Looks Like We Got Us a Convoy

Who among us honestly doesn't entertain the idea of becoming a long-haul trucker? I often dream about that life of solitude and exploration, having everything you need in the cab. It sounds pretty awesome. A fella could get a lot of thinkin' done on the road. And also a lot of music- and podcast-listening, if he's so inclined.

But then I realize how goddamn depressing it must be. Driving on interstates is pretty much all you'd do, and that gets old pretty quickly. I figure there are two basic kinds of suck when it comes to trucking on interstates: shit like I-80 through southern Wyoming or northern Nevada, which are some of the most unsightly, meth-addiction-inducing environs I could imagine (although, having never driven through Texas or Oklahoma, I probably haven't experienced the worst of it). Time slows to a glacial pace as you roll through mile after mile of windy, desolate scrubland that smells like burning oil, the monotony only occasionally interrupted by the sight of a eviscerated antelope on the roadside or a rusty, overturned mobile home off in the distance.

The second kind of suck is stuff like I-70 through Colorado, which is very scenic but must be extremely stressful for truckers with its sharp curves and steep climbs and scary descents where you have to worry about your brakes overheating. And then of course there's the blinding snowstorms and other extreme weather events that can happen up there 9 months out of the year. And then of course there's also the traffic ordeal, which gets pretty absurd most Fridays and Sundays as Denverites complete their mandatory outdoor activities. In the summer, the westbound side of I-70 out of Denver is a cavalcade of overheated RVs on the shoulder and trucks climbing at 15mph in the right-most lanes while the people in their turbo-charged Audis and Dodge trucks jockey for position in the other three lanes.

Then you got truck stops. Sweet baby Jesus, what some uniformly unpleasant environments those are! The civic centerpiece here in Wheat Ridge is a super-mega truck stop on I-70, and recently I had 20 minutes to kill, and so I decided to indulge my trucker fantasy and go mill around in there for a while. Turns out it's not a place I'd want to spend more than the 20 minutes I'd allotted myself. There was a wide selection of fried foods available, of course. JoJos were strongly represented, as well as many varieties from the Poppers and Fried Chicken families of cuisine. Breakfast taquitos? You got it. And this particular truck stop makes an impressive effort to attend to a trucker's entertainment needs: a wide selection of CDs ranging from country to western, with a few classic rock and Ray Stevens titles sprinkled in for good measure; and of course a wide spectrum of porn mags behind the checkout counter with 7/8ths of the cover sheathed in black plastic wrapping. I guess one of the skills you must acquire as a trucker is the art of asking the clerk for the latest issue of Cum-Hungry Co-eds or Samurai Suck Sluts without completely forfeiting all of your dignity.

So it's maybe not an ideal career choice. The older I get (I think I'm like 72 now or something), the more I realize just how much my psyche is attuned to my immediate surroundings, which accounts for why I've expended so much energy over the years griping about how depressing so much of America is. Not all of it, of course, but you could safely make the case that truck stops are not representative of the country's greatness, nor is southern Wyoming.

As it happened, my uncle Steve was a trucker for a couple years, and one summer when I was about 9 or 10 years old I went along on a couple of trips with him, once to Calgary, Edmonton, and Lethbridge, Alberta; and once to Seattle. I don't remember it as being at all unpleasant, but of course at that age, I hadn't really developed much of a sense of my surroundings. I also recall that Steve's truck didn't have a sleeper, so we stayed in motels every night. So I don't recall spending any time at truck stops other than just to get gas. My clearest memory is from the Rainier brewery in Seattle (which I see closed in '99 and is now a coffee roastery). They put the truck on this lift that tilted the truck to a ridiculous angle to dump out the grain or hops or whatever we were hauling into a giant bin on the back of another truck. I also remember that someone at the brewery had a bunch of dented cans of some kind of fruit punch that he gave to us.

Truckdriving as a lifestyle was fairly high on the cultural radar in the 70s, as you may recall. C.W. McCall had a huge hit with his song "Convoy," and the Kris Kristofferson movie that it inspired. Then of course there was Smokey and the Bandit and B.J. and the Bear, and a heap of other movies and songs that inspired ordinary citizens to get CB radios put in their cars. As a kid I was infatuated with C.W. McCall's Greatest Hits, which contains a number of great trucking songs in addition to "Convoy".

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