Moon Shadow

 

Moon shadows, long and dark across the snow; the branches of the forest all intertwined. Enough light not to stub my toe before ever I flipped a switch. I flipped it off again. The snow crunches underfoot. The Morning Star watches me as I make my way to work. It's cold, but the White River is still liquid; a negative image.

A young friend wants me to post some drawings here. It's not much, but this is something I've been playing with lately:

 

 

 

 

 

Hammer Down

 

Heading east on I 70 the other morning I got behind a slow poke. I waited with my turn signal flashing till there was a break in the traffic, then jumped into the hammer lane, downshifted, floored the accelerator, and went nowhere. I gained speed slowly and passed the obstruction but by that time I had a whole line of impatient, pissed off vehicles behind me. They let me know it too, as they came around me with their engines roaring and cut in way too close for their safety, forcing me to back off on the gas as I was still trying to gain speed. Get used to it people, trucks are going to piss you off more than they ever have before. It wasn't my old truck pushing 400,000 miles breaking down, you see; I was in a brand new 2011 EPA certified “smart truck” with great fuel economy, minimal emissions and no power. In classic double speak the engine is called a “Torque-max,” as in, “there's no torque, it's maxed out.”

Leave it to me to complain about getting a new truck, right? I'm not really, I'm just telling you about it in as colorful a way as I can, and the above incident is how I learned about the capabilities of my new ride. I needed a new truck. I've recently had several nightmare scenarios not due explicitly to the mechanical failure of that old truck, but certainly exacerbated thereby. Whew, I got rid of that old thing in the nick of time! And I'm all for the fuel economy and reduced emissions, believe me. I don't even want to drive a truck in the first place, but I need a job. The new truck is way welcome and besides my comfort level increasing I have much better visibility now, and the turning radius is shorter. I've survived some of our tighter customers in that old behemoth; I be cruising in style now. I thought about hanging some fuzzy dice off of the Prepass (a transponder that sits where a rear view would be if a truck had one).

 

Happy New Year!

 

It worked! The sun went away so you all plugged in a lot of lights to shine in the early darkness and have called the sun back. It really worked, the days are getting longer already. I'll be damned.

I really just wanted to be sure and post something on 1/1/11. My Finnish friends have a web hotel to keep in touch. Each post shows the time here, and the time there. I posted a New Years greeting at 00:00 EST. I know, I had a whole minute to do it, but as I wasn't watching the ball drop, or have anything more obtrusive than the kitchen clock to tell me what time it was I think I did pretty good. I forgot all about it, in fact and had to scramble at the last second, drunk as I was. So anyway...which year was it that I sent that greeting?

Danielle said that she was talking to her mom this afternoon and looked at the clock. It was 1:11.

Spooky.

2011? Cool. I'm going to party like it's 2012.

 

St-St-St---Stress

 

Driving is stressful, there can be no doubt, driving a big truck more so. One of Company's training modules states that a driver's blood pressure goes up just getting behind the wheel of a truck. I don't know the validity of that claim, but I can believe it. What toll is this taking on my long term health? Say Levine, I don't have the luxury of worrying about it.

Driving a big truck in the snow is exponentially more stressful yet. I recently woke up in the morning from an endless round of restless driving dreams and realized that I'd been stressing because snow was predicted for that day. Another time, even more recently, I woke up in the middle of the night thoroughly stressed for the same reason. On top of the fact that it was forecast to snow heavily my first stop of the day was at the customer where I couldn't get traction to get out of their parking lot last year and had to be pulled out. Being early I didn't expect that they'd have plowed yet. Fun and games to look forward to! I couldn't get back to sleep. I tensed my body, shaking, and screamed, venting steam. The cat, who sleeps at the foot of the bed took off lickity-split and didn't came back.

So what happened? The day was a nightmare, but not because I had to be towed out of that lot. I never even made it there. In fact I never made it past the gate at Electrolux. I dropped the trailer. It slid right off the back of my tractor and landed with one foot on the pavement and the other on the grass, smack in the middle of the exit lane. I'm just glad that it fell off there, before I'd gotten onto the street.

The load was light but still the landing gear wouldn't work to raise it. The warehouse manager said that if it weren't snowing he could bring a forklift out to take some of the pressure off the legs so that I could lower them, but as it was there was nothing that he could do. I had no choice but to call it in and get a tow truck to come out and help me, which meant that I'd also have to jump through all the hoops that Company would require of me.

I'd done my safety check. I'd pulled on that sucker hard doing the tug test and I'd looked to make sure that the release arm for the fifth wheel was retracted. I'd even driven from the back of the lot up to the gate with no problem. Still it was my fault, I must admit. I'd done my safety check, but not quite a thorough one. You see, you're supposed to get up underneath the trailer and shine a light into the jaws of the fifth wheel to inspect the actual locking mechanism. It's something that practically nobody does. I'd done it for years and finally decided that if the release lever was retracted then the lock must be in place, no need to contort my body and run the risk of getting grease all over myself. Yet I'd been warned, had I not (see Culpability below)! I should have done the extra step, and believe you me I will from now on!

Company wouldn't let me hook back to the trailer until I'd had the fifth wheel inspected. I took off in the snow heading for the International dealer even before the tow truck arrived. The guy at the service desk there said they'd “work me in” and that I should have a seat in the driver's lounge. Fortunately I had a book with me and no other drivers showed up to turn on the TV for quite awhile. Seven hours later they called my name.

I was hoping that they'd find something wrong with the fifth wheel. I mean, there must be something wrong with it, right? If there was an obvious problem then I'd be off the hook. They didn't find anything wrong with it.

The bill there at the shop was $150.00. The tow truck was probably at least as much again. Fortunately there was nothing wrong with the trailer itself so there was no expense there. I felt responsible, I felt like I should pay. I was trying to decide how much I wanted them to take out of my check each week when my supervisor called to tell me that I'd been charged with a preventable collision and that I was on probation for six months. Preventable, yes, but a collision? No one was hurt, no equipment was damaged. This wouldn't go on my license, but it would go on my DAC report and might jeopardize my ability to get another driving job. In light of my long service and near spotless safety record I thought that a little harsh. “So to hell with them,” I decided, “let them pay for it. They can write it off on their taxes anyway as an operating expense.”

I also had to do several on-line training modules and be “instructed” by my supervisor, a guy who's never driven a truck before in his life, on how to properly connect to a trailer. It was humiliating, but Jeff's a nice guy and didn't try to lecture me, but only had me go through the steps while he watched. It was just something that Company required him to do as well.

So what did happen, why did my trailer fall off the tractor? I don't know, it remains a mystery. The official reason was that I was “high hooked,” something that cannot be the explanation. In that earlier post, Culpability, I describe how the trailers there at Electrolux are often high and I always lower them before hooking. Could the locking mechanism have already been closed before I backed under the trailer? Possibly. A part of relying solely on the release arm being retracted as an indication that the locking mechanism is engaged is that I always check, while lowering the trailer, that the release arm is extended to begin with. I might have inadvertently missed that step, what with the snow and all. But then why didn't that become apparent when I did the tug test, and how did I drag the trailer all the way from the back of the lot up to the exit gate?

We'll never know, but a 30 year veteran driver I met in the driver's lounge there at International offered a possible explanation. He said that if too much grease builds up in the fifth wheel then it can become viscid in the cold and prevent the fifth wheel jaws from closing completely. You can do the tug test and you can pull the trailer and everything seems fine but in actuality the jaws are creeping back open under the continued pressure. It sounds like a reasonable explanation to me, though it fails to explain why I almost lost a trailer that earlier time which was during the prolonged Indian Summer, before the cold hit.

I'm gun shy now. I check the fifth wheel incessantly and still I'm afraid to pull out. I wonder, would I have noticed anything wrong had I done the visual test that morning? I don't know, I certainly wouldn't have been as diligent as I now am trying to detect any slight opening in the fifth wheel jaws. And I have to wonder if there isn't some fault in my fifth wheel that International didn't detect. Is this going to happen again, regardless of my renewed diligence? Will we finally find out what actually happened when it fails again, with possibly fatal consequences? I'd rather it remain a mystery.

Another thing that I have to wonder is why oh why am I so fucking devoted to my job? The roads were terrible that day. Every other driver on my account called off that morning due to the weather, which was fine by Company. But not me, no. Like the damn Post Master General I felt I had to do my appointed rounds, regardless of the toll it might take on me or others. Maybe it's time for a career change. Does anyone know of a less stressful job I can do that will let me pay my bills? No? Perhaps I'll become an Artist.

 

A River Runs Through It

 

Mississinewa, Salamonie, Eel, Tippecanoe, Vermillion, Sugar, Big Raccoon; further downstream the Embarras, White, Patoka, and Little Wabash: these are the major tributaries to the Wabash River, before she flows into the Ohio. Her channel defines Indiana's southwestern border and her watershed covers most of the state. No wonder On the Banks of the Wabash is the Indiana state song:

Round my Indiana homestead wave the cornfields,
In the distance loom the woodlands clear and cool.
Oftentimes my thoughts revert to scenes of childhood,
Where I first received my lessons, nature's school...

Oh, the moonlight's fair tonight along the Wabash,
From the fields there comes the breath of newmown hay.
Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming,
On the banks of the Wabash, far away.

I hadn't realized that all these rivers are one, I just enjoyed crossing them, upstream or down. In the far southwest the valley is so wide you don't even know that you're in one, but upriver the gentle hills along the watercourse are extraordinarily picturesque, like being inside a Currier and Ives print from yesterday. I became interested because when going through Logansport on IN 25 you cross the Wabash twice, or so I thought. I looked at the map and realized that you only cross the Wabash once and then cross the Eel just upstream of their confluence. Looking further I saw how all these little rivers flow together. I wanted to tell you how pretty they are so I did a little research which proved quite interesting.

Rivers; who can tell which is which? According to Wikipedia the early French maps had the Ohio as a tributary to the Wabash. It was a trade route thing. I thought the same thing when I looked at a map of Pittsburgh. “The Allegheny should be the Ohio.” It extends way further at divided highway status on the map while what is labeled the Ohio takes a tight turn and dies. But who am I?

When driving I like the signs that tell me what body of water I'm passing over. Crossing the NY Southern Tier on Interstate 86 one traverses the Seneca Nation. Bridges over the Allegheny there have signs that read Ohi? Yo. So I was right after all. (the question mark stands in for a glottal stop, which I couldn't find a code for)

The Wabash is a blessing to Indiana, hard won, apparently. Illinois and Ohio, her immediate neighbors, have beautiful rivers of their own, but not with such an articulated system. They are mostly flat, broken only periodically, while Indiana is graced with extensive gentle hills, covered in hardwood, even in the glacial north of the state. Again according to Wikipedia the Wabash Valley was created when a massive proto Lake Erie (Lake Maumee), filled with glacial melt broke through a pile of rocks that Papa Glacier had shoved there. Cataclysm (the Maumee Torrent)! And hence our serene valley.

And it is pretty. The Wabash Valley is a blessing to me, that's for sure. I can even take a moments rest from the stress of driving in the snow to appreciate how lovely the hills are covered in white. Yes, Indian Summer was long but winter has hit with a vengeance, and shows no sign of letting up anytime soon. I'm sure I'll tell you more about that later.

 

Dual Exhaust

 

And here I thought maybe they were going to cancel winter entirely this year, it's been so warm; as if global warming were a good thing. But no, the first real snow of the season is falling right now (wee hours of Saturday morning). I haven't actually had to scrape frost off the windshield yet but it was cool enough to see your breath late into the morning, this morning (Friday, no snow). I didn't notice, in my heated cab, but I was up in Northern Indiana, near Shipshewana, in Amish country. It was the carriage horses' breath that I found interesting; like twin streams of dragon breath released to the rhythm of a coal fired locomotive gaining steam. Those proud creatures make it look so easy but come to think of it, if I were pulling a ton of conveyance at a trot I'd be breathing heavily too.

 

Culpability

 

A beautiful November morning here at my woodland homestead; foggy. It's easier to be up before dawn on the weekends now that the days are shorter, the nights longer. Then again I went to bed at a reasonable hour last night as well, even though it was Friday night. I was beat. They've been running me ragged at work, the stores I service gearing up for Black Friday. Things should quiet down from here on out, with only the Winter to contend with.

Yesterday morning was interesting. I crawled along looking for my load but none of the company trailers were mine. There was one more at the end of the row that had to be it, but unfortunately a Roehl driver (the name of another trucking company) was backing under a trailer sitting right next to it. That made it difficult as the spacing there at Electrolux is tight. I'd have to back in at an angle so that our mirrors wouldn't clash and I wouldn't be able to pull out until after he left or the tail of my trailer would take the nose of his tractor off.

I was waiting till he got hooked to back under my own trailer. I saw it happening, the white of the halogen yard lights flooded in offset intervals by the flashing amber of our four-ways. The trailer was too high on its landing gear, as they almost always are there. I think they raise them to better accommodate the docks. I back slightly under the nose of the trailer, get out and raise the landing gear and then back all the way up till the locking mechanism in the fifth wheel snaps around the kingpin. Of course I'm there every day and know how it is. But that's something that every driver has to watch out for, every time they hook to a trailer.

If you don't catch it, either by sight or feel as you ease backwards it's usually not a big problem. The fifth wheel bumps the king pin and you know it's not right by the sound, so you do the “tug test” and your suspicions are confirmed. The problem is easily solved by lowering the trailer and trying it again. Sometimes, however, the trailer is so high that the fifth wheel completely passes the kingpin. This is a problem because the back of the fifth wheel springs up so that the leading edge is down, the better to get under and lift a low trailer. Once you’ve gone too far the fifth wheel has to be manually held down somehow (and often the trailer raised which can be especially difficult if the load is heavy) to clear the kingpin again; a dirty greasy job, in tight quarters, and one you want to keep fingers and other body parts well away from.

This is what I saw happening, in the periodic amber flashes. Roehl was going too far. By the time I even thought of grabbing the CB mic to warn him it was too late. I went ahead and very carefully, as he might well be out of his tractor and vulnerable, backed under my trailer, then got out to help.

Long story short: we were successful, of course. It only took about five minutes. Roehl broke his broom handle but oh well, it would have been greasy anyway. All in all it was an easy fix; it's a good thing that the loads there at Electrolux aren't generally heavy.

What happened next is a mystery.

We both went about the business of hooking to our loads. I raised the landing gear, gently backed to click the locking mechanism, then did the tug test where you pull against the kingpin with the trailer brakes still engaged to make sure you're attached. I was very careful throughout since Roehl was out there somewhere doing his inspection and I didn't want to rock the trailer; to frighten or hurt him. During my inspection I noticed that the tandems were too far back (we've talked about this before) so I pulled the pin release lever and waited until I saw that Roehl was in his cab before I pushed the trailer backward, got out to reengage the pins, then gave the rig another little tug to make sure they were locked.

I'm proactive with my paperwork so in a flash I was ready to go, but Roehl was still sitting there. This is what I was afraid of. I was eyeballing the clearance to see if I thought maybe I could make it when Roehl pulled out. “Sweet,” I thought. It wasn't that I was in a hurry exactly, but I didn't have much time to spare and I'd already given some of that away. I started to pull out but something didn't sound or feel right. I wondered if maybe the tandem pins hadn't engaged so I got out to check but they were OK. My sin then was in not being thorough and checking other things that might have been the problem. I tried to pull away again but stopped when there was a loud clang and a jolt to the tractor.

“What the hell!” I yelled, frustrated. It had sounded just as if the tandems had slid all the way to the stops at the end of their rails. “I checked that!” I said as I jumped out of the tractor to see what the hell was happening. The tandems were fine. In fact they were sitting exactly where they were before I tried to pull out, both in relation to the length of the trailer and to where they were positioned in the parking lot. The trailer hadn't moved at all, but my tractor had. The nose of the trailer was completely off of the frame of the tractor sitting on the rubber of the rear drive tires and the air and electrical lines were stretched almost to the breaking point. It could have been a lot worse.

Grrrrr, grumble grumble, work work. Like I say, it could have been a lot worse. It's a damn good thing the loads there at Electrolux aren't heavy. A quarter hour later I was on my way. Roehl was still there, pulled off to the side. He'd been kind to get out of my way and now he must have been deliberating over his route or log book or something. I got on the CB to ask if he'd seen what had happened to me but he didn't have it on; so it wouldn't have helped even if I'd tried to warn him of his immanent danger earlier. Oh well, I thought it somehow interesting that we'd both had kingpin troubles but while I wasn't in a hurry before I was now. I did the (within reason) aggressive driving thing and made my first stop in the nick of Electrolux's guillotine time.

How does that happen? I was so careful! Was I too careful? Was I so concerned about that other driver out there that I didn't actually do the tug test, but put it off till later, then forgot that I had? A visual test is standard as well, didn't I do that, in the confusion of the moment? Then what about when I set the tandem pins? I had originally pushed the trailer too far backward for my preferences so I know that I would have pulled forward to test the setting, another definite tug. How in Goddess's name do I protect myself from the inexplicable?

I'm loath to admit it but I make quite a few mistakes. Most are inconsequential, minor errors of etiquette or operational complacency, though even those are potentially dangerous. Maybe if men were meant to move goods they'd have been given horses. I'd have joined the Teamsters if Reagan hadn't deregulated transportation. But I digress.

Most mistakes that become apparent I can definitively account for, and promise myself to do better. This one I can't. There's another event that scares me even deeper that I'm unsure of. It happened in relation to an experience that I've shared, but haven't yet found on the blog here to link to. I was in central St. Louis doing a side run for the Aurora account. I was turning left in afternoon traffic when I saw that the signal turned yellow. I'd waited through the entire light with nary a break so I was just thinking of getting out of everybody's way and started to go but the nearest oncoming car didn't yield. I stopped and let him pass then popped the clutch get it done but the next car coming down the pike was still moving like it was a green light. There was a moment of confusion but I was already committed. She followed me down the next road and made it certain that I knew her displeasure.

What the hell? The light was yellow, wasn't it? It was an odd intersection, remnant of a time before the internal combustion engine, but how odd could it be that a left turn lane would get a red light with a green for the oncoming traffic? The best I can figure is that I imagined that the light had turned yellow. Can I trust my own senses? If man was meant to move he'd have been given two legs. At least I'll know now to double check the light with a glance the next time the oncoming traffic refuses to yield when I think they ought.