< http://www.washingtonpost.com > The Long Haul Miserable hours. Low pay. Lonely existence. Why would anybody make a living this way?
By Wells Tower Sunday, August 5, 2001; Page W08
Arthur Mink has a remarkable alarm clock. It is an unassuming rectangle of cheery lemon-yellow plastic about the size of a bar of soap, but its ring is monstrously loud and shrill, a whooping shriek that jolts the sleeper into an electrified, panicky sort of consciousness, the kind of sound you might expect to hear if a cloud of deadly gas were descending on your town. For Arthur Mink, it's a sound that tells him to roll out of his bunk and pull his rig back on the road. The alarm clock works like an egg timer; it ticks away the seconds you've got left to sleep, but it does not, specifically, tell time. Why should it? Long-haul truck drivers like Mink work days, nights and times in between. His days follow no predictable rhythm. There is no beginning, no end, and -- delivery deadlines aside -- no point in putting a name on each hour as it passes. For men in Mink's line of work, the hours fall into two simple categories: time at rest and time in motion.
Mink's arm shot out from the bottom bunk and mashed a button to shut up the alarm. He swung his legs out and shrugged on a red golf shirt he'd left hanging on a hook the night before. He fiddled with his shaving kit and the keen aroma of Old Spice overwhelmed the cab for a brief instant. He took a comb from the cubby above the driver's side sun visor and carved an orderly part into his silver hair. Then Mink, 57, drew back the heavy naugahyde curtains from the windshield, and the cab filled up with the pale, reluctant light of morning.
Mink did not have far to go this day, 15 miles from the truck stop parking lot where we spent last night to a drop lot (a temporary stable for trailers en route to somewhere else) just south of Richmond. The deadline for this particular load was not an urgent one, but he decided to bring it in two hours early. "You never know what tr affic will do," he said. "Traffic jams happen day and night on every road in the country. It's just not something you can figure out a way around."
But there was little traffic heading down Interstate 95 on this Saturday morning -- not many 18-wheelers out, just a lot of cars, and sitting high up in Mink's big truck, they looked small and pesky. "A year, year and a half ago, 95 was choked with trucks, so many people wanted freight moved," Mink said. "Plus gas was cheap and that was good for everybody. But these days, on a Saturday? Most people are back at the house."
We swept through downtown Richmond, past the milky face of the train station clock tower that looms over the interstate. We rolled past a crew of men at work, busy with a new highway overpass, a towering concrete clove hitch of road dead-ending in midair.
Mink steered his rig off the interstate and pulled into a wide driveway bordered by a high cyclone fence. We nosed through a labyrinth of parked trailers to an empty spot, and Mink hopped out and cranked down the trailer's squat forelegs and popped the air hoses free. On cross-country jaunts, Mink, who lives in Howard County and has been driving trucks for 15 years, sometimes hauls a load for four or five days, but the trailer he was bringing in this morning had been with him for a mere 400 miles, down from Long Island last night.
He hauls products of every possible variety and has no preference for one load over another. The load he'd brought in today was 10 tons of extruded steel display shelves designed to hold two-liter bottles of Coca-Cola, ultimate destination Atlanta. Truck drivers have an unusual acquaintance with loads like these, merchandise that is at once common and obscure, dutiful little items that play an entirely unnoticed role in the ongoing human convenience effort, but whose presence we would surely miss if one day we found ourselves stooping to pick up our bottles of Coca-Cola from the supermarket floor.
"The thing about this job," Mink said, "is you wind up seeing a lot of little things and doodads you never thought about. Just about anything you see in a store, you don't think about how somebody somewhere made that stuff and that it probably got to where you're looking at it on a truck." He removed the green package of menthol cigarettes from his shirt pocket. "See, somebody made this cellophane, this little foil deal here, this thing you yank on to get the plastic off. A lot of people worked to put this thing together. My wife rode with me one time when I was hauling a load for Fruit of the Loom, I was thinking about all that, and I turned to her and said, 'Honey, do you know how many women have had their hands in my pants?' "
Though Mink says he likes the freight company he drives for and does not speak kindly about efforts to unionize the long-haul trucking industry, an expression of dreamy amusement creeps across his face when he considers the fix the country would be in if truck drivers decided to strike. "People say we ought to shut down all the trucks for a week and see what happens. What you'd get is a lot of empty stores and a lot of pissed-off people. But still," he smiled and ran his tongue across his teeth, "it'd really be something. Teach people a little bit about who really keeps everybody in clothes and groceries."
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