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.