Flatbed Heaven

 

There’s a consensus among flatbed drivers that if you’re not one of them then you’re not a real trucker. I wouldn’t go that far, but flatbedders do have their own little club. You see, they don’t get paid anything extra, but have to work a lot harder. With a van trailer in general all you do once you’re loaded is close the doors and head down the road. With a flatbed, on the other hand, once the load has been placed it needs to be secured to the truck with straps or chains, and sometimes braced as well. Then there are a whole host of specialty items like corner protectors, brick racks, and v-channels for use with different kinds of loads. Once the load is secure if the cargo is at all weather sensitive the whole thing needs to be covered with huge cumbersome tarps that sometimes weigh as much as 100 lbs. each.

Then there is the safety angle, climbing around ten feet off the ground on some precarious load trying to get your corner protectors placed and the tarps rolled out. Now think about doing all that in a snow storm, with frozen tarps! J.B. Hunt was so overly safety conscious they made us review how to get into and out of the truck with the three point contact method at least once a year. I can’t imagine how they’d deal with the requirements of a flat bed.

Yeah, flatbedders have their own little club and like to think they’re special. They deserve our respect but they aren’t special; more like stupid, or crazy if you ask me; and now I’m one of them. That’s what I’ve been doing these days, driving a flat bed truck along with all its attendant processes.

I was tarping a load of concrete board. (Hey, don’t ask me. The stuff is made to side houses and resist the weather, it is stored out doors at the plant and comes in bundles covered with the same kind of reinforced nylon cozy as a lot of lumber ships in, but they make us tarp it anyway, every load.) I struck up a conversation with a guy tarping his load next to me. I said I was new to this flatbedding stuff and that I didn’t really like it. He said that he did, that he’d been doing it for a decade and wouldn’t do anything else.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Docks,” was his reply, “I haven’t had to mess with a dock in ten years.”

I didn’t say anything but thought, “What’s wrong with docks?” Then it dawned on me, “Oh, you can’t back a truck!”

It’s true that most flatbed loading is done “pull through,” but it’s not true that a flat bed never has to back. In fact I’ve had to do quite a bit of backing in my short career flatbedding, which presents another challenge. All of our trailers have “split axles,” which means that the wheels are in two groups of four separated by about ten feet instead of all being grouped together like they are on a van trailer. This distributes the weight over a larger area allowing for heavier loads. Whereas the law allows 34,000 lbs on conventional tandems it allows 40,000 lbs on split axles. But they don’t react the same when backing. The individual axles arc at their own rate, fighting against each other. Trying to simply “split the difference” doesn’t work either. I can’t articulate the differential ratio that works, but I’m getting an intuitive grasp of it.

I suppose you’d classify the company that I work for as medium sized? They’re not a mom and pop outfit, but they’re certainly not large. It’s too big for everybody to know everybody else, but the management know everybody. Given time a driver like me might have met, or at least heard about a large percentage of the other drivers, though I’m a long way from that right now. Sometimes in the afternoon I’ll come back to the yard and find the visiting wife of some driver in the office, with children in tow, or, especially on Fridays the children of the office workers. On my first day there as a driver, while I was out with Chris learning how to strap loads down there was a massive company barbecue that I got paid to attend.

They’re all great people too, and real characters, some of them. Not that a name makes a character but how about these for the first names of a few small town outfit employees: We’ve got a Herk, a Thor, and until very recently a Rafael. There’s more than one Steve, but that goes without saying...

But I’m getting way ahead of myself, I’m starting to tell you good things about this nightmare. What I wanted to convey is that this is a small outfit. They try, but just don’t have the budget to play like the big boys. I used to say that J.B. Hunt took better care of their equipment than they did their drivers. It’s safe to say that the opposite is true here at Stonebelt. Not that Stonebelt doesn’t take care of its equipment. They have their own shop, and a good maintenance program, but let’s face it, they have to make do.

As an hourly, and at first just occasional driver I get put into whatever truck is available on any given day. One truck that is available a lot is an old daycab, truck #87, ragged but still kicking. One problem is that the AC doesn’t work. No, not only that, the heat can’t be turned off. You can choose whether it will mainly come out of the floor board or the defroster but it always seems to seep from the dash.

This was in the early summer, when it was still bearable. They moved me to another truck and guess what, the AC didn’t work in that truck either, though that only started when I got into it. I know that’s true because I talked to the former driver. After that, when it got really bad, during the heat wave of 2012, I was in several different trucks whose air conditioning did work, at varying degrees of proficiency. I was certain that they’d retired that old day cab but later came to find out that some veteran driver nicknamed “The Admiral,” was piloting it daily.

Early on I was told by my friends that I should complain, that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I could see the economic motive of it though, while grateful for the loosely defined employment, so I kept my peace and endured. And now; now that I’m back in 87, what can I possibly say after The Admiral suffered the worst of it? Originally I’d thought, “What dummy would put up with that?” But he’s no dummy. It was The Admiral who taught me how to throw straps without having them twist, shortening the strapping process, and he’s a reader. He leaves his books sometimes: Zane Grey and other Western writers, and an occasional mystery.

See, that’s a problem with this digital age: Most of my books are on my Kindle, accessible over my smart phone. I can’t leave a book lying around by accident for someone else to chance upon. If I did the finder wouldn’t know it.

I don’t have the time, nor any idea where to look in the old archives about the summer that I followed US 90 across Texas all the way from Brownsville to California. Somewhere after the Rio Grande had dipped south toward Big Bend my AC went out. It was a holiday weekend too, so there wasn’t much chance of getting it repaired. In retrospect I probably should have whined and complained and had them put me up in a hotel room until it was fixed. Think of the Senoritas I might have known! But I soldiered on and delivered on time. The heat warped my brain though, and I found myself making silly mistakes. I thought, “This is really a safety issue.”

In conversation once, who knows where or when but I thought my partner knowledgeable enough to hazard a guess; perhaps he was a college professor, or just another migrant like me, but I asked, “How did they do it in the old days, before AC?”

His answer was, “They were acclimated.” Duh!

So even Thor, the driver trainer for Stonebelt thinks I’m crazy for continuing to drive like this. “That’s a safety issue,” he said. I agree, but you know what, I’m acclimated. It’s still bad, but not as bad as it would be for someone else coming in cold, so to speak. It still sucks, and I think I will say something at some point, but think of the brownie points I get from a company that lets me come and go as I please to begin with.

But that’s disingenuous. I’ve taken to saying, “I’ve got a Class A license with a good driving and work record, with Haz-Mat, Doubles and Tanker endorsements. Why don’t I go find a better paying job, with benefits, where the equipment isn’t so sketchy and I don’t have to do all of this dirty extra work strapping and tarping loads?”

So keep that in mind for future posts but to end this one I just have to wonder; am I so stupid, or are you all just Postmodern Wimps? You're none of you Flatbedders, that's for sure.

 

Charmed Life

 

So what have I been up to all this time? Weeeell...

After I quit my job I took a little more than a month off using my savings to maintain my lifestyle and keep my bills current. Oh, I made concessions, but I must say I enjoyed myself too. After all I knew that I could always get a job driving for somebody if push came to shove.

A friend of mine was going to build a house if the client could get financing. It was going to be a big project and he would need another laborer, beyond his usual crew. I was holding out for that. I’d been doing some temp work in a machine shop over in Bloomfield but that wasn’t enough, and I found it as difficult to get to work there as to drive to Indianapolis, though they wanted to hire me permanent. I live a charmed life and true to form the bank came through just as my finances were getting critical.

So I spent a couple of months building a house out of insulating concrete forms. It was sweet. We were working on a hilltop north of Ellettsville out of sight of the road. I could get to work in 20 minutes through the Beanblossom Valley, having only to cross the Brutal Highway, but never going into town. It was springtime!

The work was hard, but refreshing because of it. It’s good to know that I can still do the heavy lifting when I need to. It’s good, too, to be a part of something that takes shape from the ground up. It’s a beautiful house, and big; two stories and a basement. My favorite room is the sun room. Unfortunately if faces north, but with the R-factor of the construction that isn’t such an issue. It sits atop the open end of the basement, which is dug into the hill and with windows on three sides overlooks the woods. I’m sure the owners are going to be spending a lot of time in there.

And what a crew we had. The contractor and lead carpenter are old hippies; another laborer is a young (in his 40‘s) intellectual, and then there was my next door neighbor John, a contractor in his own right and a true Brown County Hoosier. Steve, the contractor was always saying what a diverse, interesting crew we made. He took pleasure in it and so did I.

It’s far too long a story to go into how John ended up working with Steve and being my next door neighbor. We needed something to differentiate me from Steve so I became “Neighbor Steve.” There are a lot of Steves in the circles I run in. I’ve been “Trucker Steve” for a long time. I never even found a suitable handle for the CB but I finally had an appellation I could feel comfortable with. I was Neighbor Steve.

And this too shall pass. I had hoped that the one job would lead to more, and it would have except Steve doesn’t have any jobs big enough to need the extra hand. He has work for me, but it’s not steady and he doesn’t know ahead of time when he’s going to need me. The problem is that we’re all too old. Steve’s got his Spray Foam Insulation gig and other investments so that the contracting is almost a hobby; and Cliff, the lead carpenter, has his turkeys and his goats. Me? Hell, It’s too late for me to resume my construction career at 54. Besides, the work is seasonal. I was laid off from construction when I answered that add in the paper that said, “Learn to Drive a Truck,” oh those many years ago.

Andrew delivers for Bender Lumber, where we got our materials for the job (other than the ICF forms themselves which came in on a Big Truck, but that’s another story...). Everybody knew Andrew and the first time he delivered to the construction sight I was introduced to him as a driver. Andrew holds a class A license too, but like me wants to go home at night. He still drives occasionally for a local company. He said I should check it out. He said you can call them up cold and they’ll find something for you to do. “Yeah right,” I said to myself, but I checked it out and so what began as a fallback gig for rain days has become my bread and butter. That’s right, I’m “Trucker Steve” again.

Before I give you the general outlines of what I’m doing (the detail is for posts to come) let’s get in the Wayback Machine. Listen to the bells and whistles as I set the dials for, circa 2004...

I listen to Public Radio; NPR mostly but Pacifica when I can get it, and my first choice Community, when I can find it. Never mind the French only stations on AM in bayou country, it’s really just about NPR. I’ve always been one of those guys that Ira Glass would love to shame: a listener but not a supporter. I’d given before, but not consistently, and my finances were always in a mess. Well, those were sort of sorted out. I mean; I could afford a Manhattan apartment (when the boy was in school), surely I could give to public radio, right?

Pledge week becomes pledge month on the road, as different stations schedule their fund drives at different times (think about the logistics of programming at NPR that allows them to do that). Just pray there’s more than one NPR outlet in your current market, they never overlap fund drives hoping to draw listeners. In any case it’s a guilty bother, but how can I possibly support every station I listen to? “Call now and your pledge will be doubled!”

I happened to be passing through Terra Haute, IN during pledge month. The NPR feed there comes through a translator from WFIU, from my home town of Bloomington. I pulled over on the shoulder of the interstate. “I can’t support every station I listen to but I can support my home town station,” I thought. Thus began a practice that continued until I got the gig in Plainfield and I started listening to WFYI all the time. Then my finances collapsed because I quit my job, for reasons elsewhere enumerated, and now I’m being hounded by three public radio stations because I’d once contributed to Chicago’s just to get a DVD of This American Life’s TV attempt; along with pleas from all of the other good causes I’ve made the mistake of supporting when I thought I could along the way, and all of the other good causes that those good causes have sold my name to.

There’s plenty of money. I heard a story just yesterday about a kid who died but started a web campaign to give $500 dollar tips to waitresses. Money came in from middle class folks, and wealthy folks, and maybe more than a few service industry personnel from all over the world. They’ve been able to give over one hundred $500 tips to not only waitresses but waiters and cab drivers as well. Buckminster Fuller was right, there is enough wealth to go around. Somebody should tell Mitt Romney.

But I digress, and grow political, which is far more dangerous! Forgive me, the point was that Ted answered the phone to take my pledge. I told him how I was an over the road driver missing my home and he told me that he was the head honcho at a trucking company right there in beautiful Bloomington Indiana, volunteering his time for public radio, and that I should get in touch with him when I came back. It’s been a long circuitous route, but I’m working for Ted now.

It is a symptom of my “charmed life,” but no less a nightmare...

 

Wake Up Call

 

The alarm is such a rude awakening, I prefer to wake before it gashes my slumber. I’ve got a really good internal clock. It’s set on eastern time but that’s OK, so is Indiana. When I was over the road I used to have to extrapolate from whatever time zone I was in and then set the alarm just in case, though I rarely needed it.

The other morning I awoke and looked at the clock. “Half an hour before the alarm, should I go back to sleep...” I spontaneously threw back the covers and pivoted to a sitting position on the edge of the bed, sat there for a few secs rubbing my eyes, then reached for the lamp. I love it when my body makes these decisions so that I don’t have to.

It seemed a dark and quiet morning. I didn’t think anything of it until I was putting my boots on and telling the kitty that I was sorry to leave her, but it was time to go. I checked the clock. I was an hour early! Sweet for me! I was awake, well rested and I never want to leave home anyway.

I sometimes wonder; if I won the lottery would I really travel the world or just stay at home?

Well, just the other day I awoke minutes before the alarm went off, the more usual scenario. When I got up it seemed a dark and quiet morning so I double checked the time. All was in order. I continued about my routine. Shortly the birds began to chirp, taking up their daily chorus, as the eastern sky paled. “Of course,” I thought, “we’re sliding toward Winter.” And so it goes, and so it goes.

Dear Readers, I must apologize, not just that I have left you for so long, but more because I have left you no jewels, only sand. I reread what I’d written of late and thought, “Who the hell is that dude? What a bummer!” I've never made it a secret that I am susceptible to depression, that's just a fact of life. I contend that we all reside somewhere on a spectrum of bi-polar order. Then again, given the state of the world and the environment a thoughtful person might conclude that depression was an appropriate response. Be that as it may I never intended to share that aspect of myself directly, but only inasmuch as it colors whatever else I have to say. And above all I hope to say something interesting! I've deleted the most offensive passages.

Now, where was I?...