Truckers -- My Frienemies

Driving in America means sharing the road with truckers.  Big ones.  Tall ones.  Single trailer.  Double trailer.  Trucks and their drivers seem to own the road these days.  Before my solo road trip last spring, I confess truckers triggered only negative emotions in me.  Disgust, fear, and anger.  They hog the road.  They slosh you with whatever matter is on the road.  Ice, rain, mud, sand, salt.  When you pass them, you take your life into your hands, especially during snowy or rainy weather.  You'll be lucky to see where you're going as you speed to get around them.  Anything on the road lands on your windshield.  Pray you don't run out of windshield fluid!  The backwind alone can push a small car off course. 

Sometimes truckers gang up; they travel in groups making any enjoyment of the drive and its view near to impossible.   In their effort to manage their fuel and their time, they will pass giving insufficient prior notice rather than slow down, moving back and forth from the pass lane and back knowing full well that their size will intimidate any car into backing away.  This happens especially in hill country when trucks gather momentum going downhill or when hoping to maintain that into an uphill slope.   And the very worse of it all, too many times I've been behind a trucker who is clearly tired or drunk.  Probably tired.  The truck will edge off the highway, swerve to correct, only to edge over the center line making passing a gamble at best.  This makes for tense driving.  Following such a driver frustrates me.  I worry about him or her.  I worry about others on the road.  Passing under those circumstances is risky but the only way to relieve my tension.  Even then, I feel like I should do something.  Honk, flash my lights, report them, something.  When I see the aftermath of an accident in my travels, too often a truck was involved.  Disgust, fear, and anger.  Truckers are my enemy.

Then last spring I travelled the highways and byways of our country between here and Montana and back.  Three weeks on the road swayed my thinking a bit.  There were times when the only ones on the road were myself and truckers.  As a lone traveller, I was glad for the company.  The wide open spaces are wonderful but when they are filled with turbulent winds and driving rain, it was comforting to know I wasn't on the road alone.  As I realized the great distance and often times isolated two-lane, roads between inhabited spaces, be they isolated homes or small towns, I recognized the service truckers offered.  Need for the produce and products these trucks contained was in a way greater for them than for those of us who live in abundantly stocked cities.  I began to recognize just how dependent they (we) are on truckers.  Not for their food but for other items that ease daily life -- detergent, CDs, appliances, health and beauty aids.  You name it.  If it can't be grown, it probably has to be trucked in.  When I learned that the some of the highways into Yellowstone where closed due to snow and had that realization emphasized by the signs and gates indicating that even the interstate I was using closed occasionally in the dead of winter when the snow is heavy and blowing, I began to think about the trials and tribulations of a trucker's life on the road.  Even when I worked, if the weather was severe, school was closed and I stayed home.  No such situation with truckers.  That postal greed -- neither rain nor snow nor dead of night...  Well, that kind of applies to truckers, too, doesn't it?  And Christmas Eve as we drove home from our wonderful dinner, it was clear to me that those in cars were like us, heading home but those in the trucks?  Well, it wasn't so clear.  Many, I'm sure, were heading to deliver whatever their trailers contained so consumers such as myself could shop the day after Christmas.  Got me to thinking a bit better of them.

I've also had occasion to see truckers as good Samaritans.  For instance, road work that results in a lane shutting down almost always creates a back-up of traffic.  Now in the ideal world, we'd all take our turns, wait patiently, move slowly, and keep traffic crawling along.  Creeping, yes, but at a constant creep.  Unfortunately, cutting in line isn't something that only happens in grade school.  In a traffic back-up there are always those who seem to think their need to reach their destination is more important than anyone else's and so they whiz by those of us who've already moved out of the lane that is closing.  These drivers then edge their way into our line ahead of us causing a stop-and-start movement rather than a steady flow.  More than once I've seen truckers move into the closing lane making it impossible for anyone to "cut in line".  I've seen them move to the head of lines of traffic to force us all to slow down when the situation calls for it.  And I've seen accidents that involved trucks, yes, but trucks that were there because they chose to go off the road rather than hit the car.  Darn, I appreciate that.

And then there was a recent incident.   We were coming home from Kansas.  We got as far as Gary, Indiana without a weather hold-up but there we ran into "lake effect" snow.  More like, "lake effect blizzard"!  The snow was coming down hard and fast.  The wind was blowing.  It was dark.  In what seemed just a matter of minutes, the three lanes of the highway had diasppeared under a blanket of white.  We couldn't see where the road began or ended much less where the lane lines were.  When we realized we might have been better to stop rather than risk an accident, we were far from an exit.  Our saviour was an unknown trucker.  He or she doggedly slogged forward into the snow and darkness and we meekly followed behind in the tracks.  I don't know how far or how long this went on but that trucker got us, and the dozens who were following behind us, safely through.  Truckers are my friends.

So I've come to realize it's really like most everything else.  Truckers aren't one or the other.  They're both.  They're my frienemies!