? Still conflicted the day before the stay at home order was to start I was sitting in a line of trucks waiting to be loaded. I had my window down playing solitaire when a guy jumps up onto the step of my truck. He didn't actually put his head through the window, thank goodness, but was well within the six feet of social distancing. He said, "Sorry it's taking so long but we've got four loaders out sick."

Great, so what the f**k are you breathing on me for? I was pissed. I called my boss and told him what had just happened and went on record that I thought what we were doing, continuing to operate as if nothing was out of the ordinary, was wrong. He said that if I didn't want to do it I didn't have to, I could just leave, hang up my keys and let them know when I was ready to come back to work. Taken aback I told him I'd complete this load, delivering to Indianapolis in the morning, and then let him know my decision. I knew I could just quit, I didn't expect to be given a choice in the matter. Could I afford not to take work that was available? Not easily. Was it the right thing to do. Almost certainly, with the only caveat that if too few of us sacrificed would it make a difference? A lame excuse at best.

I probably would have made the same decision in the end, even without this incident. Despite the fact that I rarely get sick and haven't, knock on wood, had the flu in over twenty years the risk remains to be an unwitting carrier with no sign of the illness. And, being a driver the potential is there to not only spread the disease within a community, but to transport it between communities. If what I were doing was essential I'd be all in. I'd be the man for the job. Like I say I don't usually get sick. The work ethic at my company is that when you're sick you work through it. I've been in a room full of sick people without the protection of a flu shot and came out unscathed. On the other hand if I did contract the disease I'm pretty healthy, I'd most likely survive it. But I don't feel that what I do is really essential. I can't in good conscience take the risk to others more vulnerable and the public health system's capacity.

So here I am with a little time on my hands. There's plenty to do around the house, to be sure, but I've been wanting to check in here. I promise that before this is over I'll come back with some more updates on my life and work.

 

Preemptive Retraction

 

Oh, I get a kick out of my post titles sometimes. I wrote a post recently titled Insult to Injury. It was an appropriate title since the post dealt with the Department of Transportation's lack of concern for the motoring public, strangling traffic with closed lanes yet no work being done for weeks at a time. When I reviewed it before publishing I realized that I was merely complaining. I was reminded of the rule that I had back in the day, when I used to write all the time: I could complain, but only if the gripe was presented as somehow interesting or amusing. This was just a bitch fest.

So how is the I 69 construction shaping up? A year later and they're still not finished. INDOT swears they'll be finished soon. They said that the joke around the office is that it'll be done by August 32nd. I'm sorry, but at two years behind schedule I don't find that amusing.

 

Gorgeous Days

 

We haven't had any. Well, about three nice days in the spring. Winter held on tenaciously then gave way immediately to summer with the warmest May on record. June was like July usually is and the heat shows no sign of relenting. One can only wonder what August will be like.

The good news is that we've had rain. The trees and fields are lush and green. Despite the heat it remains the glorious height of the year.

Keep it groovy.

 

Late Spring

 

It's the middle of April and winter just won't let go. We've had a few nice days but mostly it's been cold. Usually by this time the redbuds have bloomed and the trees are beginning to bud but all of the vegetative world is united in holding onto its winter sleep.

The snow was flying today, horizontal in a brutal wind. And yet, as bad as it was there was a change, a sign of hope. On the way back north in early afternoon I saw my first redbud tree, and after that I noticed a tree that was beginning to bud, and then another and another. I would have noticed if they had been budding on the way down. The awakening has begun! The plants know.