I think it's a darn shame that MacKinnon is going through financial straits and has let go the van division. The flag hasn't fallen since it's regrouping and concentrating on its speciality flat deck operations, but the shock still reverberates. This company is an industry stalwart with tremendous loyalty among its employees and partners.

I struck out to find some former drivers and ask them how they felt about the change. My first target was a veteran trucker, a walrus-like fellow, dropping a trailer in the Puro yard in Rexdale. He explained he was working for a broker and had a steady Quebec run. He was succinct enough about the takeover by Contrans. “It doesn't matter to me. As long as I can keep working until I retire. I'm sixty-two and I've only got a few years left. The only difference is I've now got an on-board computers now and the yard is just up the road from the old one.” (I didn't have the heart to mention that the Harper government is looking at making us work until we're 67--it would destroy him).

I next pulled up beside a newly-minted Laidlaw broker at the dock waiting for a Montreal load. I didn't get his name but he was friendly enough, and told me he'd been with MacKinnon for 19 years. “We're all just waiting to see what's going to happen. So far it's been OK. Actually the pay is a little better by two cents a mile. And the fuel surcharge is a little better too.” Was he surprised by the NOI? “Completely, had no idea this was going to happen. But I'm happy as long as I can keep doing my run.”

But not everybody stuck around. Joe Tavares took his seven trucks and went over to Scott Lynn Transport out of Simcoe, Ont. I talked to him on cellphone while he was loading in Quebec. “The first couple of weeks were a little rough. But everybody's working now. I'm not interested in that short stuff, most of my guys want to run long. My guys are happy, they're busy now running California and Vancouver.”

Did he have any idea this was going to happen? “I'll tell you, two weeks before we had a safety meeting and there was no mention of anything. We got the message over the satellite. But this didn't happen overnight.”

What about the hold backs on the seven trucks, any hope of recuperating that money? “Evan (MacKinnon) told me that he might be able to give me something in March. I don't know what it will be, 10 maybe 12 cents on the dollar.” There's also money Joe put into a maintenance fund, about $9,000, he says. “That money is gone, too.”

But is he daunted by this set back? “No way. I'm a fighter,” he says. “I'm back in business.”

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Lest we forget, Avtar Singh Sandhu was charged with possessing 205 kgs of cocaine after the tractor trailer he was driving was stopped near Milton,Ont.,way back in Feb 4, 2007. Halton Police officers found the coke wrapped inside nine plastic-wrapped bricks in the back of the van owned by Kandola Bros. Carriers, tucked in beside a load of baby carrots bound for stores in the Toronto area.

Sandhu was originally acquitted because the trial judge found that the evidence had been gathered improperly without a search warrant contravening Sandhu's Charter Rights to be free from improper search and seizure.

But on Jan 5, in a decision written by Justice J. A. Simmons, the Ontario Appeals Court set aside the acquittal and allowed for a new trial under a different judge. Moreover, the decision had some interesting things to say about truck drivers and their expectations of privacy, which I'll get into shortly.

The entire incident started as a bit of a surreal theatre, after an altercation between Sandhu and a truck stop employee who noticed suspicious activity at Truck Town Terminals on Steeles Ave. Evidently he had seen Sandhu and another man loading something from a passenger car into the back of the trailer. After confronting the the men, they started up their vehicles and drove off in opposite directions. The truck stop employee followed the truck and managed to impede his progress a few times, finally cutting him off entirely on a ramp from James Snow Parkway onto the 401.

It was then that Ministry of Transport officer Jason Leeman happened on the scene and noticed the strange activity going between the two vehicles. He pulled in behind the stopped truck and turned on his lights, determining at that time that he was going to inspect the vehicle--until driver Sandhu approached and mentioned something about a “gun” Understandably, Leeman called his dispatcher and requested backup. Soon after, a couple of Halton police officers, Paul Kent and Geoff Clarke, arrived on the scene. At this time Sandhu made a more explicit reference to a gun telling the officers, “someone had put a gun to his head and told him he had to put things in the back of the tractor trailer truck.”

This naturally piqued the interest of the gendarmes. They cautiously opened the back doors and while examining the cargo MTO officer Leeman noticed the nine bales, about two and a half feet square. He believed those bales contained narcotics based on his prior experience and training, and stepped back to let the Halton cops take a look. Officer Kent sliced open one of the bales, at first thinking they contained CD ROMs or computer parts. The investigating officer were now pretty sure they had come across a mother lode of narcotics, but it's not until detective Brad Murray arrived on the scene that the call was made to request a search warrant.

Neither of the judges quibbled with the right of the MTO officer to examine the vehicle and its contents. But the trial court judge felt that once Leeman had heard Sandhu talking about a gun, and had called for backup, the incident turned from a regulatory matter into a criminal investigation, resulting in impugned evidence because of a warrantless search.

According to the original judgement, the judge found that the officers “engaged in an intrusive and invasive warrantless search of the trailer with full knowledge and consciousness that they would only have the legal authority to proceed in that way if they first obtained a search warrant” [but]...” chose instead to rely on the questionable authority that cloaked Officer Leeman...” Interestingly, the trial judge also found that the driver had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the trailer, albeit “at the lower end of the scale.”

In overturning the acquittal, the Appeals Court suggested that there was no reason that a regulatory investigation could not take place in parallel with a criminal investigation, and cited another famous truck/trafficking case in Saskatchewan. In Nolet vs. the Crown, a couple of guys were bobtailing around the prairies and were stopped by an RCMP officer who noticed an expired fuel tax sticker. During a “regulatory” search of the truck cab, the Mountie stepped on a duffel bag that “crinkled,” and opened it thinking that there would be documents like log book sheets inside (believe it or else). Anyway, inside the duffel bag is papers all right, $115,000 in cash, which is enough for them to get arrested on the spot according to the law (libertarians take note, if you're carrying a large amount of money police figure it's the proceeds of a cime).. A further search of the vehicle found 392 pounds of pot hidden in compartments. The boys were evidently booting around in tractor and wholesaling pot until this sharp-eyed Mountie pulled them over.

Regardless, the Appeal judges leaned heavily on the Nolet judgement, which they add, in fairness, wasn't available to the trial court judge: “Where police (or enforcement officers) have conducted a warrantless search, the onus is on the Crown, 'to establish on a balance of probabilities that the search was authorized by law, that the search itself it reasonable, and that the manner in which the search was carried out was reasonable.'”

The Nolet judgement apparently set the bar. “Commercial driving is a highly regulated industry and truckers can expect to be subject to random inspections from time to time.” And further, trailer privacy issues had little to do with the Sandhu case, according to the Appeals Court since the respondent (Sandhu) did not own the truck or trailer, had no authority to determine what was loaded in the trailer, did not load goods onto the trailer himself, etc.

The last part of this appeal intrigues me. I'm not sure how much Avtar Singh Sandhu had to do with his illicit load, most drivers don't have any say in what they're transporting, we just hope the shipper is honest and law-abiding. As my friend Rick Geller is always saying, you could ship an Exocet missile domestically by FedEx, call it a popcorn maker, and no one would know the difference.

This case could well end up in the Supreme Court as did the Nolet charges. Showcasing that peculiar balancing of a state's rights with those of an individual which haven't quite been worked out yet...to be continued at the Superior Court in Milton, Ont., September 2012.

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Canadians are no doubt sick of elections; we've had five provincial ones lately. But trucking enthusiasts will have noted Jim Hoffa's re-coronation on Nov. 18 as general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

On a pedantic note, few people know that the word “teamster” literally means someone who can handle a team of animals, whether bullocks or horses. That's what we are, drivers of metal and composite plastic horses. It's an eons-old trade, probably going back to ancient Iraq and Sumeria where animals were first domesticated and used as beasts of burden.

But the modern Teamsters Union is a North American phenomenon older than trucks themselves. Drivers started organizing in British Columbia back in the 1890s. With 1.3 million members in the US, Canada's 100,000 Teamsters are small potatoes, but it remains the biggest trucking union in this country (only rivalled by the CAW and Steelworkers). Teamsters Canada is an autonomous organization but it doesn't have as much of a presence on the labour scene here as does the American parent-entity south of the border.

The Hoffa name has become synonymous with the IBT, largely because of the charismatic nature of the disappeared-and-presumed-murdered original Hoffa, James Riddle, the father of the present-day general president James Phillip Hoffa.

Jimmy Hoffa disappeared in 1975 but he's not forgotten, despite the mediocre movie with Jack Nicholson and Danny DeVito. Strange that Hollywood twisted a compelling story into fictional nonsense by addding the DeVito character and several other plot devices that don't jive with what actually happened, notwithstanding that the real story is far more engaging than anything a hackneyed screen writer could fabricate.

With his upcoming third term as president, James Phillip, will surpass his father's record at the helm of the two-horse union. It's curious that the adopted son is looking more and more like his father as years go by. “He's still got a long way to go to fill his father's shoes,” one old timer told me in Hamilton one day. And maybe that's true. But there are important differences between him and his benefactor.

James is a labour lawyer from Michigan, unlike his dad who came up through the ranks, at one time working in a grocery warehouse. Although never working as a truck driver, Jimmy's home base was Teamsters local 299 of Detroit. The senior Hoffa was a Republican and hated the Kennedys (Robert Kennedy indeed put his ass in stir), while James is Democrat and an Obama supporter. James recently raised the ire of the neo-cons when he suggested “we ought to take out some of the (Tea Party) bitches” during a Labour Day picnic in Detroit where he was introducing Obama.

Hoffa's victory in 2011 was never in doubt. He garnered 60% of the vote, out-distancing his two opponents, former ally Fred Gegare with 23% of the vote, and TDU-backed Sandy Pope who got 17% of the pie.

The extremely low voter turnout is a little shocking. Less than 20% of the eligible voters mailed in their ballots, and in Canada the electoral exercise was even more apathetic, with only one in ten Teamsters bothering to vote.

What does it mean? Incumbency is a factor, and most members are happy enough with the leadership that they don't care to vote. Hoffa's had a few missed steps, but no major scandals. There's some criticism that his negotiating team gave away too much at YRC, and the car haulers seem to be an unhappy lot, but his overall performance seems solid enough.

He does have some opposition forming on the horizon, if the reformers can get organized and run one alternative candidate instead of two. This time the Teamsters for a Democratic Union threw its support behind Sandy Pope from New York, but it didn't seem to have much impact. I also remember one senior Teamster, also in Hamilton explaining to me what TDU stands for: “Too Dumb to Understand!” he pretty well shouted at me.

Pope may have stumbled by not running with a slate, as did her opponents Gegare and Hoffa. Slates seem to be the way to go at the IBT. I don't believe anyone's ever won an executive position in my local 938, without running on a slate.

With about 9,000 members, Local 938 primarily has Purolator, UPS and some car haulers in its hegemony. Its the second largest bargaining unit in Canada, second only to Local 1999 in Montreal which has over 10,000 members, and is the nest from which Teamsters Canada president Bob Bouvier fledged.

The Teamsters may not be as influential on the labour front as their American counterparts, but they have had a few victories. Trucking is no longer their main focus and today's Teamsters include railroad engineers and school board staff. So signing up drivers from Young's System and Wilson's must give some padding to an eroding membership base.

But I was curious when I read that local 938 had elected their executive by acclamation on Aug. 27. These are good jobs with a lot of perqs. With almost 9,000 members you'd think a few people would throw their hat in the ring. But this didn't happen this time nor did it happen last election. The incumbent slate (with a few changes) ran unopposed, and five years ago altered the bylaws so it would be tougher to run for election to the executive. Members now have to attend 50% of general meetings for the preceding 24 months before the election, not always an easy thing to do considering card-holders are scattered throughout the province.

It's no secret that president Craig McInnes pulls in 106 K plus change, with the other executives in 938 making slightly less. And I'm sure this includes a generous expense account, car allowance and pension. The pot is sweetened in that some of the executives pull in salaries to sit on Joint Councils, and Canada is allowed three vice presidents (of which McInnes is one, also running unopposed), who also rake in pretty good cabbage. I'm guessing Bob Bouvier, as head of Teamsters Canada makes at least $300,000.

So is this unreasonable, considering what CEOs get paid in North America? I think not. Union executives should be as equally well compensated as the private sector. Teamsters also have a reputation of getting contracts that set the bar within the industry. But I'd still like to see some more representation from the rank and file, rather than watching the same bunch acclaiming itself in perpetuity.

Local 938 has a long interesting history, some of it a little sketchy. Not so long ago it was put in trusteeship for three years by the above mentioned James Hoffa because of some hanky-panky with the books. It's never been clear what exactly went on. So that's another reason the executive should not run uncontested. That's the way a functional democracy works. It has to have competition and an opposition in order to thrive, in order to be accountable to the people it serves.

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Nothing like a polite and courteous truck chase to liven up a Monday morning. People are still talking about it in coffee shops days later. The five hour drama was followed across North America as a Toronto television station had its helicopter filming the pursuit in real time.

I turned on the television to find out the weather and instantly became riveted like everyone else—for a while. It wasn't really a chase since the driver generally obeyed the rules and even signalled turns, and couldn't get the rig over 105 kph thanks to David Bradley and speed limiter legislation. CP24 also offered commentary from its resident announcer, former OPP officer Cam Wooley.

By the time I tuned in, the cops had already been following the stolen truck for hours, from Burlington where it was spotted empty of its cargo of particle board, to Woodstock and back to Toronto, where it took the 427 south and subsequently the QEW towards Niagara. The TV announcer speculated that the driver might be heading for the border, and I pictured the National Guard setting up howitzers on the Queenston Bridge.

I went for a shower and by the time I got back the driver was in Niagara Falls and turning around at McLeod Road, heading back toward St. Kitts. By the time I'd finished changing and brushing my teeth, the driver had pulled over in Burlington and the event was over.

But what I really like is that it got the public talking and thinking about trucks and our trade. Trucking is the second biggest profession for men in North America, yet we're almost invisible. This incident, however, put the cross-hairs right on the industry. Cargo theft and speed limiters in one day got more coverage than thousands of press releases and seminars from the OTA.

Jonathan Kay wrote a story for the National Post explaining the high tech intricacies of contemporary trucking, telling us the days of Smokie and the Bandit are over. The Canadian Trucking Alliance, always quick with a press release, called for tougher penalties for cargo theft crime.

Indeed, although hijackings are fairly rare, trailer and tractor theft are not uncommon. One truck stop owner admitted that about one trailer per month goes missing from his lot. As far as thefts go, this one is small potatoes. What would he get for a load of particle board, a few thousand dollars?

Most people were asking, why does he keep on driving, why doesn't he stop? Well, he was going to jail and this was his 15 minutes of fame I suppose. And it was such an orderly pursuit-come-escort. A phalanx of OPP cars riding behind and in front with purple lights flashing, almost like watching the Snowbirds doing some precision flying.

At one time I watched a rig pull alongside and squeeze the flatbed over into the hammer lane. This was the fellow on the radio who wanted to take him out. “Let me do it, I can cut him off,” but as quickly another OPP got in front of this vigilante and backed him out of the scene. No shots fired, no one injured, no property damage. That's the way to run a truck chase. True to our credo: Peace, Order and Good Government, way to go you Canucks!

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I have a couple of hitchhiking stories from Jim Mill. No idea where he is now. The one I'm not showing you might not be politically correct. Ah what the heck, If it gets censored it gets censored. So here's to Old Bull and Allen Ginsberg, Jackie Kerouac, and Neal Cassidy. Read "Sexy Mary" at your peril. It might warp your sensibilities. In my experience hitchhiking was usually a rewarding experience, but sometimes it took you into weird, terrifying, uncharted and surreal territory.

Hitchhiking to Rochester

My family disintegrated in 1962. My dad died and it wasn’t that close an extended family. So I didn’t see cousins and things at Christmas any more and considering that that half of the family was Jewish…but in the early days they used to come over for Christmas anyway.

In 1971 I was 17 we’d had a band exchange program with a high school in Fairport New York, which is south of Rochester. I was president of the band and lived with my brother in an apartment, so I’d have to billet people.

Everybody lives with their mom and dad or whatever, so the authorities assume the kids are going to be safe sexually, but my living situation was different. Our band had gone to Fairport already. I had a crush on these two girls. My brother was only 20 and I was 17. So I arranged to billet the two prettiest girls. That’s what I thought. The ones I had a crush on would be lodging with me.

Anyways, I fell in love with one of them. She was a genius and on her way to Julliard and played the clarinet in the high school the band. I was just a 3rd rate french horn player. I never played after I left high school.

One long weekend I decided to hitchhike down and visit her. It was Victoria Day weekend as a matter of fact. I decided to hitchhike down to her place and she said it was ok even though she was getting engaged to somebody—an Italian girl with a big extended family.

I got a ride with a rock band in a van as far as Hamilton. I didn’t know how I was going to get across the border but was planning to cross in Niagara Falls. One of the band guys hollered after me: “Hey Dude. Good luck man. Watch out at the border they might think you’re a draft dodger trying to sneak back home.” I was wearing green overalls and they thought I might look suspicious.

Then this couple picked me up. A young man, a young woman, kind of swarthy couple and they were bickering, bickering. They were going to Niagara Falls or Niagara-on-the-Lake to visit her dad. It turns out my Uncle Sam lives in Niagara-on-the-Lake and I’m looking at them. Micah and Miriam and they were cousins I hadn’t seen in 10 years, since I was a little kid. Now I’m a long haired hippie teenager.

I said, “Are you Micah and Miriam Gamble?” and they said “Yeah. Who are you?” They didn’t remember, they were older than me so they hadn’t changed that much. They’d gone from 14 to 20. But I’d gone from 7 to 17, so I turned out from baby into a man and they were just maturing. So they said “Yeah. What are you doing!?”

And I said, “I’m Jim. Your cousin. Jim…Jim.”

“Oh wow! Are you ever getting older.” Blah, blah, blah and it was them that drove me across the border.

That was just family coincidence that out of 200,000 cars on the road that day these long-lost cousins pick me up. The first took me to their dad’s place in Niagara-on-the-Lake and his father, who is 90s, was also there. They were all Jews. The old guy was a Stalinist, left all his money to the Communist Party of Canada when he died. Sam was a Trotskyite along with my own dad in the 30s and 40s. They went to Newfoundland when Trotsky stopped briefly in Canada on his way to his assassination in Mexico. They were fans, I guess. Trotskyites.

Miriam had just joined the Wobblies. I met her again years later when I attended a convention on Winchester Ave in Toronto. It’s a dance theatre now but at the time it had been a community centre. We decided to adopt John Lennon’s “Imagine” as the new anthem of the Wobbly movement. How flakey can you get? And Micah works at the CBC. Nice guy, not politically affiliated.

I did eventually get to Rochester and met my friend’s fiancé. Back in Toronto I’d taken her to see Godspell. I remember we got in a parked car that night and necked. We didn’t know whose car it was, the car was open and we just got in the back seat. I thought if she necks with me in a stranger’s car I’m welcome to visit her.

So I arrived at her house during her engagement party and the family put me up. “This is my family. This is my fiancé. We’re getting married.” It broke my heart.

Sexy Mary by Jim Mill

In 1973 I’d been working and had done a couple of semesters from the University of Guelph. but I wasn’t doing that well there. A friend called me up who was picking tobacco in Delhi, Ont. which is the birthplace of Thomas Edison, or so the sign claims. Nothing else was happening so I went tobacco picking.

Tobacco season finishes the end of September. When the picking ended I thought…I’m going out west…I’ll hitchhike out west. That had been going on for eight or nine years but the exodus of people had waned, like that whole Wawa thing, where you used to have hundreds of young people lined up waiting for a ride, carving their initials in trees, their epitaphs even. The pace had slacked off and hitchhiking was getting harder; fewer motorists were offering rides. And as far as camaraderie on the road, there was a lot less of it, but there were still hitchhikers.

I got a couple of weird rides and normal rides and I was up north of Superior past Wawa. It was the beginning of October and I froze my butt off sleeping in a park one night. So in Thunder Bay I spent the rest of my tobacco money on a super-duper sleeping bag that was good to 40 below.

I didn’t have any money left and I had to get to BC. I was going to pick apples in the Okanagan. That was the plan, a hair-brained plan.

So I’m outside of Calgary, the sun’s coming down, and I’m thinking if I can’t get a ride maybe I’ll bunk out in this super duper sleeping bag.

A car draws up and a couple picks me up. They’re in their mid-50s, skinny little guy, big fat wife-like person (that’s what I thought at the time). They made me sit in between them in the front seat which was weird. I wasn’t drinking at the time, I’d been a heavy drinker for a couple of years and just quit. I’m going to take six months off, I thought.

We were driving along. Across the prairie you can just see the foothills of the Rockies. “We’re not going anywhere, just out for a drive,” the skinny guy says. “She’s not my wife, I’m married,” he says. Do you want a drink?”

“No thanks, I quit.”

“Aw come on, have a drink. Western hospitality,” he says. I was just a dumb kid so I said OK.

So he goes on, “Mary will serve us.” Mary’s giggling, she looks retarded, she’s got a moustache and seven or eight chins. Not that there’s anything wrong with being hideous.

“Mary,” he says. “Mary will serve us the whiskey topless.”

I’m thinking that I’m stuck in between these two. I was a late bloomer when it comes to sexuality. I mean I wasn’t a big guy or anything.

She starts giggling and he goes, “Come on Mary,” so she rolls down her top and she’s got these huge udders and it’s just like it’s too weird, and they’re old. Now I could say, let me out of this fucking car, but I’d be stuck in the dark on the highway in the middle of nowhere. So I’m just being polite.

He says, “Touch ‘em,” and takes my hand and puts it on her boob. So I have one hand on her breast and a drink of whiskey in the other hand and I’m driving along with these two people I’ve never seen before. It’s crazy.

We drive into the foothills up a little road. He explains to me, “You know, Mary’s married but her husband’s an alcoholic and he just goes to the bar. He never fucks her. I got a wife I got to screw and I screw Mary when I can but I can’t screw her all the time. All she needs is a good screw, right?”

This was in a station wagon. He pulls off the road somewhere in the dark and the implication is I’m going to service Mary or else they’re going to leave me here in the middle of nowhere. I guess they read me like a book. I wasn’t capable of violence.

So he goes for a walk and she pulls out a condo. She says, “Are you sexy,” and puts her hand down my pants and starts whiffling with my flaccid penis. She pulls on the condom but I don’t have an erection or anything.

She lies down in the station wagon and I try to oblige her but I can’t get an erection and she’s got a cavernous vagina. So I’m sort of humping her with my pelvis. Time passes and I haven’t got an erection of fully entered her when the stupid condom falls off my penis and onto the floor of the car.

She asks me, “Are you done? Are you done? Did you go?” (not, “did you come,” western vernacular, you know).

I said something like “I haven’t even started yet,” trying to sound like some tough guy, like ‘hey baby’, I don’t know what I was trying to sound like, it was so confusing.

The guy comes back and starts banging on the window. Maybe he was watching the whole time. “We gotta go,” he says. “We gotta go.” So she reaches down to see where the condom is and it’s not on my dick. She panics and shoves her hand in her vagina looking for it. “Oh,” I say. “It’s right here.”

She’s worried that I may have ejaculated into her but I didn’t even get an erection. I didn’t actually enter her.

They took me down to a truck stop and said goodbye. I just kept hitchhiking and don’t remember the next ride. Oh yes I do, it was two hippies going to Banff. The guy was from Germany and she was French. They had a little kid with them. I said, you’re never going to believe this story and told them right on the spot. They told me I should write it down and I did but lost it eventually.

I called it the Rape of the Hitchhiker, not because I was physically coerced but there was an element of I have to do this or else. It was so weird. I wasn’t sure what was going on. I tried to oblige but she had a gigantic vagina and didn’t even know that I didn’t fuck her.

I was so young. You know how you’re horny when you’re young. Anything makes you horny? Like I’d quit drinking and was celibate for months after that. I used to have nocturnal omissions about Sexy Mary whom at the time of the incident I thought was horrifyingly ugly and I couldn’t get an erection. Later on I thought god damn, I’ll be on my death some day saying I should have been able to get it up. I missed out on a sexual experience I might have enjoyed.

The sexual content of this story is an exception. I mean there’s lots of speculative sexual stuff when hitchhiking, but in those days, when I was a young guy hitchhiking around, it usually involved older men out driving looking for hitchhikers to have anonymous sexual encounters, which some segments of the homosexual community really enjoy.

I’d been propositioned while hitchhiking hundreds of times within the Toronto City limits. You get drunk down at Yonge Station and you’ve got to hitchhike home to Scarborough. A guy picks you up, and this is the code word, you always know, he asks, “So you got a girlfriend?”

My sexuality is pretty elastic. But at the time I was looking for girls and the idea of a fortyish guy offering me a BJ didn’t appeal to me. They’d say stuff like, “does your girlfriend give you BJs? With your eyes closed it feels the same.” No thanks, I’d say. Hey that’s my stop. Where you going? Steeles Ave is disappearing in the rear view mirror. That happened a lot, where as a hitchhiker you’d feel threatened, although the driver was always taking the chance on picking up a real bad homophobe who would beat them up and steal their car. That happened, too.

So when I got offered to screw Sexy Mary it was quite a surprise. I was awakening to the fact that it was a horny world out there.

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Avatar Singh Sandhu is getting a new trial on cocaine trafficking charges and it starts on Monday Oct. 3, 2011 at the Supreme Court of Justice in Milton, Ont. As you may recall, truck driver Sandhu walked away on a technicality after he was caught with a massive amount of coke (205kgs) nestled in with a load of baby carrots. But that acquittal was overturned by the Ontario appellate court on Feb. 11 and we've been waiting ever since.

At the crux of the trial is the way the evidence was gathered and whether Sandhu's Charter of Rights to unreasonable search and seizure were violated. Many in the trucking community have been watching this situation partly because of the super-hero antics of a Halton-area truck stop owner who chased a couple of suspicious guys who were evidently up to no good in his parking lot. He finally blocked in Sandhu on a ramp to the 401 and was at first joined by a DOT officer. This is also an important factor as MTO officers are allowed to enter any commercial vehicle to check loads. However, some rookie Halton regional cop may have forgotten to get a search warrant before entering the trailer. We'll let you know how this unfolds.

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I collected this story from a gal several years ago. It's not really a hitchhiking story but it fits with the era as a lot of counter-culture young people were making a pilgrimage to India in the early 1970s. I'm sure she'd rather not have her name used but you might be able to guess who this closely resembles--she's a legend in her own mind (and other's). It's interesting to see how her belief system evolved as a result of this trip, and her observations on the Israeli-Palestinian debate are apropos in view of the current push to recognize Palestinian statehood. Enjoy.

In 1969 I was traveling alone in Europe, and I went to Canada House in London to check on rides. That was my form of hitchhiking. Eventually I hooked up with these two guys who were traveling in a van to Morocco but I ditched them in Madrid. They wanted to sleep with me and I wasn’t interested.

I spent a month in Madrid and then took a boat to Fomentera, which was a down and dirty hippie island off the south coast of Spain. Most of us were stoned all the time but it was mostly soft drugs, usually hashish. In Fomentera I encountered junkies for the first time. Heroin was cheap and easy to get. I’d lived in New York City for the last 10 months and hung out on the street a lot, but this was the first time I’d known any junkies.

It was pretty risky for woman to hitchhike alone in Europe so I didn’t do it much—only when other transportation wasn’t available. But I did some hitchhiking when I got to Israel, always with a guy, and a few times in Greece. In Israel got involved with a guy on a kibbutz and we’d hitchhike back and forth to Tel Aviv. It was OK for him to pee by the side of the road but not me. A woman was supposed to hold it in.

I spent a lot of time with Arabs in Jerusalem because I found them really interesting. I was 22 and Jewish but I wasn’t pro-Zionist. From my perspective Israel was an apartheid society. I wasn’t as political as I was now, but I certainly was radical and I’d been a radical at McGill. I had a friend who was an older Arab man. We went to the hospital to visit a mutual friend whose girlfriend had been killed by a faulty gas meter. My Arab friend had to go through a separate entrance. Stuff like that. It was really horrible.

I stayed in Israel for two months and then decided to go to Greece. Spain and Greece were two popular destinations for young people because they were cheap and warm.

I figured it was safe to smuggle some dope out of Israel because the Israelis only care if you smoke dope with other Israelis. They don’t like that. If you smoke dope with Arabs they don’t give a shit. That was the deal. So I wanted to smuggle some hash out of Israel into Greece because I heard it was hard to get there. I thought if I hid it in my body the Israelis wouldn’t care and the Greeks wouldn’t strip search me.

I was going to put it in a bra but in those days I didn’t wear bras and I couldn’t find one. So I wrapped up my seven grams of hash inside a Kotex.

When I got to the ferry docks they called my name and a man in a suit approached me. I knew I was trouble because nobody wears suits in Israel. I’m really stoned because I’d just attended a party before leaving. He says, “Come with me,” and I decide to play it straight even though I’m a stoned-out hippie.

He took me to an area with a sort of pit and there’s a woman there so I know they’re going to search my body. I was trying to be cool and calm while they’re going through my backpack and suitcase. The man who sold the hash to me had informed so they knew I had dope.

“Oh, you’re looking for microfilm?” I asked them. “You’re looking for bombs?”
Then he tells me, “Go with her.” I ask why. “Because she’s going to search you,” he says.

Then I started yelling at her, going into this tirade: “I’m Jewish and I’m a college graduate. Before this I was thinking of moving to Israel. This was supposed to be my homeland. I’ve never been so humiliated in my life.”

I’d cut myself that morning stepping on a piece of glass. A doctor had bandaged my foot. I’m down to my socks and underwear and she sees the bandage. “Take off that bandage.” I figured I’m really fucked now so I said, “If you want me to take off the bandage you better get on the phone and call the hospital and an ambulance. I’m not risking an infection for this stupidity.”

She says, “OK, take off your pants.” I just looked at her straight in the eye. “I have my period and I’m not going to take off my pants. I turned around and kept yelling at her and when the guy in the suit came back I yelled at him, too. I have to keep yelling as I put on my clothes, to show I’m not relieved.

“Did you look everywhere?” he asked “Yeah,” she says, lying. “I looked everywhere.” So I yelled at him some more and then I yelled at the passport guy.

It turned out they knew everything about me. They’d had me followed in Jerusalem. This is a complete police state. They knew who I’d been with in Jerusalem and this is why they were out to get me. Because I was Jewish and hung out with Arabs.”

So I got on the boat, still scared and carrying seven grams of hash. What if they followed me onto the boat? In the bathroom I can’t bring myself to flush seven grams of hash, so I ate four of them and started to drink on top of that. Man did I get ripped. As it happened there was man on the boat carrying 200 kilos of hashish who got through with no problem.

Anyway, I never took dope across the border again. Worse than going to jail, I was afraid my father would have to come get me. That was my worst fear.

Matala is an island off Crete and it supported a large hippie colony. You could stay there for nothing and sleep in the caves. The hippies lived on the beach and drank in the cafes. Joni Mitchell was there at the time playing on the beach. I knew the guy that she sings about in her album Blue. He had flaming red hair. Carey was his name. He was a character in Matala. I didn’t see him the way she did, but she was in love with him and I wasn’t.

You never got to know your fellow travelers that well. You were traveling around in sort of group but you weren’t part of any group, you know? Most of these kids were Europeans and Australians. Fewer of them were Americans but there were some Canadians too.

You’d find out from one kid where to stay in the next place: This is cheap and this is good; this is cool and this is not. My experience wasn’t so much as being a tourist as it was of traveling and hanging out other hippies.

In Greece I met two guys who were heading for India and I’d thought I’d start out with them and see what happens. People told me that a woman shouldn’t travel alone in Europe, but I didn’t find it so bad. So when people told me a woman couldn’t travel by herself overland to India, I thought fuck this. I’m pretty macho. It was my way of rebelling against the restrictions on women.

The entire experience was pretty heavy. Even talking about it makes me anxious. We took a boat to the north of Turkey and then buses across eastern Turkey. Most of the local people had never seen a western woman and the situation got scary at times. At one point the bus stopped in a town where it wasn’t scheduled and we got attacked by a mob of men.

It was like a scene from a bad movie. They wanted me out of there. The men started banging on the doors. I knew if I got off I’d be killed or raped. We managed to convince the driver not to stop, to drive right through, but it was a terrifying experience.

And then the guys I was traveling with became a problem. I wasn’t attracted to them but they kept pushing me to sleep with them. So I had to dump them, and I dumped them in Iran.

Then I was traveling on my own and every decision was life or death. This was a life-forming time me, it was one of the major experiences that made me into what I am today.

For one thing, I was suddenly really aware of the oppression of women in a way that I’d never been before. Alone I could be attacked, molested, sold and bought in one of those countries. And if I picked up a Western guy for protection, it would only be a matter of time before he started hitting on me. And, of course, there was all the poverty. For a middle class kid that had lived cheaply in New York in some degree of poverty, I’d never seen anything like this.

The train I was on stopped in Mashad and I was stoned. Literally. It was some type of Moslem holiday and I was out walking. I knew enough not to be wearing Western clothing, I had on these loose-fitting Indian clothes that covered my whole body. It wasn’t short shorts or anything. A crowd formed up behind me and began pitching stones. I had to run back to my hotel.

What happened next was even worse. Some of the townsfolk were so upset about what happened that they went looking for the ringleader of the stone throwers. They beat him to a pulp and dumped him at my door.

I was more comfortable in Afghanistan. Afghanies seemed less covetous of westerners, and more respectful of women for whatever reason.

I stayed mostly in Kabul until I ran out of money. I had money at home and it had been wired to me, but I had to wait a while for the money to clear. That was OK. The landlord let me stay on credit and hashish was legal. I was a hippie and I did a lot of dope in those days.

But another terrifying thing happened in Kabul. It was the 60s and I was into sex and all that. We all were in those days. But during the whole trip, I had been alienated sexually. Since I left Greece I was scared of getting involved with someone. Men had been awful to me the whole trip and I hadn’t had sex at all.

I was feeling really shitty. In retrospect, the reason I was depressed was because I was repressing all this fear. But at that time I didn’t know what was wrong with me. So I thought I’ve got to get laid, right? Those were the terms of the day. I’ve got to pick someone who I would find attractive if I was feeling good. That was how I talked to myself.

So I picked this American guy who had come from India. He’d been in jail in India. I didn’t find him attractive at all but I went to bed with him. We had sex and I didn’t feel anything, just numbness. He picked up on that and got freaked…really upset.

I didn’t realize how fucked up he was. He was hanging out with all these junkies who lived cheap in Kabul and didn’t have to steal. They could get cocaine and heroin at the drug store.

So he came to get me to take me to a party one night. I remember it was a huge gathering with a couple of hundred people sitting in a circle around a fire where they were roasting a lamb.

He went and sat in front of me in the circle. He’s a big guy and I watched him get up and start coming towards me. Part of me wanted to talk to him, tell him it’s not him, it’s me, that he shouldn’t be so upset. I was about to take a step towards him when I hear this thing whistle past me. I looked behind me there’s a knife stuck in a tree that just missed me. But everyone’s stoned and nobody notices he’s thrown the knife except me.

I got out of there real fast, packed up and left Kabul the next day. It had taken me four months to get from Istanbul to Afghanistan and the last experience had really shaken me.

I caught a cheap flight to India and lived for a time in a boathouse in Shrinigar, in the Himalayas. It was luxurious living. For one dollar you’d get three meals a day and servants that would take care of you. But that was expensive for me.

I got sick in India. Everybody gets sick on these trips but I got very ill. I was OK in Shrinigar but when I got to Delhi I had dysentery and a high fever and thought I was going to die.

I was staying in a place where I shared a room with this guy. The room was stifling: 104 degrees F and only a single ceiling fan swatting at the air. My roommate was really a cool man and he helped take care of me. I don’t remember his name, but I’d like to look him up now and thank him..

He was coming the other way, from the Orient. Everybody coming from the west was fucked up from the drugs. But travelers coming from the east weren’t as fucked up because they were coming from a less alienating culture, and they weren’t so messed up on drugs because drugs weren’t as available.

He helped me get over the worst of my illness. He told me, “If you can’t get enough money to go home, then go down south to Goa and live on the beach. You don’t want to travel back overland in the summer, it’ll kill you. Then you can go back later.”

My parents didn’t have much money when I left, but I decided to call them and see if they could get me a plane ride home. They knew I wanted to see Asia so they sent me a plane ticket that would take me from Japan to Vancouver.

I was still sick but this was my chance to get to Asia, even though, as it turned out, I had three different parasites inside me. I had amoebic dysentery, a parasite in my lungs, and another one that they didn’t find for a long time.

So I never got to Katmandu or anyplace like that. I flew from Delhi to Bangkok, Thailand, which was a completely different world. The war in Vietnam and Bangkok was full of prostitutes and American soldiers on leave.

I looked like a stoned-out hippie, and I was a stoned-out hippie. My hair was long and I was wearing these Indian clothes. The American soldiers looked at me like they wanted to kill me. “Are you a boy or girl?” some of them asked.

Somehow I got to Ching Mai in northern Thailand. I don’t recall how I got there. I had met this boy who was studying in California who told me his father was at this monastery. You know these Buddhists, they go to a monastery and become a monk for three weeks of the year.

His father was impressed that I was a young woman traveling alone and he invited me to their house in Bangkok. He was a businessman in Bangkok and I stayed with the family. This was good for me because they treated me with respect, fed me, and took me around.

If I was feeling better I would have tried to go to Vietnam. Instead I went to Honk Kong and tried to get into China. China had just started to open up to the French but they weren’t letting anyone else in. They’d just had their cultural revolution. I had a four hour interview and then I waited two weeks in Honk Kong but never got an answer. I hated Hong Kong so I left.

It was now 1970. I went briefly to Taiwan. It was a terrible place. Beautiful country, but a terrible police state.

When I landed in Tokyo I had $10 left. But I met up with this Japanese guy who called himself Christian Dior. He was bisexual and had this boyfriend who was a transvestite. He was a total outcast in Japanese society but no one bothered him. He was allowed to be who he was. But he was such an outcast that nobody talked to him ever. Nobody. Ever.

The couple supported me as they had lots of money and one of them was a famous dress designer. I got introduced to this whole other world. The gay scene in Tokyo is made up of western men and Japanese boys. I mean they weren’t really boys--they weren’t 15--but they looked like boys. Very feminine and effeminate.

In Kyoto I went to the World’s Fair. In the Canada pavilion I watched a film about Toronto that brought tears to my eyes. Being from Montreal, I’d always hated Toronto but know I realized it was time to come home when a film of Toronto makes me cry. I’d been gone ten months.

One result of this year of traveling was that I had become re-radicalized. I had rejected radical politics for awhile because I was so screwed up and settled into an existentialist kind of life which was about having as many experiences as possible.

That was the interesting part of my wanderings. No responsibility. I think the intensity of the experience was a big part of it, the freedom of being on the road, and the sense of community.

If you wanted, you could get involved in an intense sexual relationship for a week and then never see them again. Neither one of you really cared too much. It was just a very intense experience. You’d intensely connect with people and then they’d be gone.

It was what everybody was doing at the time, a way to be free. You could go wherever you wanted but in the end I didn’t find it all that appealing. When I was lying in bed in Delhi imagining that I was going to die, I realized I didn’t want to live like this, without roots and responsibilities. I had to do something to help change the way things were in the world.

Our generation was very naive. We thought we could change the world. I think that gave us tremendous energy. This generation, they’re cynical and don’t really think they can change anything. But they’re much more sophisticated. When they decide to fight they’re going to be a fore to be reckoned with.

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Speaking of Latvians, last week I got a call from a fellow named Karl (pseudonym, as he didn't want me to use his real name). Seems like I'm a go-to guy for Latvian wannabe truck drivers here in Toronto on a work permit, as this is the second young Latvian that's called me. The first chap had an Ontario drivers licence but no experience driving truck and had started working for a landscaping company hoping to eventually get on board as a driver.

But Karl is different in that he has experience hustling freight in Europe in a three axle Scania , and has his AZ licence after completing a training course with a reputable truck driving school in the GTA. He was frustrated because trucking companies around Toronto won't even look at him, let alone give him a road test, without two years Canadian experience.

This is, of course, the dilemma for any newbie driver trying to get a foothold in the industry. You can't get the job if you don't have any experience, and you can't acquire experience without getting the job.
Ironically, only a few years ago, Canadian carriers were actively travelling to Europe and sponsoring job fairs to recruit people like Karl. Europeans with driving experience were especially coveted as they were skilled, often exemplary employees and could usually function in English.

I advised him to try the drivers services and look at the trucking job sites. What Karl needed was someone to give him a break and put him behind the wheel. But today he called me and was ecstatic. “No one was going to give me a job in Ontario, but I heard from a friend who knows someone hiring Latvians in New Brunswick,” Karl told me.

Apparently, the area around Woodstock, New Brunswick is a hotbed for trucking and there are over a dozen Latvian trucking families settled in the area. The carriers in the area like the work ethic of the Latvians (as well as the Poles, Russians, Dutch, English and Scottish drivers) and there's a vibrant community in this region of emigre drivers and their families. It sounds like Karl's being offered a contract and will be driving with a trainer for a few months and then be on his own. He wasn't sure what company he'd be working for, but Karl was plenty happy and packing his suitcase and rucksack as I spoke to him.

So here's a thirty year old guy, stranger in a strange land, out to start his new life in New Brunswick. I could sense his excitement. Sounds like some Ontario company missed the chance to pick up a pretty good driver and worker. Not only that, Karl will be living in a beautiful part of the country where the cost of living and houses are affordable. Godspeed, as the saying goes.

It strikes me that many people come to driving truck by a circuitous root, and it's often a roll of the dice that gets you in the door. Of course there are those who know from a very young age they are going be driving trucks—it's all they want to do. The above-mentioned Karl worked in the IT field but didn't really like it. “My dad was a truck driver and I think it's in my blood,” he told me.

This Russian fellow I know would have taken up trucking when he landed in Canada but his experience in Ireland driving a boom truck and delivering construction materials didn't count in Ontario. Today Vlad is one of the hardest working guys I know, working seven days a week for two appliance repair companies. While my friend George arrived from Scotland twelve years ago and got his Canadian Class A licence as his Scottish experience wasn't considered valid. By chance or by fate he got the name of a manager of a big company that was hiring and started working the next day.

My path started out where I was working in a gas station as a designated apprentice mechanic but wasn't going anywhere. Ron Kimber, a friend of mine from Holland Landing (I don't know where he is now but wherever it is he's got a fleet of trucks), suggested a company that was delivering school books around southern Ontario. The first day I walked in the door, one of the brother-owners handed me a sheaf of bills and sent me bombing around southern Ontario in a GMC van with a 350 four barrel carb. Gas was cheap in those days and that thing would fly.

But the day came when I was assigned a five-ton a straight truck I gulped hard. I'd never driven anything like this and it was up on Hwy 69 near Parry Sound that I finally figured out how a short fourth transmission worked. All the gears could be split high and low except the top two, the fourth and fifth which you had to shift first and then split.

I didn't get my A licence until 1981 but even then I didn't hop right into a semi. One summer I heard about a week's work driving a dump in Sutton, Ont., close to where I was living. My marriage had broken up and I really wasn't in any hurry to sign on for life with one employer.

This was a fairly big company from Scarborough and the crew was from the Ottawa Valley, a very hard working group of guys who talked in that clipped, high-octave sounding way, a little like Newfies. They were apparently catch basin and sewer specialists and worked all over Ontario, staying in motels and getting home weekends.

The truck I was assigned was an ancient beast with a two stick transmission where every gear could be split four ways. In my recollections I've imagined it as a Diamond Reo, but I think it was in actuality an old Dodge goat. The crew boss warned me that there was very little clutch and not to goose the throttle in low gear as it would snap off the drive line. He went with me on my first move and showed me where to dump the fill, over a slight embankment into a gully.

My very first solo trip turned disastrous. I forgot to open the tailgate as I hit the hydraulic lift. The dirt shifted and the truck lifted up in the air at a 45% angle. My first thought was that the whole thing was going to tumble over backwards and I was going to die.

Instead I ended up dangling just below the hydro wires. A kid on his way to school stared at me in disbelief. So then I opened the tailgate and put it in one of those low gears. The truck lurched forward and down, jumping a couple of times until it settled back on its front wheels with half the dirt dumped on the road behind me.

So I had to get the courage up to drive back to the dig and tell the boss I'd done a wheelie and dumped a load of dirt on the road. But when we got back, it was all cleaned up. A crew from the township with a front end loader had apparently lifted it into the ravine where it was supposed to go.

That day I also learned that a fully loaded dump won't stop when you want it to. I remember sweating while rolling past a stop sign with the binders locked and learning new respect for an overweight load as a 26 year old novice. On the way back to the excavation I'd swing past the Sutton School of Hydrotherapy and Massage where I'd recently started seeing a gal from British Columbia. There were lots of women attending this college, mostly from BC, to become Registered Massage Therapists. And they were a different breed from the locals. The first night this girlfriend was at the Irish House Tavern, where I'd notice a group of these gals dancing by themselves painted up like gypsy maidens and indians.

Regardless, I was taking a bit of a detour to roll by the school to wave at anyone I knew and the crew boss caught me at it. These guys worked hard and expected me to as well. As soon as one truck pulled out of the excavation the boss wanted another immediately backing in the hole. And when I wasn't driving he had me rolling up and down the street on this vibrating steam roller tamping down the gravel.

So that was a real interesting week of work. I wanted to show these guys the local watering hole but they weren't interested and just wanted to get back to their motel after the 12 hour days. Friday afternoon they were done by three pm and heading back to Combermere and Tory Hill and Calabogie, catch basins installed and the road limed up and level waiting for the paving crew.

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While I was going to university in the early 90s, I snagged this job covering North America (read Toronto) for an English language weekly newspaper, the Baltic Independent, out of Tallinn, Estonia. The Baltic countries (not to be confused with the Balkans) of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia had recently declared independence but were in a sense still occupied by Russia, although Russian troops were in the process of pulling out. At the time, downtown Riga was reminiscent of Chicago during Capone's reign, as rival gangs and mob leaders staged shootouts to establish territories.
But business people were looking west and a similar paper, the Baltic Times had started up in Riga, Latvia. The gig didn't pay much and basically covered my subscription, but the editor assured me I could have several good cafeteria meals in Tallinn for what they were paying per story. It was easy, I'd sniff out anything Baltic and fax off copy to Tallinn from the student newspaper office at York—email was just starting to happen, and I don't think even John G. Smith, editor of Truck News at the time, was using it.
So in the process, I got to interview a Lithuanian poet at Harbourfront, and got a quick interview with the Latvian triple jumper on his way to a doping test after he'd won the silver medal in the World Indoor Track and Field Championships at the Skydome. When the Latvian president came to give a talk at U of T's Convocation Hall, I was in the front row taking notes.
In case you're not aware, Latvia is a hockey crazy country of 4 million people. And the most fun I had was attending a San Jose Sharks practice at Maple Leaf Gardens and then driving Arturs Irbe and Sandis Ozolinsh to their hotel at the Eaton's Centre in my Chevy Nova. Sandis was tall and gawky and in his early twenties, terribly shy with not much English. But the diminutive goaltender, Arturs (Archie) liked to talk and told me about living in San Jose and his hockey school in Riga. He asked me if my mother had knitted my sweater and gave me a bunch of hockey cards for my kids. Nice guy, wanted to invite him to supper at my parents' house in Willowdale for some borscht.
The point I'm coming to is that I wrote one book review at the Baltic Independent that I was somewhat proud. I spent a good deal of time on it because I'm Latvian by descent (although I was born in Hogtown) and my parents and sisters shared history with Mody Eksteins. Lastly, if you care to read on, this is pretty heavy stuff, a case study in extremism and world madness and its aftermath, all of which is too common a part of the human condition. This was first published July 2000.

Modris Eksteins captures heart of 20th century in his book "Walking Since Daybreak"

Modris Eksteins was born in Latvia in 1943. That puts him in the bull's eye of World War II and in the direct line of fire from the two worst extremist forces of the 20th century. A true war-baby, at the age of one his temple was grazed by an exploding shell fragment as Russian and German soldiers battled over a front line that shifted back and forth across his grandfather's Kurland farm.
So it is fitting that Eksteins has become a historian and chronicled the fevered history of modern Latvia - no easy task and no easy history. Indeed, "Walking Since Daybreak" is more than the story of his family's escape into exile and the fledgling nationalist aspirations of a group of Sels, Zemgalians, Kurs, and Latgalians on the shores of the Baltic Sea sharing a common language. Part memoir, part historical record and analysis, the author uses the text as a channel to enter postmodern waters. The veins of his manuscript run under the skin of our time.
The narrative is epitomized through the character of his maternal great-grandmother Grieta Pluta. The strong-willed matriarch was seduced, impregnated and cast off by the German baron for whom she was working as a chambermaid. Born in 1834, Grieta's story is not untypical of many Latvian women of that era. Eksteins sees her as an important figure, more representative of the age than the baron who bedded her.
The author wonders if the curse that Grieta is said to have pronounced has, in fact, come true. Like Artemis of Greek mythology who, after being seen bathing by Actaeon, turned the archer into a stag so that his own dogs would tear him apart. So too, Eksteins surmises, has this wronged symbol of Latvian womanhood exacted a terrible blood sacrifice from the lineage of her colonialist master.
Eksteins plays the folds of history, juxtaposing slices of personal story with uprisings, battles, massacres and the shifting tides of international politics over the last 150 years. His feelers reach
across the decades and borderlands. And the borderlands are usually dark places, says Eksteins, in a century "that swirls in eddies of centrifugal malice.”
"It must be told from the border, which is the new center," he says. "It must be told from the perspective of those who survived, resurrecting those who died. It must evoke the journey of us all into
exile."
The tale is grounded in Germany in 1945. The German cities are mere shells or less, and millions of dispossessed people are milling about-- flotsam tossed up by a maelstrom of unthinkable proportions.
"Germany at the end of World War II is the ultimate 'placeless' place--defeated, prostrate, epicenter of both evil and grief, of agency and submission," he writes. "It is here in the swampland of meaningless meaning, that our century has its fulcrum."
But what a terrible swath it has cut to arrive there. Statistics can only convey more zeros piled on top of corpses. But Eksteins offers some provocative parallels as the decades of slaughter spiral into a vortex of absurdity and terror. "Nineteen forty-five is not our victory, as we so often like to think; 1945 is our problem."
The story begins and ends with Latvians. A fiercely independent culture, they have never taken to being occupied or coerced. As Englishwoman Elizabeth Rigby writes, in Letters from the Shores of the Baltic (c.1830), the indigenous Latvians were difficult subjects and strongly objected to the enforced Christianity imported by invading 13th century Teutonic knights.
“Contented with their unexpensive deities of forest and dell, they resisted to the utmost; only declaring themselves converts after their huts were razed, their land plundered, and their best hunters slain; relapsing the moment their new brethren's backs were turned.”
Medieval chronicler Heinrich von Lettland, infuriated by violent resistance shown by the native tribes, presages the centuries of destruction that was to be visited on these people. "They deserve to be killed, rather than Baptized," he declares.
And so they were. Folklorist Gottfried von Herder equated the devastation wrought by the Baltic crusade with the Spanish conquest of Peru where almost a whole civilization was wiped out.
A few hundred years later, during the Northern War between Sweden and Russia (1700-1721), the land was again leveled. The Russian commander Sheremetyev reported: "From Reval [Tallinn] to Riga everything has been eradicated, root and branch."
The Baltic states lie in the path of ambitious giants. Napoleon and Hitler both used the region as a stepping stone on their way to attack Moscow. The Russians, of course, have always eyed the Baltic zone covetously since the time of Peter the Great.
Somehow, despite the changing rulers and the moveable borders, the German aristocrats were able to maintain their privileged position as feudal lords and keep title to most of the land. The link between Baltic Germans and Russians was particularly strong during tsarist times.
This Russo-German paradigm is of particular interest to Eksteins. He asserts that the politics of extremist left and right are not that far apart in Latvia, and that various accommodations between the two powers over the years are not surprising, i.e. the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939; the close ties between former East Germany and the Soviets; and the alliance of the German Freikorps and White Russian opportunists after World War I.
At the height of absurdity, 1919 found several forces competing on Latvian soil. The British navy, Bolsheviks, Latvian nationalist troops, White Russian units and German mercenaries fought pitched battles during that year. As always, executions became a by-product of the fighting, especially when things weren't going well.
The Bolsheviks took hostages and left a stream of corpses in ditches as they retreated from Jelgava towards Riga (and murdered the rest of them in the Central Prison). Overall, the Reds took 6,000 people to their graves in this brief foray and clerics were often a target. "Probably the most dangerous profession in the Baltics was that of clergyman," writes Eksteins.
Not to be outdone, the German-White Russian alliance headed by adventurer Col. Bermondt-Avalov was equally as brutal. While in retreat from Latvian infantry, the rebels destroyed whatever they could. One of the mercenaries, Ernst von Salomon, describes the action:"We hunted the Letts across fields like hares, set fire to every house, smashed every window. We dropped corpses in the wells and threw bombs after them. We killed anything that fell in our hands."
In fact, when Riga fell under the rogue army's control, 50 to 60 people were executed every morning at the Central Prison, and Bermondt started the tradition of having prisoners dig their own graves, a practice that was to be repeated by the Bolsheviks and revived again by the Germans.
No less than the notorious Rudolf Hoss, later to become commandant at the Auschwitz extermination camp, received a bloody initiation during this campaign. By his own admission, he was "turned to stone" while serving in the Freikorps in 1919."The battles in the Baltic were more wild and ferocious than any I have experienced. There was no real front; the enemy was everywhere. And when contact was made, the result was butchery to the point of utter annihilation."
After almost two decades of independence and a flirtation with dictatorship, the coming of World War II brought with it a new cycle of death and terror. Ironically, in pre-war negotiations among the Kremlin and English and French emissaries, the Russians wanted the Western powers to guarantee protection of the independent Baltic states, something that the West has never agreed to do.
Following Hitler's attack on Poland in 1939, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania again found themselves trapped between two extremes, and both sides were to be the source of unspeakable horror.
Eksteins cites chilling statistics. "Between 35,000 and 40,000 Latvians were murdered or deported by the Soviets during the occupation of 1940-41, most of them on June 14, 1941," he writes.
"The homicidal policies of Stalin are burned in the memory of most Latvians. In general, Russian imperialism has a poor record in the Baltics and the "socialist" models of the 20th century have done little to make it better." Eksteins calls Stalinism "red fascism."
Moreover, communist collectivization policies and malfeasance fed the flames of nationalism. And in some Latvian minds, the close ties between members of the Jewish community and the communist regime meant that they were one and the same.
In a culture where anti-Semitism has very deep roots, the SS did not have much trouble finding willing natives to carry out their dirty work. One German official described the Latvian peasants' hatred for Jews and Bolsheviks as "monstrous." But many of the death squad recruits were university graduates who were active in the Iron Cross, an extreme right-wing organization intolerant of anything non-Latvian. In a photo, the Arajs Kommando (a group of Latvian auxiliary police who drove around in powder-blue buses and were responsible for killing 26,000 Latvian Jews) looks like a university fraternity - a group of freshly-barbered, intense young men.
Eksteins doesn't hesitate to look under rocks. As Soviet troops pulled back in 1941, Latvian zealots murdered over a thousand Jews before the arrival of the German Einsatzkommando units, actions that the Nazi brass found appalling. They wanted their policy of extermination to be a "scientific cleansing" rather than murder in the streets by hooligans.
An AP news photo flashed around the world on March 17 sticks in the mind. A counter-demonstration in Riga, Latvia, of Soviet World War II veterans has confronted a group of Legionnaires, former conscripts of the Waffen SS, marching to commemorate fallen colleagues. One sign reads, "In the fight against fascism you gave in." Two old men stand accusingly head to head, with the Freedom Monument visible in the background.
The two men are symbolic of the fracture in Latvian society. Eksteins supplies the figures: "Some 140,000 Latvians fought with the Germans, some 65,000 with the Russians.
Among the last defenders of Hitler's Reich Chancellery and Himmler's State Security Headquarters were 80 Latvian soldiers - the last commander of this battalion, Lieutenant Neilands, would act as an interpreter for the talks on German surrender - yet another Latvian, the Soviet Col. Nikolajs Berzzarins would become the first commander
of Russian-occupied Berlin.
As the war was drawing to a conclusion, the Eksteins family managed to stay one step ahead of the collapsing Reich and Allied bombing raids. War's end found them in Flensburg along with the remnants of the Nazi regime.
The last days of Nazism became a pathetic comedy. In an attempt to escape, Himmler shaved off his mustache, donned an eyepatch and changed his name to Hitzinger, while his intimate, SS Gruppenfuhrer Karl Gebhardt, put on a Red Cross uniform. Other former heroes of the "Thousand Year Reich" were also in Flensburg trying to flag a submarine ride to South America. "The fury ended, as always, in farce," says Eksteins.
With the cessation of hostilities, Europe entered a new phase - the era of the DP, or displaced person. Close to 40 million people were on the move when the war ended. "Collaborators, resistance fighters, SS soldiers, Jews, peasants, professors, prostitutes, children, paupers, bankers, criminals, clergymen. Every nationality, age, social class, type. They were all present amidst the devastation," he writes.
My Latvian parents also arrived in Germany in 1945, my mother pushing a baby carriage with all her belongings, and my father grenading Goering's trout pond (a very effective method of fishing) on his way through Austria.
They, like the Eksteins, spent the next six years in a DP camp until they could find a Western country that would take them. For many people, repatriation to the Soviet sphere would have meant imprisonment or worse, and some committed suicide rather than return.
But it was only because of the chilling of relations between the West and the Soviets and the start of the Cold War that the DPs were allowed to emigrate. Even the two flourishing bouts of Latvian
independence, says Eksteins, came about in flukish circumstances that no one had predicted: the vacuum created after the Russian Revolution in 1917; and the putsch by communist hard-liners in 1990 that failed to topple the Russian government.
DPs in Germany after the war were disliked by the German population and by the Allied military authorities. With limited economic possibilities available to them, thievery and smuggling became common pursuits. One raid of a combined Latvian and Lithuanian camp turned up 109 live pigs hidden in three different areas of the compound.
But DPs were more than an assemblage of criminals. These were northern Europeans with strong artistic traditions. A very active culture-in-exile soon sprung up in the camps as opera, dance,
theater, and music productions were regularly staged. Even a Baltic university was set up in Hamburg which at its height in 1947 had 1,200 students.
Canadian High Commissioner to London Vincent Massey was pleased with what he'd seen of Latvians. After inspecting a DP camp in Germany of 1,500 people, mostly Latvian, he concluded, "I am deeply impressed by the quality of these people who appeared to be industrious, clean, resourceful and well-mannered. The camp itself was a model of self-help, and I could not help feeling that of all the Europeans I have seen these Balts would make the most admirable settlers."
These camp Latvians were part of a great exodus that saw them settle all over the western world, with the bulk of them landing in England, Australia, the United States and Canada. Latvian émigrés were, for the most part, very successful in their adoptive countries and some achieved a degree of affluence. Vibrant and virulently anti-communist Latvian communities formed in cities like Melbourne and Toronto where their presence remains strong to this day.
The Eksteins and my family cross paths again in Toronto where they both arrived in 1952. In Canada "DP" was a pejorative label, and in many ways the new immigrants were made to feel unwelcome. They were frequently told to "speak English" and the new immigrants were routinely considered "second class citizens." Toronto was a very stodgy British bastion in those days. Some areas of the city were "dry," no alcohol permitted, and everything came to a stop on Sundays because of the Lord's Day Act.
Again moving across borders, Eksteins won a scholarship to Upper Canada College, an exclusive boys' private school, putting him in the league of Toronto's Anglo-Saxon elite. Later he went on to become a Rhodes Scholar and attended Oxford University.
The Duke of Edinburgh and Field Marshal Montgomery visited the college while he was a student there. One day, the aforementioned Vincent Massey, now in line to be a future governor-general to Canada, arrived to dedicate a new building. In his speech Massey praised the British tradition that allows them to turn disaster into triumph, vis a vis the initial defeat at Dunkirk and their eventual victory on VE day.
This is a bit of a sore point for the author. Yes, the British, Americans and Canadians suffered horrendous casualties (388,000; 295,000; 41,700 respectively), but this is small change compared to the 27 million Russians left dead, 7 million Germans and 6 million Jews. If any one nation can claim victory in World War II, it would have to be the Russians.
Moreover, the arrogance displayed by the Allied occupiers was not lost on the German public. The western powers wanted to publicize the atrocities committed against the Jews. They forced residents to visit the death camps and widely distributed a film, "The Death Mills."
As Eksteins points out, for most Germans who did not live in a city "the Jew was a myth, not a reality, as Jews were never more than 1 percent of the population and were concentrated in the big cities. But the German people did witness atrocity in the form of Allied carpet bombing and Soviet brutality and rape at the hands of the Red Army. (Although members of all armies participated in raping and looting, Stalin was the only world leader to condone such activities. When questioned by Milovan Djilas about the practices, Stalin replied: "Can't he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?"
"When the war was over," says Eksteins, "the mood in Germany was an indefinable mixture of confusion, fear, and anger, but not guilt, certainly not collective guilt." Writer Thomas Mann suggested that the Germans even felt some pride in the fact that the greatest tragedy of all time had been theirs.
Eksteins does not indulge in finger pointing. It wouldn't do any good. Who was the greatest butcher, Stalin or Hitler? Who should be charged with war crimes, a Kalejs or a Kononov?
"We must accept a variety of histories, but we must also accept variety within our history," says Eksteins. "History should provoke, not dictate meaning. It should be a vehicle rather than a terminus."
"Walking Since Daybreak" is more than a provocative piece of writing. It is a tool to access a murky and dark past which, too often, has been obscured by rhetoric and ideological agendas.
Eksteins ends the book by saying war poetry is the love poetry of our age, and that his great-grandmother Grieta would probably agree. This gives me a chance to include a poem by the greatest of all catastrophist poets, Osip Mandelstam. The Russian Jewish poet was exiled by Stalin and died in a Siberian prison camp in 1937, ostensibly for writing a poem that ridiculed Stalin and his "cockroach mustache." The following is from his collection of poems, Kamen (Stone). The heads could be from any genocide, past, present or future.

"Mounds of human heads are gathering / in the distance. / I dwindle among them. / No one sees me. / But in books much loved and / in children's games / I shall rise to say. / The sun is shining."

Modris Eksteins lives in Toronto where he teaches history at the University of Toronto. "Walking Since Daybreak " won the Pearson Writers Trust Award in non-fiction in March of this year. His previous book, "Rites of Spring," a history of World War I, received a Trillium Award.

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Sharing a couple of wobbly pops with my friend Hartley Nagy the other evening and I was surprised to learn that he'd recently taken a course at a skid school at Shannonville raceway. Even better, his company had paid 75% of the cost ($300 of the $400 for the one day hands-on seminar).

I'm a big believer in this kind of training and I've attended two former skid schools in Ontario, both now defunct: the former Markel school in Centralia, Ont., and the Canadian Center for Decision Driving in Grand Bend, which up until a few years ago used to operate a slippery track beside the Grand Bend drag strip.

Both courses were memorable. The Markel program had a really enthusiastic director who loved what he did. After lunch he pulled out a B-train configuration that he'd got surplus from the DOT, and we had fun jacknifing a set of joints, too. The pad was shared with a regional airport and the occasional Cessna would taxi alongside the pad, and locals from Huron Park would break in on the CB with some saucy and scatological commentary from time to time.

A few years ago, I got to take the Grand Bend course. The stopping distance and spin recovery drills were great. At the end of the day, I got the feeling that the students had bonded in a way, and come away from this training with more confidence, feeling more like truck drivers with some inside knowledge.

But I hadn't heard of the operation at Shannonville, although Rick Mercer took the program in 2010 and raised the celebrity of the multi-purpose track immensely. This incarnation is run by the Transport Training Centres of Canada which appears to run the program at that track about once a month.

As far as I know this is the only transport skid school in Canada. The only other training institute that utilizes direct skid avoidance training is KRTS in Caledonia, Ont., which sends its students to a skid pad down in Marshall, Michigan as part of their tractor trailer training package. I can't find much recent info on the Scheider's National skid training facility in Green Bay, Wisc., but I suppose they are still using it. And skid pad training the US seems much more prevalent than in Canada, with pads scattered around the States.

These courses usually use older trucks or newer ones that have the ABS systems shut off. But I'd really like to try these maneuvers with these controls left on. After all, that's what we're driving these days, with the exception of the old beast I had as a spare truck last week..900,000 kms and a sunken seat, but more annoyingly, the trailer ABS idiot light flashed intermittently, and after I dropped the wagon, the tractor ABS came on. Who knows how frequently these systems malfunction or are effective? This winter I saw two jacknifed tractor trailers on the way up Wooler Hill which seems more difficult to do going up than coming down, but apparently not for these two drivers. And here's betting they never went to skid school.

I think this is a great tool to give drivers, particularly newbies. It develops a sense of respect and wisdom about what that can go horribly wrong in milli-seconds. There's really no other place you can practise this. If a trailer starts coming round you have to get on it right away; and ramps always deserve respect, either bobtailing or coming in high and heavy. At skid school, when you feel the tug of the restraint chains you know that trailer's not coming back. And that should be the only time it happens in your driving career.

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Dan Pautler Live

I started reading about the Beat writers in 1967, probably when I was 14 or 15. When I read On the Road, what amazed me was what a lame hitchhiker Jack Kerouac was. He’d start an across-continent journey and get to Pennsylvania where he’d take a bus. I was sort of disappointed.

In Dharma Bums, Gary Snyder is more in tuned with what was coming in the 60s in terms of being a zen hitchhiker. Kerouac was more like a mad literary genius.

But I think On the Road created expectations in terms of being able to hitchhike. The technologies and the change in consciousness just sort of converged for a certain number of years…after that the technologies made it impossible again. Technologies accelerate and nobody really controls them.

Hitchhiking always existed in the American road mythos. As soon as automobiles came along it was inevitable that people would get rides. It became very popular in WWII because it was that sort of era of cooperation, the war effort and stuff like that.

Then it went out of favour in the 50s when everybody got their own car and became paranoid. With the Interstate highway system in the 60s you could travel fast across the country in 3 or 4 days. When the hippie revolution came along and the two things converged so there was a meeting in time that made hitchhiking a cultural necessity.

It was surpassed mostly because of an over-reliance on technology. Highways became unfriendly to pedestrians, highway speeds got faster. What made hitchhiking possible made it impossible a few years later. The public was given information that was overwhelmingly negative, about what could happen to you if you picked up a hitchhiker, making people increasingly paranoid.

A Couple of Accidents, 1977 Boulder, Colorado

One day I went down to the highway with my friend Salsa to hitchhike into town. It was just a sleepy mountain road, hardly any traffic. A real casual, bright day and this chick picks us up almost right away. Then for some reason as she’s going around a curve the car goes off the side of the highway.

The car rolled twice. I remember the tumbling action. We didn’t have any seatbelts which was good because of the tumbling of the car as it rolled. I remember rolling up into a ball so I wouldn’t get hurt.

The car landed on its roof in a creek. We climbed out but my glasses had fallen off. Then the most amazing thing, Salsa reaches down into the water and pulls out my glasses. Then we went back up to the highway and continued hitchhiking because we had a class at the Naropa Institute leaving the chick to deal with her turned over car.

The second accident happened the same year but a month later. I was leaving Boulder for Alma Gordo, New Mexico to get my aura balanced. I met these Sufi women in Boulder and they gave me a ride all the way to Santa Fe. Which was really nice, me in the back seat in the middle with these women at the compass points. But the hip thing was, in the middle of the night we’re passing through Leadville, Colorado and the radio announces Elvis Presley just died. Elvis Presley man. That was the night Elvis died.

They let me off in Sante Fe, the next day I’ve gotten a ride and I’m somewhere around Albuquerque, New Mexico somewhere and my driver picks up this other hitchhiker, a really weird schizophrenic guy. About this time you’d see these guys in white robes hitchhiking around the south-west. This guy didn’t have a white robe but he was weird. He started attacking this alarm clock that was in the car, really violently trying to kill the clock.

The day was getting freaky. So where the fuck do I end up? Rosewell, New Mexico. I took the ride to Rosewell figuring I could get somewhere else. In the southwest you get to thinking in blocks of hundreds of miles when you’re hitchhiking because there are only a few roads through the mountains.

So this couple of young boys pick me up, really drunk. After ten miles they’re going 100 miles an hour. And they spin out into a fence. We go through the fence and nobody gets hurt.

These French tourists stopped. Like wow, an American accident. So they give me a ride, a fantastic ride for 80 miles when a cop pulls us over. I was selling jewelry at the time and the cop had found one of my fish belt buckles at the crash scene. It had fallen out of my bag during the collision. But the cop made me return to the crash and he tells me I can take you back here afterward. So the whole night was spent driving around with this cop. It was late at night when the cop drops me off.

I finally get a ride to the Escalero Reservation. They have bars on these reservations run by Arabs, I don’t know why. But I went into this bar and had one beer. I didn’t know where to crash but I’d spotted this corn patch where I bedded down. What I didn’t know was that there was a guy’s house there and his shitter was on the other side of the corn patch.

So I’m sleeping in this corn patch and this Apache guy comes walking along in the night. He’s like 50 or 60 and gets extremely startled when he sees me jump up, thinking I’m an apparition or something. When he calmed down he told me I shouldn’t be sleeping there, that I should have checked with him first.

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Teamsters and Freight Carriers Truck Museum in Port Coquitlam has fallen on tough times, but it may flourish again in Merritt, BC. I was in Vancouver last week and dropped in to see curator and director Norm Lynch as he was manning the phones in the front office of the museum's industrial unit in Port Coquitlam.

The collection has moved a couple of times since I first saw it eight years ago. In its present location, the magnificent trucks are more in storage than on display, but the spirit of volunteerism lives on. About half a dozen old timers are milling about the garage in coveralls involved in various tasks. A couple of guys are starting up a BC Telephone 1951 pick up that was recently donated. “Give it lots of gas and full choke,” Lynch hollers. Others are fabricating parts for the latest projects: a 1924 Federal and a 1929 International sitting in pieces on a drop deck.

Lynch tells me he's known the end was coming for about a year now. “The Teamsters aren't that interested in trucks these days. The guys are getting younger. Local 31 is even representing the Chilliwack school district now. Times have changed.”

Lynch who is 70 now, has shepherded the truck collection and archives since 1996, when then-president Garnet Zimmerman asked him to find a truck from 1936 to parade in the Local's 60th anniversary celebrations. The following year the museum was granted its charter and the Aubrey King collection of trucks was added to its roster. Ironically, King was a shipping magnate who had a dispute with the Teamsters and locked up his trucks rather than bargain with the IBT. The Chevrolet Maple Leafs, all made in Oshawa, were retrieved years later from a padlocked warehouse and added to the Teamster Museum in mint condition.

According to Lynch, there has been a lot of interest in acquiring the collection since it became known the Teamsters were going to divest themselves of it. He speaks highly of a proposal from the city of Merritt to house and showcase the exhibits. It's not a done deal yet, but talks are underway to move the trucks there.

It's a wonderful collection from the oldest truck, a 1914 FWD, to Andy Craig's restored 1936 Indiana, the first vehicle driven on the Coquihalla Highway by the trucking legend himself the day the highway first opened. I also love the 1935 Dodge Airflow that could stand up to any modern aero-truck in a wind tunnel test.

Norm Lynch and his group of steadfast volunteers are getting older and he's looking forward to passing the torch. Lynch himself was a heavy haul float driver for Arrow before retiring. “There's two other guys who volunteer here who were originally Teamsters and they're 80 now.”

The visit left me thinking about the significance of the past and the need for keeping a historical record. I do hope Merritt, at the base of the Coquihalla, and a transportation centre in its own right, inherits this collection and does it up right.

Why is it important? Because it represents who we are and how we got here. Trucking is a culture that is rarely considered as such, but so important to the development of the country and our everyday lives. The Teamster and Freight Carriers Museum has to change and be reformatted to stay relevant. As do we all.

And speaking of organizations trying to stay relevant. I landed back in Toronto this week and went directly to the MVSA banquet in Mississauga. MVSA stands for Motor Vehicle Safety Association and has been around since 1947, but don't bother to look it up on Google. It's not there.

I know nothing about this body, except that my old friend David Logan, a legend himself, was a lifetime member, and I was invited to the function by Ken Hellawell, the fellow that taught me to double clutch so long ago, and a former columnist in Truck News. He's also been forever involved and instrumental in running the Ontario Truck Rodeo Championships.

From what I gather, the organization is mostly volunteer, but it probably gets some money from Infrastructure Health and Safety Ontario to operate. They certainly were nice people, mostly representatives of some trucking-related goods and services, from insurance, to parts and accessories, to consultants, safety people, as well as folks from the truck and bus community.

Highlight of the night was the 2011 Safety Motor Transport Award given to Shawn Jameson Safety/Recruiting Manager for SGT of Brampton, Ont. Jameson made some heartfelt comments about the meaning of public safety and society-at-large. He was accompanied by his family and also received a diamond ring and $500.

But just like volunteer staff at the Teamsters Museum, and commercial drivers in general, I noticed this group is also getting long in the tooth. The MVSA has a good crop of retirees, and I'm not suggesting they turn anyone out to pasture, but they could really use a few faces under 50. Ken tells me the organization has been somewhat dormant and is looking to revitalize. In which case here are a few ideas.

Get a website presence. It's absolutely crucial if you want people to know who you are and what you do. Otherwise MVSA is just another acronym like McMaster Vietnamese Student Association, which has a website. It's unthinkable not to be online, especially if you're looking to be relevant and appeal to a new generation.

Go looking for some good people to bolster your ranks (and inject some new ideas). I'll bet dollars to donuts most people in the transportation community have never heard of MVSA, but might be interested if you were to reach out.

Mostly males, and no ethnics, makes an organization dull and less diverse than it could potentially be. I'm not quibbling that Caucasian males aren't great safety people, but no women have won the fleet safety award since it began in 1947? Lots of great women in the industry now. As for ethnic diversity in this group—I didn't see any. Not that I care much. I go to lots of all-white functions, but this group is not really representative of the transportation community as it exists today, ethnically at least.

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With great interest I noticed that the 2009 acquittal of Avtar Singh Sandhu on cocaine trafficking charges had been overturned by Justice Janet Simmons of the Ontario Appeals court on Feb. 11 of this year. This means a new trial should be coming up soon. Stay tuned.

After being found with a massive quantity of coke (205 kgs.) in his trailer in 2007, Sandhu walked away on a technicality. The original judgement, delivered by Justice Michael Quigley, found that the evidence was gathered improperly and violated Sandhu's right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.

To quote a recent TorStar article from one of their satellite publications, Inside Halton, “One constable said he decided to go into the vehicle after Sandhu said he’d been ordered at gunpoint to load the trailer. Another officer, a 21-month-rookie, said it never occurred to him to get a search warrant before climbing on-board and slicing open bales of cocaine with his knife.”

However Justice Simmons ruled that Quigley had not established a “meaningful balancing” of other considerations and...“the further fact that exclusion of the evidence would put an end to the prosecution of a very serious charge.”

The granting of an appeal in this case must be some comfort to Ned Kelly (not his real name, for obvious reasons), who is the unsung hero in this case. At the time of the incident, he was working as security chief for Truck Town Terminals of Milton, Ont., Kelly no longer works there, but I caught up to him recently and asked him to tell me what happened that day.

On Sunday Feb. 4, 2007, Kelly pulled into Truck Town Terminals in the industrial outskirts of Milton, Ont., and proceeded to take a routine cruise around the yard

His curiosity was piqued when he saw a strange tractor trailer in the restricted parking area along with another car. He confronted two men and asked them what they were doing. They told him they had stopped for lunch. “I smelled a rat,” says Kelly. “For one thing it was 9 o'clock in the morning and too early for lunch. Something about these guys just didn't feel right.” Kelly noticed foot prints in the snow leading to the back of the trailer and could see the trailer had probably been entered.

The truck and car sped off when Kelly told the truck driver he wanted his dispatcher's number before he would allow him to leave the lot. Kelly gave chase and cut off the tractor on Steeles Ave., not far from Truck Town. “You're really p***ing me off. Now, I want your dispatcher's number and I want to see your driver's licence, because I don't think you're qualified to drive that thing,” he told the driver.

The tractor roared off again and Kelly gave chase pulling him over a little further down the road. The truck driver again bolted repeating the scenario one more time until Kelly finally managed to cut him off on the west bound 401 ramp at the James Snow Parkway. By then a MTO officer, who noticed the disturbance, had arrived on the scene followed soon after by a Halton Regional Police cruiser.

Initially, the officers thought this was a dispute between a motorist and a trucker. Neither Kelly nor the officials had any idea that the trailer contained a mother lode of cocaine: $8 million of the powder wrapped in bundles and stashed among a load of baby carrots.

Kelly was anxious to get back to Truck Town and left the scene before the contraband was discovered. He only found out about the arrest after a female officer arrived at the terminal that afternoon to take his statement.

When Kelly was finally subpoenaed to testify in 2009, he told the Crown that he no longer lived in the area and had to travel some distance to attend the trial. He was told: "Feel free to make up an invoice an I will see if I can get you some witness money.”

Kelly replied, “'I'm embarrassed enough when I think of the taxpayers money that has been wasted on this farce and I will pick up my own expenses.' As it turned out, I went to court 3 times and never saw a nickle.”

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I'm no wuss when it come to guns. My dad introduced me to target and skeet shooting when I was just a lad so I've always been respectful around firearms. My neighbours at Riverrun are all hunters and that's cool with me...I just don't go up during deer season and I don't mind if Charles at the end of the road picks off the odd grouse for the barbeque, or that Ron and his boys across the river go after ducks and geese in the autumn.

But for myself, I don't play with anything more lethal than an archery set and lawn darts, did I mention lawn darts? Picked up a set at a garage sale in Thornhill, and banned everywhere in North America, but still enjoyed in the free state of Riverrun hard by the Salmon River--we are risk takers!

But when it comes to handguns, like most Canadians, I don't see the need for them. I mean you're not gonna take down a grouse with a Glock. The stratus of truckers with handguns gets murky and legally bizarre south of the border. I ask you, what Canadian trucking company would allow their employees to carry sidearms? But this is not unusual in the good ol' US of A. If you've got a licence for a concealed carry, chances are good your employer will allow you to bring your weapon to work. There are probably a few places where you might not be welcome to bring in a gun, i.e., the US Post Office, and Columbine High School.

Gun ownership is a constitutional issue that's deeply ingrained in the collective American psyche--a serious fixation with some Americans (and some Canadians for that matter). Who can forget the photograph of gun proponents who showed up with holstered automatic weapons at town hall meetings during the last US election. Where was that Arkansas, Arizona? Very strange.

To generalize, many pro-gun people believe owning handgun keeps them safe and free; it's a heavily ideological stance, to say the least, and the more extreme view holds that one does not only have the right to bear arms, but it is almost one's duty to carry a firearm (or at least a sharpened set of lawn darts).

Canada has its own microcosm of this story with the governing Harper conservatives spoiling to get the long gun registry abolished, despite the apparent distaste for this strategy among Canuck urbanites, and the fact that law enforcement officials are staunch supporters, and Canada's police services consult the registry every day. But the governing party now has a champion in the shape of former OPP commissioner Fantino, newly elected in Vaughan, Ont., who can carry the no long gun registry banner high for Harper. (Canadians, with few exceptions, really aren't big into handguns and it's really not an issue here. We do, however, have our own horrendous psychotic killer in the figure of Marc Lepine, who put sexism in random mass murder by killing only women engineering students at Ecole Polytechnique on Dec. 6, 1989 in Montreal ).

The States are schizoid when it comes to handgun legislation: some jurisdictions like New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts have very harsh proscriptions against carrying heaters, while others seemingly format legislation to make pro-gun people feel comfortable, i.e. Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, etc.

Via Internet, I got talking to Lee who runs the Drivers Alike website along with his wife Danielle. They live in rural Kentucky and also have significant following on Facebook. Danielle, 27, takes along her pearl-handled Colt 38 when she takes her two german shepherds for a walk. This is again slightly shocking image to an urban Canadian, but it's legal in Kentucky (home of Daniel Boone right?), as long as the weapon is holstered. “The cops drive by and wave,” she tells me on Facebook.

Lee, 31 years old, drives flatdeck across the continental US and goes with an “American-made” Highpoint 380. As you can imagine, it must be challenging traveling to stay legal running cross-country through the US packing a revolver, but as a long distance trucker and proud gun owner, Lee's up on all the regulations in the different states he travels through. He carries a lock box where he can secure the 380 while he's traveling through states with stricter prohibitions.

All along, I figured Lee must be an owner operator. I had an image of a White Line Fever kind of guy making a stand who won't let himself or his rig or his family get messed with. 'Load up the Blue Mule for Houston. My name's Carrol Joe Hummer and I've come to work!' But he's not and O/O, he's a company driver. Lee tells me on the phone, if he gets certified for running Canada, he'll have to either leave his gun at home or put it in a locker in Buffalo or somewhere like that.

And just to set this straight. Lee and Danielle and their passel of kids strike me as good, moral people. I wrote down the ages of kids somewhere, there are about five of them, but two of them are 3 and 2 years old and they've both shot a handgun, probably one of the couple's 22 pistols. “How else are you going to teach them about gun safety?” Danielle comments. How indeed, but two and three years old firing off rounds? Just a tad early, I tut tut, up here in Canuckistan.

These are the kind of folks you'd like to have turkey dinner with and share a drink or two. Like many of my colleagues in the trucking world, they're often highly-principled, straight-ahead people who would do anything to help you if you asked. And it's not that I couldn't love them, but I've always been happy not to have firearms around the house. Isn't there some statistic that most homicides are between people who know each other, and are often related? So it's not that I don't like guns, it's just that I'm a whole lot more comfortable when they're not around.

So what percentage of American truckers carry firearms? Back in 2009 I asked Don Kirk of “InterState Sportsman”, who had been featured on Dave Nemo's satellite radio show. Kirk email back:

“That's a pretty broad question, but I'm happy to put my two-cents worth in. Because felony and certain misdemeanor convictions are not uncommon, and especially so, among professional drivers, a sizeable percentage of the total number of drivers cannot legal have any sort of firearm in their possession.

Another factor is that some companies prohibit firearms on trucks, and in that same vein, laws in New York and Texas are quite different. The more restrictive a state's law is, the lower the percentage of drivers with firearms.

Now, among those drivers who are no legally or job curtailed from having a firearm somewhere in their truck, I think is is better than 50%. Among independent drivers who work almost exclusively in states that recognize other state's "carry permits" I think it may be as high as 80 to 90 percent. Conversely in Massachusetts it probably very low.

Now, when it comes to individual in individual states, the numbers differ. Alabama has liberal concealed weapon laws. I have been told that one in four adult drivers are armed. I suspect it is not so different in Florida, Texas or Arkansas. I hope this is helpful.”

It sure is Don. Wait here while I sharpen my lawn darts.

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Here are a couple of more hitchhiking stories I've collected. These two are from later decades.

Tiss Clark

Hitchhiking died out as a common practice in the late '70s. But many people remained attracted to this independent, cashless form of travel. A few years ago Tiss Clark was driving a streetcar for the Toronto Transit Commission. But a dozen or more years ago, you might have seen her with her thumb outstretched beside the highway. She is in her mid-40s now. She has thick, flaming red hair and a mole over her left eyebrow.

"Hitchhiking saved my life. I'd hitchhiked around Ontario one summer and then moved back home briefly, but I was very depressed--suicidal. So when I turned 18, I decided to kill myself and even picked a day. Then it came to me in a flash: You haven't seen the world yet! Don't kill yourself until you've traveled!

A few days before I left, I told my mother I was going out west, to Yukon and eventually Malaysia. I'm sure it was painful for her to hear this. She said “Don't hitchhike,” and made me buy a bus ticket to Winnipeg.

I met this guy on the bus and we started making out. It got so heavy that we got off in Thunder Bay. We stayed in a motel overnight but it wasn't a very good sexual experience. The next morning I took off and got this ride with a truck driver to Winnipeg.

At a hostel in Vancouver I met this guy, Tony, from Sept Isles. He seemed directionless, too. We got caught having sex in the men's section of the hostel. We were in a bottom bunk bed, and suddenly there were footsteps and flashlight shining in our faces. We had to march shamefacedly to the front desk, where they got us a family room. But the fun was all gone after that.

Tony is one of the few men I've hitchhiked with. We hung out around Vancouver for a couple of weeks but I never really liked it there. I just considered it a stopping point on my way to Yukon.

About five hours out of Vancouver we got this ride with a Native family who stopped along the way. We went off into the woods and they made a fire, cooked up some food, and gave us tea.

We got one long ride, 700 kilometers up the Cassier Highway. Tony and I took turns switching between the back of the pickup and the cap. We froze. I remember endless, endless woods, sunshine and snow. It was very cold.

Everyone should see Whitehorse at dawn. It sits in a valley surrounded by a mountain range, and there was a blue glow around the buildings as we descended. Phil Collins' Something in the Air Tonight was playing on the radio. Very slowly and mysteriously, the mountains opened up on a magical city. It was May 8 and there was a lot of snow up there.

With 25 bucks in my pocket, I realized I wasn't going to Malaysia that year. There was a chambermaid job in Tuktoyaktuk posted in the employment office. I flew up there on a floatplane. But the guy that hired me was not a very good employer. It was a bunch of trailers pushed together that he rented to white construction workers for 95 bucks a night.

John was the owner's name, and he treated the Inuit like dirt. He was basically a prisoner in his own trailer complex because people had threatened to beat him up. I washed the dishes, chambermaided, answered the phone and served ice cream to Inuit children who would come to the back window (of the trailer-park snack bar). I kept the job for two months before getting fired. The old cook couldn't stand my whistling.

At the time I was living with an Inuit man, Sam, who started coming by the restaurant. It was a quick transition to living together. He was an artist who'd been in prison and was very traumatized by that. A kind, gentle man.

Sam wanted me to stay, but I was fighting depression. I was so young, I often think of what would happen if I had stayed and learned about Inuit culture. But there was nothing to hold me there. I'd been gone six months. It was now October.

I was back living with my parents when I found out he'd killed himself. It was disorienting hearing a stranger's voice on the phone telling me he was dead, and then the connection was gone. I still think about him.

Some people have a definitive trip they take before university, but for me there were several hitchhiking journeys that affected me profoundly. There were trips I made to
Gaspe and Labrador and around Ontario.

A lot happened to me between the ages of 17 and 22, between 1983 and '89. a lot of hitchhiking. I liked being able to say “This is as far as I'm going.” I always had some destination in mind, but not always a good reason for going there.

Hitchhiking influenced the way I see the world. Toronto seemed like all there was until you got outside of it. It still keeps me inspired to know there are people living in fishing villages in British Columbia, without a lot of money. There are other ways to live."

Tahnea Battle

Tahnea Battle was a born hitchhiker. Her mother was thumbing lifts while Tahnea was in her womb. The daughter of a European mother and a Sudanese father, Tahnea is a short, beautiful woman with dreads, and a vine-like Celtic pattern tattooed high on her forehead. At 24 years, she's hitchhiked extensively across North America, crossed Western Canada four times by freight train, and been jailed in Louisiana and Florida for vagrancy. Now working as a bicycle messenger in Montreal, she talks fondly of her traveling days while sitting in LaFontaine Park on a summer evening, pulling on DuMaurier cigarettes.

"I first hitchhiked when i was 17, on my way to pick apples in the Okanagan. I decided I liked it, and after that I hitchhiked four or five years straight, though I did stop to winter once in New Orleans. Most of the time I traveled with my friend Jasmine, a blond girl from Vancouver. We used to call ourselves traveling psychiatrists. People tell you everything thinking they'll never see you again.

If I was hopping freights I'd travel really light, a small bag and a bottle of water. But if I was hitchhiking I could carry a few more things. It was just the basics, though. A change of clothes, shorts, a reading book, a writing book, dental floss and sewing needles, nuts and dried fruit if you had them. I always had a knife on me and pepper spray. I had an old sleeping bag that my mom gave me that I carried around for years.

In the States I had a lot of trouble with the cops. They loved to pick on people like me. They'll stop you, harass you, go through your stuff. It's not as bad in Canada. Nowadays when I see a cop, I go the other way, quickly.

The first time in jail was in New Orleans, and I was 17. I wasn't doing anything, in fact I was buying juice. The cops said I was buying liquor. It was crazy. They put me in a tough section of jail. After four days I called my mom and they made her pay $500. No one even knew I was in there.

One of the weirdest things that happened was when Jasmine and I were waiting for a ride in the desert. This red car screeches to the stop, blaring Janis Joplin. There's this older man driving with a big grey beard. An old hippie named Sam who's on his way to Reno, Nevada, to visit his sister. He's drinking Johnie Walker and I realize hes an alcoholic. So this calms me down, because many alcoholics can drink and handle it. He even stops and buys us lunch. He's a jolly fellow, singing to the music on the radio.

But at one point. he pulls out a gun and points it at my head. “What would you do if I pulled the trigger?” I turned around and looked at him with no expression in my face. “If you pulled the trigger, I would die” He laughed and put the gun away. My girlfriend was freaking in the back, but I trusted him. I think he just wanted to see my reaction.

The absolute scariest time was with a drunk woman who picked us up in Saskatchewan. She drove the wrong way on the freeway. Now that was frightening.

Jasmine and I would always tell the driver “no sex” before we got in the car, but that didn't always stop them from trying. I got tired of always having to talk my way out of it. One of my last rides was back from South Carolina with a pair of truckers. Jasmine rode with this young guy who was nice enough, but I had this grandfatherly type who kept talking to me about sex in a nasty way for hundreds of miles.

I still manage to go for short journeys on weekends. I've been to Toronto to visit my mom and Vermont. Nowadays I travel with Casey, my dog. He's a cross between a shepherd and a pit bull, but he resembles a miniature shepherd.

My job keeps me in Montreal these days, but I miss hitchhiking. It's about freedom. It's times I was the happiest. It took me two years to settle down after I came of the road. But I'm already planning my next trip – I've got itchy feet."

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I'm not consciously looking for a new driving job, but I'm always browsing transportation ads, and there seems to be more and more demand for lorry drivers as we pull out of the recession. This being the start of a new year, at least some drivers are thinking about switching jobs and looking for a fresh start. So who's good out there and who's hiring?

I'd really like to hear some positive feedback, forget the horror stories this time. With any employer there is always going to be some negative experiences with dispatchers and management, but I'm looking for the good carriers and fleets.

Money is not the sole object. Thank goodness that pay packets overall are starting to move up, but there are lots of other factors to consider when choosing a carrier. Pension, dental plan, personal days, enough work to keep you busy, good equipment, pet and rider friendly vehicles. Do you want to haul short or long haul, work regional or city, flat bed or dry van, and how often do you want to get home? Do you want to work for a big company like FedEX, or would you rather stay with a mom and pop operation? Each situation has its pros and cons.

It all depends on what you want to do. My experience with driver services wasn't always good, but I know gear jammers who wouldn't work anywhere else. They like the freedom and variety of the work. I tried to balance a couple while attending university, but they were like jealous girlfriends and got really annoyed if you turned down work, especially if they found out you were working for a rival agency.

With a student loan hanging over me, I went to work on a contract for an agency and stayed too long. The money wasn't great and the work was back-breaking, but I stuck around because I liked the managers and the co-workers. Somehow I then smartened up and went to work for a variety of private fleets. Starting with Eaton's until they folded, followed by a few years at a couple of big bakeries, who eventually third partied the work and/or asked us to buy the trucks. I've never been interested in being an owner operator, but the guys that bought contracts and trucks with this last outfit have made out pretty good.

I can always tell a good employer by the comments from the drivers. Usually when I interview drivers with good carriers, they will be happy to talk about their job and employers, and go out of their way to tell you why they like them. I ran into an old timer last night (I guess I'm getting long in the tooth, too), who was running Toronto- Winnipeg for Arnold Bros. "Good company?" I asked him. "Yeah they treat me fair. You work for them and they'll work for you."

And this is the case with many of the good carriers. Here's a few that drivers have gushed about over the years (sorry if I left anyone out): Kriska, Mackinnon, TransX, Yanke, Muir's, Bison, Rosedale, Mackie, LMB, and Challenger.

So what do you look for when shopping for an employer? How do you tell the good from the bad and the mediocre? Let me know your thoughts and try to keep them positive, will ya?

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I was seated at the same table as a bunch of truck insurance people during lunch at the OTA convention, and the issue of ice and snow on trailer roofs came up. One man acknowledged this is a big time problem in terms of claims and public safety, while another thought there doesn't seem to be a solution, or if there is no one's found it yet.

If we have a mild winter here in southern Ontario, I think a lot of transport companies just ignore the problem. They might clean off the odd roof during the season, or hire a couple of acrobats to do so. As drivers pulling out of a snowy dock, we've all watched plumes blanketing the roads and the drivers behind us. It's actually quite a beautiful sight (from the rearview mirror). What's really cool is braking on a tight turn and shucking off cascading sheets of ice into a ditch with the accompanying sound effects.

Snow cleaning machines can do some of the job. The best one appears to be the Yeti, and among the most expensive, but even it won't take off ice, which is a bigger problem than snow when it comes to public safety. Ice from trailer roofs can kill or seriously injure, and it's happened too often.

Some companies provide platforms where drivers can get tethered and shovel off the roofs. Others don't do anything and just hope the snow will go away by itself, or no one will notice, or at least not make a report. A few supply mechanical snow clearing devices, and those get mixed results. It's also necessary to provide some means to clear away the snow that accumulates on the ground from the cleaning, too.

Putting cleaning stations at inspection stations, as they do in the Maritimes, doesn't make sense either. The snow-laden vehicle has to take the highway to get to the scales in the first place. Part of the responsibility should at least be the shipper's. If the trailer has sat in a dock all weekend because they requested a dropped trailer, that snow then belongs to the customer and they should be obligated to clear it. But try telling that to a customer and sending them a bill!

And when is it all right to pull a snow-covered trailer? Surely it's OK to move one that has an inch or two of light powder. The problem is we drivers can't even see what's up there, and even if we could, few would risk life and limb to scale a trailer with a shovel. Until someone figures out how to solve this problem we'll just keep dropping snow and ice on the roads. So have a nice winter. Let it not snow, not snow, not snow.

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Over the years I've had this hobby of collecting hitchhiking stories. I suppose I've had a book planned somewhere in the back of my mind called Stuck in Wawa: a generation on the road; stories by Canadians and others about the golden era of hitchhiking. At one time I even sent off a few chapters to a publisher and got a form rejection letter back from an intern. I hate rejection so I gave up on the idea. Besides, what is published? One day maybe I'll put up a website and then anyone can read my stories whenever they want.

Not all the tales are from the 70s, I've got ones from other eras as well. Some of them are my own, because I was one of those kids who stuck out my thumb in the summer with a few bucks in my pocket and not much else to my name besides a knapsack, a change of clothes and a few books. I can't find any record of this, but I think the prime minster at the time, Trudeau, encouraged young people to go thumbing. He'd been a great traveler as a young man, and been around the world.

Those were different times, liberal, somewhat affluent times, and a series of hostels existed along the TransCanada, operated mostly on LIP grants from the feds, where you could stay for a couple of dollars a night, and get a lift to the highway in the morning. Most hitchhikers were male, and traveling with a female companion made getting rides so much easier. And I always admired those girls and women on the road, especially the ones who traveled solo. Here's a couple of interesting gals and their stories.

Katherine Edwards

Now in her 50s, Katherine Edwards owns a card and gift-wrap shop in upscale north Toronto. In 1970, she was working as a chambermaid at a lodge at Jones Falls, north of Kingston, when she decided to hit the road.

I was going with a guy and we decided to hitchhike to P.E.I. His name was Lumpy. He reminds me of a guy in Bonnie And Clyde who was working in a gas station and ends up going with them. Those same chubby cheeks.

The problem is that I've never been forgiven for this incident and I've never been able to talk about it with my family. It was something so frowned on that I don't have any memories. To top it off, I had been elected head girl in high school the next year. An officer of the student government shouldn't run off.

Mostly, it was truck drivers that picked us up. I wore hip-riding jeans and a leather-cinched belt, and this terry looped top that was kind of rose-burgundy with a collar and zip front. It was the age of not wearing a brassiere and this thing was tight-fitting. It's nothing compared to what girls wear nowadays, but at that time it was very daring. I remember truck drivers staring at my top.

New Brunswick was very barren and depressing. I soon grew weary of Lumpy, but I didn't have the confidence to leave him. Somewhere along the way I developed a bladder infection and it was agony. We weren't very clean on that trip; I don't think we bathed at all. I'm sure we stank to high heaven.

We went to a community dance in Truro, Nova Scotia. I'd never seen so many black people in my life, being raised in Kingston. So that was eye-opening.

In P.E.I we slept on the beach. There were crowds of kids and bonfires and parties. Most of the young travelers were from Quebec and there was a lot of talk about Quebec nationalism. They wanted to know our opinion because we were from Ontario. I was 17 and knew who Rene Levesque was, but that was about all. It was surprising how politically attuned these people were.

After a couple of weeks, I wrote my parents to say I was coming back. I was tired of being dirty and hungry all the time. Back in Kingston, Lumpy went with me to collect my belongings and accompanied me home. I remember him standing at the side door to my house telling me he loved me. I think he felt obligated to say that.

My Mom was cold. She said, “Maybe some day we'll be able to talk about this, but not now.” We've never been able to talk about it. This was a great experience that I had and I regret that I've lost part of it. Over the years, I've picked up the hitchhikers but I've never told anyone about this.

Eileen Mullen

Eileen Mullen is striking and tall with a mane of long brown hair. She's part owner of Alchemy, a specialty import shop on Toronto's Danforth Avenue.

I started hitchhiking when I was about 17. At first, short trips around Racine, Wisconsin, my home town. Then one weekend, I told my parents I was going camping with my girlfriend and we took off for California.

It scares me to think about how stupid I was. One time, I hitchhiked from San Francisco to L.A. In shorts that barely covered my ass. If it was one of my daughters, I'd be appalled.

This guy in a sports car picks me up and tells me I could be a model. He pulls out a roll of money and waves it around. “Look, I'll give you all this money just to retain you.” I didn't know what to make of this. We were zooming along and I can't remember what we were talking about. I'm looking out the window, trying to be cool, and he keeps asking me questions and trying to draw me into conversation. It was the liberal '70s. I thought maybe that's what people did out there.

He did talk me into taking off my cloths at a rest stop. You know the line, “I have to see what you look like as a model.” But I refused to take off my underpants. I wasn't taking off undies for anybody. That seemed to satisfy him and we got back in the car. We drove a while in silence and then he took the next exit into a little down. He dropped me at a greyhound station. “I'm buying you a bus ticket,” he told me. “A girl like you shouldn't be hitching."

Looking back on it now, I can laugh about it. We trusted people and usually got through all right. But there were some terrifying things that happened, too. Years later, in Austin, Texas, I hooked up with this beautiful girl, Edna, originally from Sri Lanka, although she'd lived in Australia. She was astonishingly beautiful and had this tanned look. Her attitude was that life was a party and nothing could go wrong.

We hitchhiked together from Austin to Laredo, Texas. From there we were going to take the bus to Mexico City. That was the plan. I was heading for Taxco to buy silver jewelry. That was what I did those days - bought jewelry in Mexico and sold it in the U.S. At the time I was five months pregnant. My future husband was somewhere in South America and I hadn't heard from him in months.

While I was lining up for bus tickets, Edna comes back and tells me she's found us a ride to Monterey. “It's going to be just great,” she says.

We ended up in the back of an old Chevy pickup truck with these men driving around the streets of Neuvo Laredo in Mexico for about two hours. It's getting to be dusk and I'm crying. At one point Edna grabbed me as I tried to step out of the rolling truck.

Then they turned down this dirt road. Now, I speak Spanish so I knew that these guys were up to no good. Edna's dark skinned and they assume she speaks Spanish, but she doesn't. Finally she clued in when one of the men in the back told her in English: “Oh, by the way. These guys want to rape you”

She goes, “What!” And I was crying, “Dios, mio. Don't Kill my baby.” I went on and on in Spanish, moaning and praying.

Somehow, they decided not to bother with us. They dropped us off at the next village. They weren't even going to Monterey. We had been driving parallel to the border.

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As Ontario's pilot LCV program is getting ready to wrap up for the winter, I've noticed something strange going on. They're getting faster. Some of the long trains are pushing the 90kph limit, and I don't just mean downhill.

The Ontario/Quebec reg's are pretty clear: Thou shalt not exceed 90 kph, and most of the big boys seem to be keeping it there. But the tractors are governed for 105 and when the law's not looking some of the trainmen are dropping the hammer part ways. Usually at night, and I suspect they're trying to do Montreal-Toronto round trips and trying to keep within HOS. When the highway gets closed they also get all messed up because they can't take detours, and don't forget they're not allowed in the Big Smoke during rush hour.

So if you're trying to run say, Mississauga Road to the Montreal suburb of Anjou, you'd be pretty hard pressed to do it in 6.5 hours steady driving at 90kms without a break. Even if the trains hooked up when you get there, pulling a round trip in 14hours, without exceeding 12 hours driving time is nigh impossible.

Quickening road trains are a new issue. Maybe it's not a big deal, and I'm sure they can do 100 yards safely, no problemo, like they do out West. But this is while the pilot project is still in effect. Why jeopardize the trial, when most companies only have one or two permits?

And remember, these are supposed to be the best, most qualified, conscientious drivers, the cream of the creme brule, exemplary knights of the blacktop. But unless you've got the cruise control set at nine-zero, a driver could be excused for letting it go a little bit down the gentle rolling hills of Northumberland County. But that's not what I'm talking about. These daredevils are up to 95 and maybe more when no one's looking. Yikes, I say.

So what's the big deal? Truly, I only noticed because I used to whip by these guys doing my 99 kph, and lately it seemed to be taking longer to pass them. Speed limiters setting the max at 105, and the 90kph LCVs, have changed the dynamics out there.

As my colleague Bob Sherwood explains: "One night they closed the 401 for 15 or 20 minutes at the 613 in Kingston. I noticed it took almost one hundred kilometres before traffic worked its way out, to about the 710 marker. That's with four-wheelers going crazy and trucks running side by side for a long ways.

"LCVs, if they're working right and running 90, straighten the traffic out. People have to pull into the left lane to pass and the traffic gets spaced out quickly. But if I come across an LCV doing 97, I can't get around him."

This really is happening, but I'm not going to name names I've asked around and other drivers have noted this trend as well. Like I said, most of them are playing fair. Two I came across last night were doing 90 right on the button.

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I mentioned to editor Menzies that I'd do a survey of the 401 rest stops from Toronto to Montreal when I get a run that way, and he wondered, “Don't you have a job to do, and schedules to keep?” I replied, “There's not so many of them out there, James. Most of them are still closed. You have to almost drive to Kingston before you can get into one, and that place is a nightmare for trucks.”

I've never been able to write a happy story about Ontario's 400 series rest stops. The remodeling process has been a debacle from the get go--and nothing's really changed. But I've sought to provide balanced journalism and printed meaningless interviews and platitudes from the government press people about how great these new service plazas are going to be, and that irks me. However, superb indoor washrooms are now open at a few locations and you can buy chocolate bars and bungie cord from a few CTC kiosks. That's progress I suppose.

So here's the skinny on my brief survey, starting by running Eastbound to Montreal:

Don't even think of going in the Newcastle (454 km) site because you can't. Concrete barriers in place and it's a field of rubble in there anyway.

Next one is (was) is the top of Wooler Hill, at the 519km marker, so-called Trenton East. Formerly a McDonald's/Shell on two levels that never worked that well. Now the skeleton of a new one is arising, praise allah, but don't come in here unless you're an LCV with an emergency (hey that rhymes). It's marked “LCV emergency parking only” and Oppie has been enforcing it at times.

So then we come to the Odessa Esso and Tim's (519), just this side of Kingston, maybe the last original Jetson Family model with the spaceship roof that used to be so popular on the turnpike (Newcastle and Woodstock were of this genus, I can't believe I'm getting nostalgic for that old-time 60s architecture that was sub-par to begin with--these weren't designed by Frank Lloyd Wright). But don't go in here, either. It's too easy to get blocked in. Very limited parking, a narrow passageway around the back, and the front gets filled up after 10 pm fast. I still see LCVs in here, on both ramps and in front of the pumps.

At the 679 we've got Mallorytown and it's shut right down and barricaded. No stopping, no nothing.

Morrisburg at the 758 has several acres of parking for trucks. The CTC kiosk and pumps are open here, but bathrooms are still in portables. This site gets top ranking for parking but I'm not sure if LCVs can come in here, it's twisty in the parking lot.

On the Quebec side, a beautiful new Tim's and fuel bar has just opened up on Highway 20, just across the border. This has been badly needed and a good place to stop before heading over the scales and into the heart of New France. Parking looks minimally adequate. Brand new facility I watched sprout over the winter, very welcome indeed.

Westbound running back to Toronto.

Just after you leave La Belle Province,. at the 826 we now have one of Ontario's first On Route facilities. No fast food but the bathrooms are open, as is the CTC gas bar and kiosk. All the trucks are staying out front and there's virtually no parking or room out the back. I suspect that there's no room out back because of piles of contaminated soil and french fries and oil drippings from when this was a Wendy's/Shell/KFC.

Next one is Morrisburg westbound at the 762 which is completely closed. It was on a curve and I don't think it will reopen there. No stopping or parking.

Mallorytown (679), west of Brockville, has got some ad hoc parking and washrooms in portables Some of the parking spots out front don't look too wide, and not much room in the lot, better keep moving.

And don't bother stopping at the Westbound Odessa (670)..it's barricaded and haunted, only cops are brave enough to go in there.

But Wooler Hill westbound at the 520 is open (hooray). Trucks are still using the shoulders of both ramps, because construction has got most of the parking spaces fenced off. CTC pumps, snacks and indoor washrooms. Never liked the water in this place. The coffee invariably gave me cramps. No food yet, pity, only in Ontario.

The 445 is one of the first of the old-school sites and has stayed open throughout. Tims and Wendys. This comes just before you hit the scales at Bowmanville. Parking is not adequate though--not over night. And even after it was reconfigured years ago, I recall having to run over a curb to get around a 53 in an angle spot around the back. It was poorly designed and sits beside a lagoon so I don't think there's any more room to expand. Trucks on the ramps and along the shoulders in the early AM.

So enjoy your Ontario On Route rest stops. I haven't been the other way to Windsor in a long time, but it doesn't sound any better. Most drivers have learned to do without them and take their brakes off-highway--I'm one of those.

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Hey Gang: I've been off the sphere for awhile as my dad passed in his 89th year, and what I forgot to mention in the eulogy was the he had such a strong work ethic that right after he retired from Massey-Ferguson after 30 years, he went out and got a design job with Spar Aerospace (mostly to see if he could get another job to know he was still useful). Then he messed around with starting his own company and even had some letterhead printed up: he would work at home and take on some projects, maybe farm out some of the work to his old cronies. But retirement suited him and he dropped all that freelance stuff-: took up golf with the same tenacity and steadfastness that he did everything else. I could always outdrive him by 100 yards but I never beat him at the game and he never let me. Just like I never lost a game of snooker to him, although we'd both ease up on each other when the score got too outrageous. It just isn't right to play beneath your ability and we both knew it. Goodbye paps, it's been really good to know ya.

As for the blog, I found a disc of photos while cleaning up: unlabeled photos I'd collected for the Highway Workplace project at virtual museum website. This one didn't make the cut. I particularly like the ones with horses because our relationship with them goes back thousands of years..and that's what we truck drivers are: glorified teamsters handling hundreds of horses belching fire and clawing at the blacktop. I've got a bunch more photos but can't figure out how to download more than one at a time. Later.

View image

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I checked the ads for truck drivers in the Montreal papers last week, and it would seem the good times are back again. Lots of camioneur jobs in the Journal de Montreal (31 ads) and plenty in the Gazette, too. Trucking being a leading economic indicator, this bodes well for the rest of Canada's economy.

My laptop's hard drive seized up just over a year after I bought it. The dehumidifier in the basement stopped sucking 14 months after purchase. Seems like the Asian manufacturers have the warranty expiry down to a science. As far as laptops, extended warranty is the way to go. But it was refreshing to lay off the computer for awhile. It should be a tool that you control, not the other way around.

These energy drinks are everywhere, and they're especially prevalent in truck stops. Most contain a cocktail of stimulants like caffeine, gotu kola, taurine and ginseng among others. I've tried one brand on a couple of times with mixed results. It did help me stay awake and complete the trip when I was very fatigued. But despite being extremely tired, I didn't sleep that long or fitfully while off-duty, feeling the lingering effects for hours the next day. Some people are apparently having heart palpitations because of these potions. Any negative experiences from these beverages?

Lastly, I'd like some advice on bringing a bicycle along on truck trips. Over the years I've seen them mounted on the back of a cab. There should be room to do this but I'm concerned about staying clear of the hoses and hydro cord. Of course a road bike fits no problem in the passenger seat of a daycab--if you take off the wheels and the seat post. Then you can strap it in with the seatbelt nice and secure. Fold up bicycles are another idea, but even so they're still bulky in a small cab. I've often thought that a good fold-up cycle would be a nice enticement as part of a recruiting package. Having a bike along can make for pleasant times exploring new locales, not to mention the physical benefits of riding on your time off.

We drivers had three bikes up in Ottawa at one time, that I picked up at a nearby Value Village. We certainly got good use out of them cycling from our suburban hotel along a terrific bike trail that took us past the governor-general's place and Steven Harper's dwelling on our way to Mel's Diner or the Bytown Market. Ottawa is particularly bike-friendly and over a couple of summers I was able to explore the War Museum, Aviation Museum, Museum of Civilization in Hull, and the National Gallery. Did I mention the Museum of Technology? Canadians should see these places. Admission is cheap, $10-15 and we paid for with our taxes, after all. On a typical Ottawa layover I would check out some used books stores, find a good ethnic place to eat lunch, and go for a good long ride along the Ottawa River. Those were the days.

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Although the immensity of the BP oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico isn't understood yet, and despite recent editorials proclaiming Canada's tar sands as an attractive alternative to deep sea drilling, this is a profound environmental incident that is sure to change public perception around this resource.

No reason for me to mention that the world is almost-entirely reliant on crude, but what surprised me is how recent this addiction is. Re-reading Herman Melville's great classic Moby Dick, I was struck by the realization that whales were a major source of industrial oil prior to about 1870. Whaling was about oil!

The amazing thing is that the book was based on real incidents of whales that rammed whaling ships. Moby Dick was no imaginary behemoth. According to Wikipedia, Melville read about the incident of an albino sperm whale ramming the Nantucket ship the Essex in 1820, and sending it to the bottom with only eight survivors.

And then there was the real “Mocha Dick”, who had over 100 encounters with whaling ships in the Southern Atlantic between 1810 and 1830, usually coming out the winner. He had dozens of harpoons in his body but continued attacking whaling ships with incredible ferocity. And there were other whales with a vendetta, the most recent account being an attack on the Kathleen in 1910.

Well sir and mesdames, the Gulf oil gusher may be our Moby Dick. The worm has turned and the destruction is immense. And for all of us who rely on “dirty oil” for our livelihoods, it might be a good idea to have a look at the monster that is following us.

The oil craze in North America began in 1858 in Oil Springs, near Sarna, Ont., when James Williams dug a well behind his asphalt plant and struck oil instead of water at 20 metres (it's still operating to this day, producing a small amount of light crude daily). The first commercial operation in the US began in 1861 in Titusville, Penn., and J. D. Rockefeller founded a refinery in Cleveland that became the precursor to Standard Oil in 1865.

It's a wicked world and the accelerated craving for crude has sparked wars and destruction, death and depravity, on a macro-cosmic international scale. If you believe the report on 60 minutes a couple of weeks ago, BP was outrageously negligent in their exploitation of the drilling procedure, and sacrificed due diligence for increased profits and public safety. The Exxon Valdez was only small potatoes compared to the unabated gushing a mile under the Gulf that BP doesn't know how to stop, and neither does the US government nor the hundreds of species (including homo sapiens) that depend, or rather rely on the ecologically symbiosis of the Gulf wetlands as a source of life itself.

And with Big Oil taking a drubbing, Big Trucking can't be far behind. Outside of finding a new cheap and enviro-friendly fuel, we're obsolete and don't realize it...I know it's heresy to say this, but running trucks up and down the road doesn't make sense economically or environmentally. inter-city trucking should be done by rail except for a small percentage of perishables, and that should be prohibitively expensive unless deemed a necessity.

You can put all the LCVs on the road you want and it won't make much of a dent. Freight on the 401 corridor should be moving by rail and I suppose we're lucky that the rail infrastructure is so backwards and arrogant that we can keep our jobs for now. The two Canadian railways have an untouchable monopoly and they just don't care about service to customers or the common good.

And where are the new technologies and alternatives to internal combustion? Years down the road if that. Hydrogen fuel cells haven't panned out, electric trucks are still in their nascence, and other alternative fueled vehicles are just a pipe dream at present.

Not that the fickle public is going to help any. A recent survey indicated at 75% of Canadians “care” about the environment, but only 1 in 100 are willing to give up their cars to make a difference. The public is “concerned” about the latest glitch in the crude oil supply chain but nothing seems to be changing (except for the dinosaurs that claim global warming is an anomaly and we should keep on polluting all the way home, or as prime minister Harper aptly told us, global warming is a “socialist” plot).

So keep on trucking brothers and sisters but don't look back. The big white whale is gaining on us!

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I ran across this personal essay by Linda Duffus and thought it was pertinent to our profession. Although I'm not hauling long distance these days, I can personally attest that this job is very tough to balance with family life. Linda is a product of a trucking family and she articulates a child's perspective about growing up with a long haul dad.

The role of the long distance trucking parent is not an easy one. I know one situation where the mother is on the road and the dad handles the childcare, but in most cases, the father-figure is expected to be all things to the family besides just a breadwinner and home repairman. He's also expected to be disciplinarian, companion, friend, great lover, sage, fun guy, moral compass, sugar daddy, Santa Claus, strong man, problem solver and the rock of the unit.

Unfortunately, parents sometimes don't realize how deep an impression their words and actions have on their children. Thanks for the following Linda!

A Kid's Point of View
>>
>>My father was gone a lot. That's what happens when your profession is
>>truck driver. You have to go where the load takes you and it takes just as
>>long as it takes. It's easy to understand that concept when you are an
>>adult with bills to pay, a little less so when you are five and you have
>>to walk to swimming lessons in the frigidness of winter because the only
>>person in the family that drives, your Dad, is several hours away from
>>home, bouncing around in his loud, noisy truck. It makes you angry that he
>>will be spending the night in some motel, maybe with a pool, while your
>>feet are cold and your hair is frozen into icicle strings that smack your
>>face as you're pulled along by your Mom, who is tired and angry and cold
>>as well.
>>
>>Back home in the tiny apartment, you, your brother and your Mom have a hot
>>chocolate to warm yourselves up, and soft, fluffy jammies bring comfort.
>>After a quick read of a story and a brush of the teeth, the three of you
>>climb into Mom and Dad's bed and snuggle yourselves into sleep. All so you
>>can rest up for the morning, when a walk to the babysitters is the start
>>to the day. It wasn't quite the "ten miles through snowdrifts up to the
>>armpits in bare feet" that my father used to walk when he was a kid, but
>>it seemed awful enough.
>>
>>A few days later, my Dad would return. We'd know he'd be coming without
>>even having to ask. Mom would be dressed up all pretty, and like as not,
>>my brother and I would be in trouble for doing something wrong and the
>>threat of "wait till your father gets home" would be said with a little
>>more weight behind it than it had on other days. I swear that sometimes my
>>father started removing his belt as he climbed the apartment stairs. He
>>knew that the moment he opened the door, my brother and I would race for
>>his arms and my mother wouldn't be too far behind to tell him what
>>horrible children he had left her with. I don't think my mother really
>>felt like that, I think she was just tired all the time. She worked
>>full-time and had all the responsibility for raising us.
>>
>>Depending on the seriousness of our wrong-doing, we were sometimes given
>>an hour or so reprieve, a chance to gather round as Dad emptied his
>>satchel of amazing treasures he'd brought from his latest adventures, well
>>those and a bunch of really stinking laundry. Mom would get the dirty
>>clothes into the basket and downstairs to the washer and my brother and I
>>would get our loot. A good trip might yield us tiny wrapped candies, or
>>little cakes of motel soap with the names of places we couldn't read
>>printed on them. Sometimes there were stuffed animals, or coloring books
>>and often it was little packets of jam that we'd covet for breakfast the
>>next day. If he'd been to Sudbury, a chunk of slag might be the gift. We
>>used to get pretty excited about straws wrapped in paper sleeves. (My
>>brother and I were raised to be grateful for everything!)
>>
>>Mom would come up from the laundry, and suddenly it would be bedtime. It
>>didn't matter what time of day or night it was. Apparently a family nap
>>was in order. But there was no space for my brother and I in our parents
>>bed now. Dad was home. We'd be banished to our own room, but we didn't
>>care, we had our treasures. I guess Dad was tired out from all his driving
>>and Mom was just tired out. They always seemed to nap for quite a while.
>>
>>Dad would be home for a couple of days, and our lives would be completely
>>turned around. Toys had to be picked up, meals eaten at certain times and
>>we had better be quiet while Dad napped in the chair, listening in his
>>quasi-sleep to some stupid sports show that was interfering with our
>>Wonderful World of Disney. We'd sulk off to our room, quietly of course,
>>and break the soap bars into little bits with our safety scissors. Or use
>>the jam packets as booties for Barbie and GI Joe. Of course Mom knew we
>>were up to no good - we were TOO QUIET - and she'd sneak open the door and
>>we'd be caught and all hell would break loose. She'd yell, he'd jump,
>>off'd come the belt and my brother and I are crying in bed with red
>>bottoms and counting the hours until Dad had to hit the road again.
>>
>>Looking back now, it seems odd to be remembering things this way. I know I
>>had an excellent childhood, I know that I was deeply loved by both my
>>parents and that they did the best that they could with what they had. I
>>know that there was never a time when family wasn't first. And it worries
>>me to think of what my own kids will remember from their childhood!

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You heard it here. I’m calling the recession over, trucking-wise, at least. Volumes appear to be up everywhere and companies are hiring drivers again. I’m not too worried about a double dip…we been down so long it looks like up to me. But before we inhale the fragrant winds of prosperity that are soon to blow over the arid landscapes from Surrey to Etobicoke, Laval to Dartmouth, Brandon to Cornerbrook, Yellowknife to Megantic, we're going to be smarter with our sheckles and zlotys this time, right? Admittedly it’s still slow though. I just talked to one guy who had to wait 7 days for a backhaul out of Kansas, until he finally found one in Oklahoma that got him back to Ontario.

Got to drive a 2009 ProStar last week and really liked it. It came with an Eaton Yale ten speed Autoshift which made me realize how profoundly good these automatics are getting. Only 50Ks on this unit but the drive train was wholly responsive backing up, not much lag time or slippage and a lot less free roll when hooking or stopped on a grade, unlike the last generation of sloppy automatics.

This truck’s on a regular run between Toronto and Val D’Or, Que., and the full moon nights were spectacular and the ideal weather made for sublime driving conditions: April Fools and fat moths hatching in the conifers and splattering into the windshield this early in the year, ravens.and crows making a stand on the highway And highway 101 hasn’t heaved too bad from Notre Dame du Nord to where it joins with 117. So nice to be driving without much traffic through the hills around Marten River and Temagami, and the full moon just made the experience richer, like a divine light illuminating this astonishingly beautiful country of ours.

I rarely get up to Val D’Or these days as I’m a relief driver bidding weekly on the slots as they come up. Accommodation in a classic hotel—the Continental—which contains the ghosts of prospectors (the town's name means “gold mine”), as well as groups of young Cree hockey players running in the halls (Val D’Or is host to the world’s largest kids' aboriginal hockey tournament in the world, and it seems scheduled every time I get to town).

Not much sleep for me, but the town was coming alive in the warm weather. That's a sign of a healthy community when a cross-section of the populace is milling about on the sidewalks and the doorways. Just one long main street that contains 25 taverns (most are country and western oriented) and five barber shops. And the economy is rebounding too. Forestry is still in the toilet but the zinc and gold mines are ramping up and the sense of optimism is palpable.

offering coffee and comfort to famous Polish Canadian Avro Arrow test pilot in Barry's Bay

But maybe I should write about the schizophrenic nature of the contemporary trucker. The old order of the mashed potato farmboys and their self-important unquestioned racial pedigree is being challenged by other ethnicities and truckers of different skin tones causing untold trauma on channel 19. Yes there are bad drivers among new Canadians, as there are among those who can claim generations of British Isles and European descent. Bring on the driver shortage, I say, and we'll all eventually learn to work together.

People of the Valley: Back to the Lander father and son team at Morning Glory Farm somewhere near Killaloe

And what about that Michigan militia that was planning to kill police officers so they could foment a revolution? The whacky right is just as bizarre as the militant “new left” of the 60s and 70s that had a similar mindset. This is the politics of intolerance and rebellion that's bulwarked by the angry talk show hosts that flood the airwaves-the Rush Limbaughs and Bill O'Reillys that are legion, yelling and stamping their feet on the Fox radio network nightly like spoiled children. And their Tea Party followers who have nothing to offer except negativity and absurdity. The paradox is that the country with the most personal freedom is a Petri dish for fringe groups that will stop at nothing to bring down the world's most important democracy for their own selfish neo-conservative ends. There's another militia in Michigan that is training to stop an invasion from Canada—no kidding. Yeah, look out, we're coming to get you with our socialized health care and used trucks.

Lastly, I was going to write about the myth of the logistics industry which is really nothing much more than a pseudo-science couched in jargon and obfuscation--a back-slapping coterie of logistics specialists who reproduce themselves geometrically. It's not all bullshit but some of it certainly is. Logistics is the science of moving goods in the most efficient manner possible between point A and B , and it's nothing that our benefactors weren't doing all along without the aid of fancy software. I'm reminded of scholar Hugh Kenner from Harvard telling me that his grandfather was stationmaster of the C&O railyard in St. Thomas, Ont., and the fact that he had to keep the entire yard set up in his head all day. He'd know what rolling units were going out when, and where they were dropped. Without relying on computer programs he was able to plot the day's moves and set up trains using the least energy without making redundant moves, not unlike what a good dispatcher or yard man does today. And what do you do when the computer crashes? Write it down and call the IT person? Like I said, I'd like to write about the myth of the logistics industry but I better know what I'm talking about before I do so.

Yours Truly at the Val D'Or depot docks: Another big load of potatoes!

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Thursday May 8
The pitching of the truck wakes me somewhere past Upsala, Ont. Looking in the mirrors, I can see we're in the middle of a caravan of seven big trucks making good time on the twisting roads of Highway 17.

Ross prefers radio silence, never flips on the FM stations or the CB. But I'm sure this group of drivers is communicating. They're traveling fast and fairly close together.

It is a midway ride across the north, a caterpillar with 14 eyes that weaves its way through the black night. Suddenly, Ignace, Ont., appears in a ribbon of neon truck stop lights and Ross pulls up to the pumps. The Peterbilt is thirsty.

One of the drivers in our convoy, a Quebec driver with a cabover Freightliner, pulls up to tell us we have no taillights. This comes as a surprise.

But you can find an apprentice mechanic at 1:00 am in Ignace. "Yepper, I know just the fella," says the diesel jockey. A baseball-capped young man appears as if by magic, and connects the hydro again in fifteen minutes--the problem is a misfit light cord. The baseball hat goes back to watching television with a few extra bucks in his pocket.

It's my drive to Kenora and Ross takes the bunk. I'm not used to long distance driving, my legs are cramping from spending long hours in the same position. It would be great if truckers could ride a treadmill or stationary bicycle as they drive. A small survey conducted by two nurses in Cambridge, Ont. showed that 81% of truck drivers are overweight, 60% don't get enough exercise, 34% have high blood pressure, and 31% smoke. Maybe the stationary bicycle could charge some sort of auxiliary life support equipment.

We've twisted the light pods so they're working a little better how, though the headlights are still far from effective. I stop to piss outside of Dryden. It's a dark night and very still, only the occasional roar of a semi flying by and Dopplering into the engulfing blackness.

Most teams switch roles every four or five hours. But Ross and I are changing quicker--about every three. Ross takes the wheel at Kenora and I nod off.

I startle myself away just as the lights of Winnipeg come into sight. A light rain is misting as Ross is passing a B-train. "I'm tired," Ross says, wrist propped on top of the gearshift. "I was thinking of curling up on the floor." He steers us to the outskirts of Winnipeg and a welcoming Husky parking lot.

Ross takes the bunk while I go for take out coffee, brownies, a Winnipeg Free Press. The rain is smattering heavier as I pull out of the service centre, and promptly miss the bypass, snacking on brownies. It's all right, I tell myself. How often do you get to see downtown Winnipeg at 5:00am?

The bakery trucks and cars are beginning to swell the streets, a pre-dawn restlessness washes across the city. I take Broadway and then Portage, passing only a block from the provincial legislature. After about 30 traffic lights, I can spot an inspection station in the distance. But the officers are busy with a customer. No flashing lights for us.

Ross awakes before dawn and we stop for breakfast at the Husky in Brandon, Man. Then, we back pedal to the local Kenworth dealer to get the lights repaired. One of the mechanics works on the headlights, while Ross pops open the side door so the rest of the shop can admire the antique cars.

Evidently, one of the headlights was installed upside down, and the other has a short that's drawing three volts. The bill is $52, but Ross is happy: the dealership buys three cases of Boot Brushes and he writes up a receipt on a blank sheet of paper. Every Boot Brush sale is a small victory for him.

It's Ross' turn to take the wheel now. At Broadview, Saskatchewan, he shows me where he and his dad had to unhook the trailer so they could get under a low bridge. They dragged the trailer with a chain by the dolly wheels (in those days dolly wheels really were wheels).

"There was a little bit of pavement around Winnipeg, and a little bit around Regina," says Ross. "Depending on what time of the year it was, you could run into sections that were gumbo--mud up to the axles and it would be impossible to steer."

We make the customary stop at the Regina Husky. I talk to three big men, farm machinery haulers, in the parking lot. They're enthusiastic about trucking in Saskatchewan (this was before the BSE scare). "We're busy as hell," says Harvey Barsi, tightening down a strap on his float trailer. "I've got all the work I can handle."

Inside, however, Ross is unable to sell any Boot Brushes to the truculent manager. "I'd be willing to buy some fuel if you'd take a case or two." he says. "No," says the manager, shaking his head.

A comedian once said, "The Prairies give a whole new meaning to cruise control." But the land grows hillier and increasingly saline as we vector westward. A solitary red tailed hawk drifting over the valleys might be a descendent of the same one that watched the Mackie trucks roll through here 50 years ago.

Ross' decision not to get fuel in Regina leaves the gauge dangling on E by the time we reach a Husky in Medicine Hat, Alberta.

We both eat quickly. I have the last portion of farmer's sausage and immediately regret it. Ross, meanwhile, fumbles with his cell phone--this is an ongoing ritual and takes him at least an hour per day, sometimes two or three hours. Each time he listens to his long list of messages and meticulously resaves them.

Driving the TransCanada through Alberta is a thrill for me, especially with the 110 km speed limit. We pass giant feeder calf and stockyard operations. As we climb higher, there is evidence of a serious May storm that just tore across here, a few days ago. The air is warm, but long ribs of snowdrifts are still clinging to the land.

The self-weigh inspection station before Calgary leaves us scratching our heads. "What do you do if you're overweight," asks Ross. "Arrest yourself?"

Calgary is another one of those cities that entwines itself with the Trans Canada--there is no bypass. We park beside a Travelodge at the west end of town while Ross checks prices.

But cheaper is not better tonight. Our room is in the back alley besides a row of dumpsters. The shower leaks and water rolls across the floor into the carpet. It doesn't matter. Ross is asleep before the lights are off.

Friday May 9

Ross illegally parks in front of a Calgary pancake house to start the day. We chow down on a small stack each, fueling for our climb into the mountains.

We share the highway with sad-eyed commuters and contractors, and the occasionally SUV with skis strapped on top. Light snow is powdering down, leaving a white coat on the fields and horses. The landscape looks like an Ian Tyson song.

Ross turns off the TransCanada at Banff and takes Highway 93 southwest where it winds through Marble Canyon and joins up with the Kootenay River. The panoramas are spectacular, with some very steep, but short declines, and equally abrupt runaway lanes that crawl up the sides of adjacent cliffs.

For eons, Plains Indians would hike weeks to "take the baths" at Radium Hot Springs, but truckers have little time for spas. Our mission is to deliver a dirt bike to a young man at the Greyhound station in Invermere. Mountain goats chewing on the ditch grass beside the road don't even look up as we wind in and out of the village.

Leaving Invermere, there is no quick way across the mountains to Vernon. We're forced to back track to Golden, BC. and take Rogers Pass.

Back on the Trans Canada, Ross points to a few places, formerly mom and pop truck stops, where drivers would meet during their cross-continent peregrinations. By his accounts, some of them were wild men who engaged in a wide range of activities from time to time.

But they were truck drivers, pure and simple. They didn't consider themselves outlaws, or cowboys or sailors. Their uniforms were peaked hats, bomber jackets and pressed pants. They drove hard and partied hard, romancing their way from one corner of the country to the other.

It's late afternoon by the time we connect with the customers in Vernon. The hired hand, Bud, meets us by the side of the road and leads us into the mountains--way up into the mountains. With a little dexterity, Ross swings the trailer around in a laneway and has us facing the right way for our descent.

Neither the Plymouth nor the Corvette will start, so we push both of them off with some help from admiring teenagers. The new owner of the Corvette also owns a cheese factory and is apparently quite successful. The car is a birthday gift from his sister. He bought the Plymouth as an after thought when he was in Napoleon, Ohio looking at the Corvette.

Before we depart, Bud gives us directions to a bar in town that should serve good grub. It's Friday afternoon at the Longhorn in Vernon and some of the locals are whooping it up (their dogs are waiting for them in pickup trucks outside). Ross drinks a near-beer (0.5%) and we have salad and fries. Some kind of provincial kino game takes place on an overhead screed every 15 minutes. People buy tickets but no one seems to win.

I'm happy to drive the next stretch into Kelowna. I picked apples there in 1980, and Stockwell Day used the Okanagan as a back drop when he rode up in a jet ski and delivered a speech in a wet suit, after he became Alliance leader.

But the view from the highway is dismal: heavy traffic, fast food outlets, and box stores. John Steinbeck observed that truckers travel across the land but are not part of it. Rather, ours is a world of lachrymose sunsets. The people we come in contact with are only peripheral and fleeting. I turn the Peterbilt west towards Aspen Grove and Merritt as the last rays of sunlight filter through the Rockies.

My chance to run the mountains comes at night. With so little weight, I hardly feel rushed down the grades. Only once does Ross warn me to lay off on a steep decline, otherwise the down slopes are an easy sweep. The Cat engine works harder on the up grades but never breaks a sweat.

We pull off the highway at Merritt and park in a lumber yard. It's a little after 10:00 pm. This is the best motel on the trip: fridge, micro, extra coffee. Ross catches up on a week of newspapers: Globe and Mails, Free Presses, Suns and Provinces. But not for long. These are well-slept nights.

Saturday May 10

When I awake Ross is in the shower. I mark up the log books and sip coffee, while Ross fires up the Pete and does the circle check.

At the wheel, Ross is torn between taking the old canyon road through the Fraser Valley or the Coquihalla toll route. Anxious to get to Vancouver, he opts for the high road. The Coke (as truckers call it) cuts two to three hours driving time and a lot of headaches. But the real driving is on the old road Ross tells me. "I could show you places," he says.

The Coquihalla Highway is one of the world's most modern highways and very pleasant to drive. It glides from one mountain shoulder to another, and kisses a few clouds along the way. Its altitude alone makes it susceptible to sudden weather changes. But our trip is clear sailing and worth the $20 toll.

We've run almost 5,000 kms without seeing an open inspection station, but the one outside of Hope invites us in to get weighed. Just a formality, we're empty now. The inspector nods to me from behind a sheet of plate glass. It's Saturday and he probably wishes he weren't working.

Ross wants to get the truck washed, and his wish is answered at Lickman's Esso in Chilliwack. Within the same block, there are two truck washes and a good restaurant. Ross forks out $100 for the wash and I go for coffee.

Gloria's Truck Stop, arguably, might be one of the best truck restaurants in Canada. The decor is simple: drivers sit around formica tables and vinyl upholstered chairs. Newspaper posters of the Vancouver Canucks are taped to the walls.

But the food is wholesome and plentiful. It has that home-cooked touch that's missing from the chain of truck restaurants that proliferate throughout the west.

Gloria Byerlay is a small woman of Costa Rican descent. She has a faint, downy mustache on her upper lip. Fourteen years as a truck stop owner have taught her a thing or two about truck drivers.

"Truckers are easy to please," she says. "Give them good portions at a good price." That and 14 hour work days, seven days a week, she adds.

Meanwhile, Ross has found one of his drivers parked in the back row of the truck plaza. With over a hundred brokers scattered across the continent, it's not really surprising to find one of his teams bunking in Chilliwack, but Patrick and Phyllis Skinner, out of St. John's, Nfld., are a good catch.

They look crisp as they enter the restaurant. Patrick has shaved and put on a clean shirt. At 51 years of age he has a well-defined belly and a shock of blond hair that he sweeps back over his thinning pate. Phyllis 49, is shorter and lighter. She doesn't drive but handles all the bookkeeping and inventory records, as well as the navigating. The two have been trucking together for more than five years.

"We left home on January 12. That was five months ago," says Phyllis pouring coffee.

"In my mind I'm always heading home," says Patrick. "Vancouver is a about as far west as you can go, so we have to be going home from here."

The couple has three children and seven grandkids. Phyllis admits that she misses being away for long periods. "But after about a week with the grandkids I'm ready to go back out again," she adds.

Washed and rinsed, our Peterbilt is ready for the last leg of our journey. Phyllis hands me a poem she's written and I shove it in my pocket.

The car we are picking up in Abbotsford is a bronze 1967 Mustang GT heading back to Ontario. My car carrier training (I was a once a trainee at Maris Transport in Oakville) is finally getting some use. Sensitive to the age of the frame, we opt for nylon tie-down straps instead of the steel hooks.

Back on the highway, we're very close to Vancouver, now. My son Matthew, who now lives in Vancouver, is waiting for me at New Westminster. I'm excited about spending some time in this new city and reconnecting with my 23 year old son whom I haven't seen in half a year.

The phone rings and Ross answers. "Grandpa, where are you?" It's his grandson Shawn. In trucking, timing is everything. Shawn, teamed with a Greg Heasman, a Durham Region cop who also drives for Mackie, are only a kilometer behind us. They're hauling displays for a Sony electronics show at the Vancouver Airport Ramada Inn.
Awkwardly, the two trucks have a short reunion on the shoulder just before the next off ramp. I quickly explain where we're meeting my son.

Ten minutes later we meet Matthew at the Burnett exit. I take a picture of the bunch of them. Then we shake hands and separate. Ross and the other truck continue to the airport blaring their air horns, while my son and I walk along the bridge.

Ross will head back to Ontario in a couple of days via Emerson, Manitoba where he has a couple of cars waiting to be picked up in Green Bay, Wisc. I've got a few days of research to do in Vancouver and then I'll fly back to Toronto on Thursday, beating Ross home by a full day.

It's not until later that evening that I find Phyllis' poem in my pocket. It's a pleasant surprise, although a thread of sadness runs through it. It seems like a good way to end the journey.



Driver's Prayer
By Phyllis Skinner

My truck is my livelihood, I shall always want.
It maketh me to lie down in dirty truck stops.
It leadeth me beside busy highways.
It destroyeth my soul.
It leadeth me down paths of unrighteousness for survival sake.
"Yeah," though I drive through the valley of deer and moose,
I will fear no evil for thou art with me.
For my fender defends me.
My grill and my bunk, they comfort me.
They preparest a table for me at many restaurants.
They anointed my food with grease.
My blood boileth over.
Surely, payments and headaches will follow me
All the days of my life.
And I shall dwell behind a steering wheel forever and ever.

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Back to what I know best, trucking history. Looks like my friend William "Diesel Gypsy" Weatherstone has got his site up and working again. Trucking stories from all over the world on this site--highly recommended! www.thedieselgypsy.com/

The following is from a trip I took with Ross Mackie in April 2002, I think it was. Things have changed a bit since then. Ross is not so active in the business these days, though he still puts in regular appearances. We always talked about taking a truck trip to the east coast to complement our journey to the west, but if we do it, I'll have to drive. Ross has given up his Class A licence. Also, one of the characters in this story has passed on, Rudy up in Thunder Bay who was a real gentleman and a great truck driver. I'll run the second part next week.

Travels with an Old Bedbug by Harry Rudolfs

I jumped at the chance to ride across most of Canada with Ross Mackie. Pioneer trucker is too narrow a term for him. The straw-haired patriarch of Mackie Moving Systems of Oshawa, Ont. has a long list of industry firsts: first Canadian carrier to run into Mexico (seven years ahead of NAFTA); first Canadian moving company to offer air ride trailers; first in the country with an enclosed car carrier. As well, in 1987, his firm was chosen by General Motors to set up a logistics network that eventually spanned thirteen plants in six countries on two continents.

But most of all, Ross is a good driving companion and an expert yarn-spinner. His crackling, dry wit cuts like a chain saw. His blue eyes sparkle when he talks about the wild old days of trucking. This is worth more than a free ride to Vancouver for me; the man is a driving history book.

At 68 years of age, the diminutive CEO can still hop around the upper deck of a car carrier. He keeps his AZ licence active and takes the occasional road trip to remind himself why he's in business. A few months ago he hauled Frederick Eaton's Bentley back from Florida teamed with his 23 year old grandson Shawn--the fifth generation of trucking Mackie.

Ross hasn't driven to Vancouver in a dozen years. But his reasons for making this trip run deeper: he wants to recreate a journey he took with his grandpa and father, just over fifty years ago.

In the early summer of 1951, two trucks left Charlie Mackie's Oshawa barn/warehouse loaded with furniture for Calgary and Vancouver. Grandpa Charlie and a hired man, Lloyd Simcock, drove a three-ton Chev straight truck with a 20 foot box. Ross and his father Merle followed in a Chevrolet tractor pulling the pride of the Mackie fleet--a 28- foot Trailmobile trailer.

This was a liminal time in trucking history. Extra-provincial trucking was still in its infancy. Some general freight was moving over the road, and a few bedbugs (furniture haulers) were making some long distance forays across the country. But for the most part, almost everything being shipped across western Canada, including household furniture, was moving by rail.

After unloading the first truck in Calgary, Grandpa Charlie and Lloyd turned for home, while Ross and his father continued to Vancouver. Ross remembers a harrowing ride through the Rockies. Most of the passes were single lane with treacherous switchbacks. If you met a truck coming the other way, one of you had to back up to a "cutout"--a wider section of road where the two vehicles could squeeze by each other. The two chugged through the towns of Creston, Trail and Rossland. Their little truck with its 248 cu. inch gasoline engine was badly underpowered and struggled on every grade.

Merle lost the brakes descending Anarchist Peak into Osoyoos. The drums over-heated and the truck rolled halfway through town before he could get it stopped. A sweat-soaked father turned to his son. "When we get to Vancouver, let's sell the truck and take the train back."

Fortunately, as it turns out, no one in Vancouver wanted to buy the little tractor. After making their delivery, they found another load of furniture going back to Ontario. The rest, as they say, is trucking history. "We were the Flintstones," says Ross with a wink. "But we done all right."

Tuesday May 6

We'd planned to leave Mackie's Oshawa terminal by noon, but at 2:00 pm Ross is still juggling a multitude of tasks. He stops to talk to the plant electrician--then answers the wall phone in the dispatch office. On his way to check on a trailer in the paint bay, he confers with a long-time driver fueling at the pumps.

It's taken weeks to put this trip together. Bob Fraser, a 36 year company veteran on medical leave, has lent us his 2000 Peterbilt. It's a 379 model with only 460,000 kms. Ross has had the unit hurriedly certified and quarter-plated. With almost perfect timing, a load of classic and antique cars for British Columbia materialized in the warehouse just last week.

And what delicious cargo it is. I watch a crew from the warehouse strap a 1963 Corvette to the enclosed car carrier's upper deck. Next, they roll in a 1937 Plymouth, and a 55 Chevy bound for Thunder Bay. A hacked-up dirt bike rounds out the load.

The last thing Ross and I have to do in Oshawa is handbomb a dozen cases of Boot Brushes into the trailer. The aluminum-backed brushes are a personal crusade for Ross Mackie--he's a partner with the inventor, Steve Shermeto, also a company driver. The brushes are bolted upside down to a truck's steps and are a popular item with owner operators.

What started as simple idea on a dusty trip to Mexico has turned into a 12 year business venture for the two men, and spawned a couple of copy cat imitators. "We've sold over 500,000," says Ross, shutting the side door of the trailer. "Our biggest customer is Paccar." And I get the feeling he wants to sell a few more on the way to Vancouver.

Clutching two logbooks, Ross climbs into the cab and settles behind the wheel of the Peterbilt. At 4:30 pm, unbelievably it seems, we're rolling towards Vancouver.

It matters little that Thickson Road is choked with homebound commuter traffic. The start of any road trip is fueled by adrenaline and nervous expectation. The Cat engine pulls us gently over the over the hillocks of Durham County. The afternoon sun is shining divinely over the pastoral landscape.

But the gravitational pull of the GTA is strong. Ross slides to the shoulder just south of Highway 12 so he can make two last phone calls. The first one is to his girlfriend Colleen in Ajax--to explain, again, why he is going to Vancouver and when he’ll be back. "I love you, too," he sings. The second call is to a "movie guy" who’s awaiting delivery of a couple of Hummer trucks at a film shoot in Toronto. "I’ve worked with this guy for years," says Ross. "I want to keep him happy."

Some truckers will tell you that they drive for the sunsets. And rounding the rim of Lake Simcoe we're in for a great one. The cumulous clouds on the horizon burst into spectacular violet and crimson blossoms. Very little traffic now--only the occasional gambler on the way to an evening at Casino Rama, or a gravel hauler making a last run back to the pit.

At the narrows between Lakes Simcoe and Couchiching we pass a Tim Horton's and the skeleton of a fish weir that was used by Natives for thousands of years. The sticks from the ancient crib are still visible through the water. About 400 years ago, French explorer Samuel de Champlain spent a weekend in Orillia. We slow down only enough to take the ramp for Highway 11.

This is Yonge Street, the longest street in the world, and the extension of an old Indian trail that was blazed by Governor Simcoe's Queen's Own Rangers over two centuries ago. The pink granite rock faces of are welcoming but too-familiar: Muskoka is southern Ontario's cottage playground. We roll past the exits for Gravenhurst and Bracebridge. Near Huntsville, Ross spots a Swiss Chalet and doubles back.

There is still some light, so he pulls on coveralls and grabs a flashlight. "I'm worried about that Corvette sitting close to the roof," he says climbing inside the trailer. "If things come loose, they do it within the first 100 miles."

We share the dining room with two local families dressed in matching pastel tracksuits. They sing, "Happy Birthday" to one of the kids, and hardly notice us as we devour our quarter chickens. We're gone in minutes, anyway, leaving a pile of bones and Loonies for a tip.

Now it's my turn to drive. The 13 speed Eaton Yale meshes smoothly and the 425 horsepower Cat is hardly challenged by the hills of the Amalguin Highlands. Our payload is only 10,000 lbs.

But I'm immediately having problems with the headlights. These are aftermarket pods mounted on the fender for that "classic" look, but they’re not set up right. One eye shines into the bush and the other is dim as a 40 watt bulb.

The inspection station at North Bay is closed. North of the city, wisps of fog rub along the road and I'm glad we're taking the northern route rather than Hwy 17. The southern highway hugs the north channel of Lake Huron and is probably fog-bound tonight.

At 90 kph, I can just make out the scarred centre line and shoulder, but the fog worsens and I have to back off the throttle again. I'm straining to keep between the lines, and relieved when the lights of New Liskeard come into sight and Ross suggests we get a motel for the night.

It's midnight when I pull in beside a long line of trucks. They resemble sleeping dragons, dozens of them snoring on both sides of the road. There are no humans in sight--the drivers are hunkered down in the cabs or in the motel rooms--except Ross, who's darting across the highway from motel to motel, trying to find the best rate.

Ross beckons from across the road. He's found a place that will give him a senior rate. Stepping into the lobby, I'm struck by a powerful sense of dislocation and other-wordliness. The pop machine hums in a pool of glaring fluorescence. The young woman behind the desk acts detached and surreal. The scene is empty and metallic--this is truck driving existentialism. Country singer Dwight Yoakam explains it better: "I’m a thousand miles from nowhere / Time don't matter to me / 'Cause I'm a thousand miles from nowhere / And there's no place I want to be..."

Otherwise, it's not a bad room. We're asleep in seconds. The next thing I hear is the 6 am wake up buzzer.

Wednesday May 7

A breakfast of links sausages and poached eggs under our belts, we're rolling with the first streaks of dawn.

The fog lifts in an hour to reveal Northern Ontario. Here, along the roadside, the disparity between north and south in this province is obvious and profound. We pass shanties and cobbled dwellings where souls scratch out a meager living on the harsh shell of the Canadian Shield, where the lakes stay frozen well into May. Most of us southerners couldn't deal with this type of isolation and the great distances involved. We're uncomfortable without a Loblaws or Sobeys close by.

"I'm hoping to get the Chev delivered in Thunder Bay tonight. I'll phone the customer later," Ross announces.

He gears down in Cochrane and pulls into the Husky parking lot. This will be Ross' first attempt to sell Boot Brushes enroute.

The owner of the truck stop is Mariel Vachon, a stocky man with a short beard who is holding a baby. He tells Ross that he already has an accessories supplier but he knows about Boot Brushes. Mariel owns a small trucking company as well, Vachon Trucking, and has the brushes mounted on the steps of his six Kenworths. "I'll take 10 Boot Brushes," he says, "Six black, four red."

Mariel points out his trucks parked across the road. He runs them heavy--with 500 Cats under their hoods--hauling B-trains from saw mills fully loaded with wood chips, maxing them out at 63,500 kgs--the legal limit.

He's not enthusiastic about the state of trucking these days, though. "I'm from the old school," he says. "I used to have 15 trucks but things are changing too fast for me. Insurance has tripled in the last year. I’ve got six trucks now and eight drivers. And I'm thinking of getting out of the business."

But he's proud of his truck stop, a place he bought six years ago. "I've always been a truck driver but this crossed my path so I bought it." Mariel shows me the remodeling he's done: new showers and the stairs are plate stainless steel--the kind of embossed star-pattern you find on fuel tank steps. Ross, meanwhile, is happily writing a receipt for the Boot Brushes on a sheet of paper.

My turn at the wheel. Northern trucking is making me a friendlier driver. Up here, every trucker waves and expects one in return. The process makes you aware of the name on each truck and gives you a brief glimpse at the driver, but my arm tires soon enough. The oncoming trucks are predominantly Manitoulins, TransX and Bisons from Winnipeg, Erbs and H&R Transport, and a few Yankes. Even the odd Quebec carrier hauling plywood or lumber. Obviously some freight, frozen meat for the most part, is still moving east-west in Canada.

So far, we've counted two dead moose and a small squished bear. Almost all the local haulers, chip wagons and logging trucks, sport impressive moose catchers mounted on the noses of their rigs. $3,500 seems expensive for an aluminum grille, but it's the cost of doing business in the north country. One large animal strike can be career-ending, or write off a $160,000 truck.

Ross shows me a place where a grader pulled him out in 1951. That was when he was driving a White 3000 series with a rounded nose. "The windshield tended to cave in," he says. "So I made up two lengths of 2X4s that fit between the windshield and the back of the cab." He also tells me that he also installed a propane lighter on the floor that would backfire and leave his skin blackened with soot.

"This where I nearly froze to death," Ross says matter-of-factly. Here, the road here is rough in spots, bounded by scrub brush and a pencil-thin shoulder. Kilometres float by without any sign of a homestead or a fenced lot.

"This part of the highway is called, 'The Stretch,'" he says, shifting into storytelling mode. "It's 137 miles with nothing in between. One winter night, I stopped for a coffee in Hearst, just back there a piece. Some older drivers told me, 'Now look, you better think twice about heading out tonight'. But I wanted to get to Vancouver and when you're young you figure you can do anything.

"It was probably about 30 below F. The gearshift in that White was real sloppy, but it got so cold that it wouldn't shift properly. Then my steering box froze up on me so I couldn't steer. I was stopped on the shoulder and the wind was just howling. By then my truck had shut off, too. I wrapped myself in furniture pads trying to keep warm and thought for sure I was going to freeze to death.

"Eventually, a snowplow come along with two guys in it. They took me inside their truck and warmed me up a bit. Then they gave me a lecture and told me I should have known better. Today when I hear some young guy complaining about his air ride seat and his lower lumbar, I think you poor bugger. Don't you have it tough!"

A flat tire in Kapuskasing comes as a bit of a surprise. Kicking the tires, I find a bolt that has gone through the casing. Luckily there's a tire shop in town a few kilometres behind us. Pulling under the canopy we're greeted by a balding service manager with a strong French-Ontario accent--and superb service. The young man who patches the tire is eager to go to lunch and has us fixed up in ten minutes.

The repair job only $50 and we're conscious of how much a service call would have cost on the highway ($300). It also gives Ross a chance to call the customer in Thunder Bay and tell him we'll be arriving around suppertime.

Ross also has a friend in Thunder Bay who he knows from the old trucking days. Rudy Croissandt is 89 now and long-since retired. His claim to posterity might be that he drove Field Marshall Erwin Rommel's headquarter bus in North Africa during World War II. Ross can't get Rudy on the phone but he does contact his son Deiter. He tells us his father usually can't hear the phone, but Rudy is waiting for our visit.

Past Nipigon, where Hwy 11 and 17 join, there's too much truck traffic to wave at every driver. Almost at random, Ross takes an exit off the TransCanada that lands us into a residential area of Thunder Bay. We pull up beside a soccer field. The owner of a diner lets us use the phone in her restaurant.

We buy fried chicken to go, but it's almost too greasy to eat. There's no time, anyway. The young couple who bought the 55 Chev arrives to escort us to their house. Good thing, it's a dead end street and difficult to back down. But the vista is exceptional, overlooking Lake Superior and the harbour.

The Chev starts easily and backs off the hoist. We're secure again in half an hour. The couple insists on giving us an escort to Rudy's house. Good thing, again, because Rudy lives on a crescent behind an old shopping mall. Ross tries not to knock down too many tree branches as we pull around the street.

The two men hug and walk off arm in arm as soon as Ross steps out of the cab. It's been 20 years since they've seen each other.

Rudy is gaunt but well-preserved. Inside his bungalow, he keeps the shades drawn and the television turned on loud. His wife died a few years ago and his main companion, these days, is a furry tabby cat who is stretched on the couch.

"I have a bottle of whiskey," he says to Ross.

"Rudy, I quit drinking 26 years ago."

Instead, the two pour over an old photo album that Ross has brought along. He has pictures of another legendary bedbug, Highway Hank Stroud, who drove a Leyland Beaver for a gypsy trucker in Hamilton. Another photo shows a 32 foot trailer that Ross laid on its side 40 years ago near West Hawk Lake, Manitoba.

Rudy has stacks of photo albums, as well. Old black and whites show him as a young man beside his old Leyland Comet in 1953. A page from a German newspaper shows Rudy with Rommel, himself, and the headquarters bus in the foreground.

Rudy also has a newspaper clipping of the time he escaped along with 5 other German prisoners in 1943. After being captured in North Africa, he was sent to Canada and jailed as a POW in Kapuskasing. The six were quickly rounded up and recaptured.

Evidently, Rudy liked northern Ontario enough to return here with a German bride after the war. Ross met Rudy in the 50s when they both drove for North American Van Lines. They'd see each other at points along the highway. At other times, Rudy would drop into Mackie's Oshawa warehouse to pick up a return load for Thunder Bay.

"So Rudy, are you going to come to Oshawa and visit me? I've got a Harley dealership, now. You can go for a ride on a motorcycle."

"I'm not going to Toronto. I'm too old," says Rudy.

"Do you think we can make Vancouver by Friday night?"

Rudy counts off the days on his fingers. "Yeah, sure. I used to do it."

The two embrace again and I snap a couple of pictures. These are the classic photos that the men want me to take: the two friends beside the cab of the Peterbilt, Rudy with a Player's cigarette sticking out of his fist. "Hey guys," shouts Rudy as we pull away. "Keep it on the rubbers!"

I crawl in the bunk almost immediately for a nap (I had a beer at Rudy's). Ross announces his intention to drive through the night.

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Who will speak for truck drivers?

Working truck drivers are not well-represented and have few champions. It’s ironic considering the sheer numbers of people involved in the trade. Up until the last census, truck driving was the largest occupation for males in Canada. We've lost first place to retail workers, but there are still well over 200,000 of us.

Now this may seem like a large interest group that should attract some notice from politicians, but this is sadly not the case. Legislators (and industry lobbyists) really don't care what truckers think. Don't like speed limiters? Too bad, they're here to stay. Don't like the Ontario government's discriminatory protocols licensing Class A drivers over 65? Too bad again--this is now policy with the MTO and no amount of bitching is going to alter that.

While researching the Ontario government’s sorry record on the padlocked 400 series service centres, I contacted the provincial NDP for a statement via Peter Kormos’ office, an upstanding guy himself, but nothing was forthcoming from the kNeeDeePs front office on the issue—imagine that, a party for workers that isn’t interested in workers. The only opposition MPP to run with this story was former conservative house leader Bob Runciman who got some mileage out of it, seeing as how the two derelict Mallorytown service parks are in his riding. To his credit, Runciman called me from his Toronto office one Friday afternoon just as my deadline was descending. But it’s unlikely that you’ll be hearing any more on this issue from this freshly-appointed Harper sycophant to the senate.

So which political party will speak for truckers? Christian Heritage Party? Greens? Marxist-Leninists? I’m afraid the choices aren’t much better federally. Remember the term silent majority? Truck drivers are more like the invisible majority; other than a few squawks you don’t hear much out of them.

If we only had someone with the mellifluous tones of a David Bradley, grand Pooh-Bah of the OTA and CTA, whose lobbyist-invocations always seem to find the ears of provincial transport ministers. But the OTA does impact truck drivers and their working conditions with its consultations and interventions. I.e., trucking CEOs go on a mission to Europe to “investigate” speed limiters. Not so many years later, almost all of Canada is looking through the sights of 105 kph speed-restricted trucking; Industry wants LCVs in Ontario, industry gets LCVs, etc.

So who's left to speak for us? I don’t think I’ve ever heard Teamsters Canada president Bob Bouvier speak on anything. With all the challenges of dwindling membership, recent attempts to organize casino and McDonald's workers have failed. And the drive to sign disgruntled Challenger drivers might have already stalled out--haven't heard much about it.

And don’t expect relief from south of the border. As one old-timer from a Hamilton local once told me, James Hoffa Jr. still has a long way to go to fit into his father’s shoes and probably never come up to the task. Moreover, the IBT has focused on a new constituency now that includes cops, security guards, teachers, armoured truck personnel and Disneyland workers. Teamsters officials just don't see trucking as a growth area. One website states that only 16% of IBT membership is involved in trucking.

Like buying a Sham-Wow

What about OBAC? Although primarily for owner-operators, it has good people at the helm, including journalist Jim Park. This group certainly has the ability to be a “voice in the wilderness” but paid membership is small (correct me if I’m wrong) and many operators are only lukewarm when it comes to joining a group and paying fees. Initially, it didn't help that Industry Canada start up funds were stolen by one of the original officers.

The feds were interested in creating a group like this after the blockades and slowdowns of Sept. 2000, when owner operators turned militant as a result of spiking fuel costs. Quebec independents just about choked off the northern part of the province with blockades. The provincial and federal governments grew concerned that no bargaining unit that could be brought to the table. Quebec passed legislation that would severely punish anyone blocking a public road. It's unlikely that we'll again see the direct actions and bridge blockades of the last century.

And then there’s Peter Turner of The Truckers’ Voice, who claims great success at going to bat for drivers and lots of paid up members (at $100 a pop). For that money you get a newsletter and two hours free consultation concerning job matters. Turner also claims to be an effective political lobbyist. He sounds like a radical talking to him on the phone and I have no way to verify any of the things he told me. Maybe he is Moses and will lead us out of the desert.

Truck drivers know they are important and that without them the country would grind to a stop. Once in a while someone gets the idea that everyone should park their trucks for a day. Presumably, so the public will see how important this industry is. A particular day is chosen for drivers to lay down their tools, but nothing much ever comes of it. A few O/Os shut down for a day and then complain that there is no solidarity among drivers.

Fiercely independent truckers don't like being told what to do, or what group to join. Some have contracts that they wouldn't think of jeopardizing, while others don't think work stoppage measures would be effective, and others just don't care. I personally wouldn't stay home from work unless there was a very good reason to do so.

It’s unlikely you’ll ever get consensus on any one topic among truck drivers. For example, most drivers don't like speed limiters, but not all of them. Company drivers like myself have always driven governed vehicles, and guys always found a way to circumvent them.

And what about hours of service? Most O/Os want the right to work as many hours as they decide, like doctors. But not everyone thinks we should be able to work around the clock. Some would prefer 12 hours off between shifts and mandatory overtime after 40 hours (inter-provincial carriers don’t have to pay OT because they fall under federal jurisdiction).

But I have to admit that the politicians might be right in ignoring truckers, bunch of sheep as Julio, pirate CB operator in Toronto, used to remind us. Personally, I’m voting Rhino next election.

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Driver #1: I'm just like every other driver out there plying the 401 corridor: I hate to back off the throttle since I'm governed at 99kph (love that word "governed" instead of "speed limited--Right O gov'ner check, my black box, eh what?"), even more so, I hate to make a brake application when unnecessary, but I really dislike having to throw on the binders just because buddy has been out in the left lane for 20 minutes, creeping up on me the last 5 exits. During that time I've passed four trucks and one car (ok I drive at night), now he's closing in and getting a few lengths away and I come across a few real slow pokes in the right lane, a three-legger and a tanker and a car as well in the mix. Am I right to pull out in front of him even though he may have to put on the brakes?

Driver #2 In my opinion making excessive lane changes is dangerous and unnecessary. When I'm going to pass somebody I get in the left lane and stay there until I've done my business and passed who I want to pass. The four wheelers I don't care about, they can do whatever they want behind me. The only time I'll pull over for them is if they've got a red and blue flashing light on their roof. If I'm driving in the left lane to pass someone, and another truck pulls out in front of me and I have to put on the brakes, I consider that an unsafe move on the other driver's part.

I think both drivers have a point, and there's a little of both in most truckers. Usually, if I'm involved in a marathon passing session with another truck moving a fraction of a km faster or slower than me, I'll back off and see if the positions realign, but I'll pass a slow guy on a hill to keep my own momentum going...Sometimes I'll notice someone slowly making a move at the top of the Kingston hill and they'll catch me in Napanee. Then I'll blow by them on Wooler hill and the dance begins again. But I have to say that it's pretty polite out there most nights. Drivers give you lots of room. But I don't think there's any excuse for a professional driver sticking in the middle lane all the way through Toronto, and you see it not infrequently.

Last night I noticed a guy reading a book with the dome light on, and driving quite well actually, and another truck driver who was all over the road whenever he got past another vehicle. Most likely sleep deprived but I suppose he could have been drunk (actually they drive quite similarly). This guy would get past a truck or two alright and then would be floating across the lanes, or straddling both alternatively. I noticed he pulled over at Coutrice Rd. hopefully for a short sleep, it's just too bad I can't mention the company name, but I did chew him out pretty good on the radio, even though he probably wasn't listening.

So blah blah, and drive safe, as they say grammatically incorrectly.

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Really, I can't think of a topic that's more polarizing to the trucking community. And I should start by declaring my bias: working truck driver and IBT member as well as a freelance writer. In a past incarnation, I used to joke that I paid union dues to Jimmy Hoffa Jr., wrote copy for Conrad Black, and hauled sliced bread for Gaelen Weston. These days I'm just a peon in the Purolator linehaul network and I've never been politically active with any union or local. So the following is my opinion and doesn't represent anyone or anything. My brief survey of a few Challenger drivers below is unscientific and anecdotal in nature.

But Teamsters Canada president Bob Bouvier's vow to organize Callenger Motor Freight of Cambridge, Ont. might have less substance than his strident press release would have you believe. True, Challenger is in expansion mode and possibly some drivers are being courted by Teamsters, but the unionization process is never easy and this is a tight company with some very loyal employees.

My job puts me in contact with a variety of Challenger drivers almost daily and I'm always happy to ask them what they think. Everyone of them has heard about the Teamsters initiative, and the response varies from mild interest to disparaging comments.

“A union like that is only good for lazy drivers,” one Quebec driver told me. Well, not exactly, but a union environment makes it very difficult to fire drivers, and family companies faced with the prospect of a unionized work force are loathe to give up control of personnel issues.

The other side of the coin is that carriers paying top dollar don't have any trouble finding good drivers. Ideally, the lead hand system allows work to carry on without the presence of management. The drivers are supposed to be the best and most capable and should know what doors to fill, what runs have to go, etc., without the presence of a supervisor.

Another Challenger company driver, a former Teamster, told me he liked the job, but thought the base rate was a little low. Another man, a newly hired owner operator from the west coast told me he liked all the extras, free showers, laundry, etc. He added that his recruiter was incredibly attentive to him whenever he called in.

Stats Canada figures indicate that unionized drivers make a bit more than non-union drivers and work slightly less hours. From my perspective, after working for driver services and random carriers, I went gunning for the best paying jobs and they were usually union fleets.

But every month $61 from my paycheque goes to the IBT (I'd be curious to know how much stays in Canada and how much goes to the head office in Washington). Make no mistake, Teamsters are a big corporate union and historically have been able to get a good rate for their members. But it's not the only union model in Canada. If I remember correctly, roughly just under 20% of truck drivers are represented by a union in Canada. Besides IBT, Steelworkers, CAW, UFCW and Chemical Electrical and Paperworkers all have a trucking component as part of their membership.

No company welcomes unionization: it's too much trouble, it will reduce profits, they'll ask for too much, they'll be too strong and shut the plant down in the event of a dispute. But there are potential benefits to a union model. A collective agreement spells out exactly the duties and responsibilities of employees and management. And although the grievance system my be time-consuming, once a company gets to a certain size, it helps to have a standard disciplinary protocol in place. After a labour board ruling a few years back, Mackie Moving Systems of Oshawa, Ont. was organized by Teamsters local 938 and, unofficially, I don't think the process was particularly painful for either party.

Are drivers better off in a union? From my perspective. yes, but only very slightly and it really depends upon your situation. Some owner operators would never consider working for a union while others don't have any problem with a collective agreement. The Challenger drivers I talked to weren't exactly hopping out of their trucks to sign a union card

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.

That little is written about truck culture and history might surprise some. After all, it's been such an important trade on this continent since early European settlement, and only until recently (2006 census) has it been displaced as the number one occupation for Canadian males. But compared to the volumes of text devoted to railways, we're almost an empty shelf. This is puzzling considering the large numbers of people involved in antique truck collecting and restoring. Surely they understand that there's a narrative accompanying their recreations and treasures. But the lore, stories, canon, and historical record of trucking is largely oral, and not enough of it gets passed down.

That's why it was such a treat to discover 100 years on Trucking in British Columbia by Andy Craig (Hancock House, 1977). I found it several years ago in the stacks of the Scott library at York University (I hope it's still there). Athough long out of print, some used copies can be bought on Amazon.ca from $90 to $248. This is a far cry from the golden days when Andy himself used to travel to truck shows and sell the book out of his 1936 Indiana open top 2 ton. He had a narrow bunk built into the box's nose where he slept when he was on the road.

You can see his red and silver Indiana near the front door of the Teamsters and Freight Carriers Museum in Port Coquitlam, BC ( a suburb of Vancouver), where it still gets out for parades and Canada Day celebrations. He and his Indiana were honoured by the citizens of British Columbia when they were the first to roll across the newly-completed Coquihalla Highway in 1986, a year before he passed away. The highway is an engineering marvel that runs from mountaiin hip to mountain hip, between Merritt and Hope, B.C., and cuts a couple of hours off the old Franser Canyon route.

Andy Craig was an industry pioneer who started trucking for his father in 1929 driving a Model TT Ford dump truck with an “Armstrong” manual hoist. In 1937, along with a couple of associates he started Inland Motor Freight running the Indiana between Vancouver and Penticton. He must have cut quite a figure. Early photos show him in knee-high boots wearing a rakish cap. As he writes in 100 Years of Trucking: “High boots, jaunty caps and leather breeches were the truck drivers’ garb for the long and hard treks through the Fraser Canyon in the 20s and 30s.

“In those days we hauled everything you can imagine on the up trips; and on the down-trips we searched the country over to get contracts on ore, mercury, hides horses, cattle, pigs, wool, canned goods, kegs, empty beer bottles, and everything else that would make up a load.”

Wayfreighting, was a means by which drivers could supplement their income. As the driver drove through the towns, he’d often be asked to deliver a suitcase or a crate to a destination along his route.

“Way-freighting wasn’t much fun in the worst seasons of the year, when we were fighting miles of unploughed snow, or in the spring break slugging through gumbo. It still makes me shudder to think of those stops in deep winter, when you dropped from the heat of the cab into the shock of freezing weather, then the trip around to the tail-gate, and frozen ropes. And the tarp stiff as a piece of steel. Before you got the tarp on the roof, and sorted through the load for the pieces to be delivered, then wrapped everything up again and collected monies due, and got the waybill signed, your fingers would be so stiff and chilled that for miles after you would be sitting first on one hand then on the other to bring back the circulation—and man, how they would hurt! And meanwhile you were still trying to shift gears and keep the rig on the road, and thinking, “Damn the way-freight!” You modern drivers are lucky; you don’t have a clue what it was like. All you do now is drop off a semi-trailer, couple on another and away you go.”

Craig goes on to describe the very tough driving conditions of that era: “Washboard, slides, gumbo, and narrow twisting up and down, in and out, on rutted, rotten, dirty roads…We seldom made a trip without finding some unlucky soul who had hit a rock slide, or gone over the bank, or broken through an old bridge…Two of the worst problems for drivers were metal fatigue, where a ball socket or spindle might break; and brake failure, when you really had to look out because the load of freight was so high behind it usually rolled the truck over…Most of us had gray hair prematurely, and a nervous stomach, and the bad habit of smoking two or more packs of Millbanks a day.”

Craig enlisted in the army during the second world war and worked at various logging operations in the post-war period, finishing off his career at Hayes Mfg.--a fitting role for a great Canadian trucker, to end up working for a great Canadian truck manufacturer (Hayes trucks are legendary throughout the world, especially in the logging industry). Andy must have shed a tear when the plant was closed in 1975 after being sold successively to Mack and Paccar.

But it's the writer Andy Craig that I'd like to thank. The rest of Canada has its share of trucking history (although it's disappearing almost daily with the passing of the old masters), but it was in the mountains of British Columbia that the real trucking was done.

Early Hayes pulling more than its share!

End notes: One more crack at the Dave Nemo trucking show on XM Sirius radio this Wednesday Dec. 9th at 9am Central, 10 am Eastern. This is the legendary Dave Nemo who should also take a bow...the Larry King of Truck Radio, he's been the trucker's friend and companion since I can recall picking up Dave Nemo's Road Gang on AM radio early in the morning in the 1970s, usually from WWVA, Wheeling West Virginia, or somewheres like that. He should write a book, too. These days he does his show for satellite radio from Nashville, Tenn.

Kudos to Nemo for taking an interest in trucking history and my Canadian contributions. This week, I think we're going to talk about the Alaska/Canada highway built in response to the expectation of a Japanese attack on Alaska.; trucking heros like Andy Craig, Highway Hank Stroud, and maybe the Cannonball TV show that was filmed in Toronto in 1958 and had repercussions right into the Whitehouse, with supporting actors like JFK, Sam Giancana, Old Blue Eyes and of course the Klingon Empire. You'll have to tune in to find out more. Keep the shiny side up!

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I would have thought the decision by Ontario superior court judge Michael Quigley to dismiss the drug charges against Avtar Singh Sandhu of Brampton, Ont., would have drawn howls, but there doesn't seem to be much reaction. The judge felt the evidence was impugned because of the way it was gathered. On Feb. 7, 2007, an MTO official entered the trailer Sandhu was pulling after hew was brought to a stop and chased down by Mark Dorken from Truck Town Terminals of Milton who noticed Sandu "acting suspiciously." Halton Regional cops joined the group on a 401 ramp. What the cops and MTO officer Jonas Leeman found was 208 kgs of uncut cocaine in brown packages nestled among crates of baby carrots--one of the biggest all time drug busts in Canada, let alone Halton.

Evidently, the judge thought that there was no reason to open the back doors of the trailer as the matter was a regulatory one and didn't require a search of the cargo. Personally, I've always thought the MTO were supreme beings who could do anything they liked to your truck, so this is news to me. Mr. Sandhu is very lucky to walk away. Had this occurred in the US he'd be doing some serious time. I don't know this man's story or how he came to be hauling this commodity, but a google search reveals lots of this kind of activity. Jail sentences are stiff on both sides of the border, 12-20 years in the slammer, but that hasn't stopped the flow via truck.

Recently CBSA intercepted two containers that were headed to Calgary, loaded to the hilt with poppy heads, the raw source of opium, morphine and heroin. Labelled as "dried grasses" the stuff was probably on its way to get processed in Calgary where the chemicals are available. Processing opium requires lots of chemicals, and you may or may not know that the processing of Afghani opium takes place in Pakistan where the chemicals are more readily available.

Regardless, this kind of trucking is a scourge, and it's disturbing to note that this manifestation of evil sometimes involves new Canadians and immigrants, who may be more easily exploited or duped into hauling contraband. I certainly hope Mr. Sandu didn't get to keep the coke, but what happened to the baby carrots?

Lastly, we truck drivers have been displaced by retail clerks as the most prevalent Canadian profession for men, according to the 2006 census. We've held this title for more than ten years so it's a shame to see it slide away.

"Although there was a relatively large increase in the number of truck drivers between 2001 and 2006, truck driving was replaced by retail salespersons and sales clerks as the most common occupation among men.

"Nearly 285,800 men reported that they were retail salespeople or clerks, taking over the top spot from truck driving, which was reported by about 276,200. The third most prevalent occupation among men was still retail trade managers, at 192,200."

Watch out for those retail trade managers, they're making a move too!.

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This happened to me back in the summer of 1988.. At the time, I was hauling autoparts for a medium/large trucking company in St. Thomas, Ont.--that's the place where Jumbo the Elephant was killed by a New York Central freight train 110 years ago, bumped from behind as he was running along the tracks in front of the locomotive; the impact sent him careening headfirst into an embankment and the stem of his tusk buried itself in the soft tissue of his oversize brain—but that's another story.

It's a hot Friday afternoon and I end up in Wooster, Ohio, the Home of Rubbermaid as the billboard proclaims (“who is this Rubbermaid, and how can I meet her?”), and I know my hours of service are getting long. After three hours in the loading dock of a trim plant, I'm running back to the Canadian border through traffic snarls outside of Toledo, and then the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit is backed up onto the I-75--even though I know a shortcut down Fort Street, I've got 17 hours on the clock when I clear customs on the Windsor side. Dispatcher insists they're going to put me to bed, and after I growl, the operations manager comes on the line and insists some more. So I drop the trailer with disgust and a burning sensation in my pocket where I've got three Toronto Blue Jays tickets behind first base for tomorrow's game and I was hoping to take my boys, Matthew and Alex, nine and eleven years old, who live in Toronto and who I only see every other week, or not even. Never make the1:05 pm start, I realize. After laying over eight hours, dispatch will expect me to pick up a load down here. Hopefully, I'll find something going east, but I'll never make it to the ballpark in time...But it looks like I'm going to make last call at the Golden Nugget--across the street from the motel.

The motel is owned by an Indian family where the company lays us over, tucked behind a donut shop in a quasi-industrial part of Windsor, the lights of the airport blinking in the distance. Country Style Donuts on one side of the road and a country bar on the other. The motel owner gives me a Labatt's Blue as I check in. And after a quick shower, I'm hoofing it across the road to quaff a few more.

It's an edgy country bar, with its own Windsor rent-a-cop stationed on the premises because it's Friday night. The band is called the Southern Diplomats and there's a Stars and Bars flag draped over the pedal steel. They play straight ahead, hard-driving country and safety-boot rock, spliced with some Bob Seegar from across the Detroit River. Imagine “Katmandu” done to a driving four-beat, steel-toed shuffle.

A few beers later I can still hear the trucks rattling along Howard Ave., on their way to the 401 or the border, or Chrysler or Ford or GM plants. Without sleep I can feel a major headache sweeping in like a summer storm. I'm shooting pool with some CanTruck drivers and their dates, and they joke about one of them who stops at every rest stop from Oshawa to Windsor. They chant the names in unison: “Cambridge, Ingersoll, West Lorne, Tilbury.” Outside it’s hot summer night, cars vying for parking spots in the gravel lot, their occupants anxious to make last call.

The band finishes with a Waylon Jennings tune and the beer glasses smack the tables demanding an encore. “Dance with me trucker,” this small gal whispers to me, dark feathered hair, leaning into me. The Southern Diplomats strike up “Freebird” and we sway across the floor for eight minutes. She drives me in her little Acadian to a bungalow in the east end. I remember a porch light radiating green light, spilling into the suburban emptiness.

In the morning I'm hung over like a split rock and try to shade my eyes taking a taxi back to the motel. The dispatcher sounds cheery enough and sends me across the river to a Ford windshield plant in Wixom, Michigan to look for an empty trailer. My last hope to make Toronto before supper just evaporated. No empties in Wixom, so I'm sent to look in Taylor, Michigan, and finally to a Chevy bus plant on Charlevoix in Detroit, where there's an empty three-legger waiting in the parking lot. Two hours to load 26 skids of road salt by the river in Windsor, and I'm finally heading back home, windows wide open in the old Ford Louisville, the 318 Detroit singing and slightly streaming grey smoke from the stack. The ball game crackling on CHYR Leamington: Jimmy Key of the Jays pitching against Jack Morris for the Tigers, and Key has a no-hitter going into the top of the eighth, and they both have one-hitters at the end of the ninth. I'm just taking the ramp off the 401 at Hwy. 4 when the static roars as Buck Martinez homers in the 13th to win the game for the Jays, 2-1.

Back home in my converted chicken house in St. Thomas: no ballgame, no kids, just the scent of that girl's feathered hair still lingering in my nostrils, and the sound of the Norfolk and Southern freight train chuffing outside my window. “Dance with me trucker,” she said.

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I wrote the following for the Ottawa Citizen in 1997, I think, but it still stands up twelve years later.. Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road is Woven throughout the piece (should be in italics).

O Highway, you express me better than I can express myself Walt Whitman

Garry Valiquette’s mother remembers her son of four or five always having a wagon tied on the back of his tricycle. The Valiquettes lived in Cornwall, a few houses from Hwy. 2 (there was no 401 in those days), and Garry would wheel his tricycle-trailer to the edge of the roadway and watch the big rigs roll by. “I can remember the blue Smith Transport trucks with their black lettering like it was yesterday,” he says.
Almost half a century later, Garry, himself, is pushing one of those big trucks for Highland Transport, a modern-day offshoot of the Smith-CP transport lineage.
Just a few months ago the Kanata resident was the principal of a Nepean elementary school. This summer, taking early retirement, Valiquette fulfilled his life-long dream and traded in his desk for an 18 wheeler.
The former math teacher and political science major is forthright when asked why he chose truck driving as a second career. “I want to see if I can.” he says. “I think I’m going to enjoy the solitude, the freedom of being in a different place every day.”
Walt Whitman, the grandfather of modern poetry, would have understood. His definitive “Song of the Open Road,” reads like a trucker’s psalm:

Strong and content, I travel the open road...leading wherever I choose...the east and west are mine, and the north and south are mine.

Valiquette isn’t alone out there. According to Canadian and U.S. statistics more people work as truck drivers than any other profession. In Ontario, alone, there are an estimated 100,000 working AZ drivers (150,000 licensed), and over 200,000 people employed in the transport industry.
Trucking has long supplanted the railroad as the preferred method of transport (and perhaps appropriated some of the romance associated with train travel). With the burgeoning demand for just-in-time delivery systems, the so-called “warehouses on wheels” have become the essential engine of a borderless economy. As the century draws to a close, endless packs of tractor trailers criss-cross the continent every moment of the day, linked by satellite dishes, onboard computers, cell phones, and CB radios.
Trucking is a thriving and little explored subculture. This is the realm of cream pies and coffee cups, chain drive wallets and baseball caps, drooping eyelids and CB chatter, truck stops and chicken coops, smokey bears and swindle sheets, deadheads and bird dogs, jackknifes and bobtails, drug tests, black ice and diesel fumes.
Most fascinating are the men and women balling those jacks, pulling those reefers, hauling those tankers, stretching those A trains, shunting those hoppers, spotting those 53 footers. These are the people with the road written on their faces, whose sleeper cabs are their homes for weeks and months at a time, whose trucks are an extension of themselves as they, themselves, are an extension of their trucks.

Observers of cities, solitary toilers... Journeyers over consecutive seasons, over the years...They are the swift and majestic men--they are the greatest women.

Valiquette’s career path might have taken an unusual turn, but it is not exceptional. One in three truck drivers has some form of post-secondary education while one in fifty has a PhD. Though most male drivers can be distinguished by their rounded bellies and bear-like stances, gear jammers come in a variety of shapes, hides and backgrounds. But like Valiquette and myself, most truckers realize at a young age that they want to drive truck.
One summer, when I was about ten, my family took a trip from Toronto to Minneapolis to visit my father’s aunts. For some reason we always started road trips at 4:00 am. So I remember sitting beside my dad in the half-dawn watching him squirrel our 54 Plymouth around lumber trucks in Northern Ontario while my mom and sisters slept on oblivious. The first time I smelled burning rubber was when one of the big rigs locked up its brakes in front of us.
My parents stopped at cabins and motels along Hwy 17 as we rounded Lake Superior. More than once they caught me wandering over to high grade to watch the trucks on the TransCanada. I was transfixed by the noise of the machines as they tore past, kicking up cinders and dust spirals. The roar flattened against me and then Dopplered into a plaintive wail as the rig disappeared into the purple hills. There was something lonely and soothing about the scene, but it was also highly-charged and stirring.
That same vacation, my parents stopped to visit friends who were building a golf course near Port Arthur. Besides getting to drive the bulldozer, I found an old Mercury flat bed truck abandoned in a field. The side windows were busted out and the springs poked through the bench seat, but the gear shift worked. Methodically I played for hours retracing the route we’d taken earlier in the day, repeating the entrancing place names: Marathon, Hurkett, Schreiber, Nipigon, Wild Goose...
Nowadays I spend a third of my life in a truck, and it’s pretty much the way I imagined it behind the wheel of the rusted-out Ford. The same exhilarating monotony of driving twisted dark roads into engulfing emptiness, and the same spark of discovery coming across settlements along Hwy 7 on the way to Ottawa: Kaladar, Sharbot Lake, Silver Lake, Wemyss, Perth, Innisville. Ribbons of gas station neon and pools of car dealership fluorescence, as if a sorcerer had appeared and commanded: “there will be a town here, take note ye minions.”
For others, the pull to becoming a trucker is almost hereditary. Stephen McGrath drives tanker in Oakville, Ont. He has trucking in his chromosomes:

My introduction to trucks was family. My mother is from northern Ontario, and since most of her family was still there, I spent every summer with my cousins, up north.
How did I get there? By lumber truck. An uncle of mine used to stop on the shoulder of the 401 before it was 12 lanes wide at Keele St. Hop the fence, have lunch, throw me, suitcase, and a one-eyed teddy bear up in the cab of his gas Ford tag axle (extra non-powered axle behind the drive wheels) and head for the north. No sleeper, no heat, 5 speed with a 2 speed rear axle, pulling a tri-axle load of lumber. Now that was trucking: throttle position fixed, door open, foot on the running board, listening to every sound his engine made pulling up the hills. It didn’t pull up the hills very quickly.”
I have a cousin who bought the first diesel engine among friends and relatives. A cabover Mack (a flat-faced cab mounted over the engine), without cab assist (no hydraulic cab jack), and there weren’t many back then. It had 250 hp with a 5X4 twin screw (twin gear sticks and two tandem powered axles). On occasion he used to pull the gas trucks up the big hills, and frequently take their overloads across the scales for them.”
Now I play with the big rigs, it’s really what I enjoy. When I don’t run as much as I feel I should, I get agitated, unsettled. It’s a difficult thing to explain. I love my wife and family, but there’s a calling to the road, there really is.”

The contemporary trucker is a little bit of a sailor, a little bit gypsy, part cowboy, part mechanic, part frontiersman, part astronaut, the last truly independent for-hire business operator, the proud descendent of a long line of tireless and unstoppable teamsters, wagoners and draymen.
In his book, A Thousand Miles from Nowhere, Graham Coster calls them “the last nomads of the industrialized world.” The former Granta editor spent a year hitching rides with trucks in Europe and North America. “At least when you were a truck driver you never had to leave anywhere,” he says. “You were always on the way to somewhere else.”
Three weeks after leaving his administrative position, Valiquette was given a taste of modern trucking. Teamed with a company driver in a double-bunk 98 Volvo, the pair started by pulling a load from Toronto to Montreal, and then picked up a Purolator trailer bound for Moncton, N.B. From there they loaded for Scranton, Pa., where they found a return load of paper and headed back into Montreal. In Montreal they hooked to an empty trailer and took it to an Oshawa drop yard. There they picked up a load of empty parts bins which took them to an auto parts plant in Brownsville, Texas, 36 hours later. At the plant they had to wait half a day for 28 skids of steering wheels and seat belt fasteners which brought them back to General Motors in Oshawa. All within 11 days.

You but arrive at the city to which you are destin’d, you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart...

“The rules is when you can go, go. Keep going forward, keep driving,” says Coster. “A trucker is like any traveler, like St. Augustine, like Robert Louis Stevenson--like all the people through the ages who said it was better to travel than to arrive. Never mind the destination itself: the end was the means...to shoot at a constantly moving target.”

To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights,
To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights they tend to,
Again to merge them in the start of superior journeys,
To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it
To conceive no time, however distant, but what you may reach and pass it,
To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you,
however long but it stretches and waits for you...

But you’ve got to like being alone. Truckers rarely stay in cities long enough to develop relationships or do any sightseeing. Instead they may have to wait days in barren, nondescript industrial parks and highway rest stops.
Valiquette talks about some of the dislocation he felt one night after he picked up 44,000 lbs of paper rolls in Birmingham, Alabama. “It’s late, pitch black, and the truck computer tells you it’s 1,100 miles to Kingston, Ont. That seems like a long way to go.
“So you try to get to some truck stop somewhere, and there are only about half a dozen guys inside. Nobody to talk to.
“200 trucks might be sitting in the parking lot, but truckers don’t really go in truck stops. They use them as places to sleep and places to eat, but they don’t hang around inside much.
“I thought that by going all these places I would get to talk to someone. Occasionally you might strike up a conversation with somebody while you’re doing laundry or over a coffee, but for the most part you’re entirely on you own. You’re around a lot of people but you’re still crawling in your bunk to sleep by yourself, and you’re still eating by yourself.”
On the other side of the Atlantic, in a truck stop near Essex, England (Truckworld in West Thurrock, Essex, to be precise), Coster comes across the same existentialist displacement: “Trucking leaves you on the outskirts of things...here we are 20 kms from the city, conveniently nowhere, hiding out for a day where we really weren’t welcome and didn’t fit, until we could rumble off again and leave the neat, manicured village to the slumber it hadn’t realized we hadn’t disturbed.”
Solitude and uprootedness are universal conditions for truckers. European transcontinental drivers can be away for months at a time on runs to Siberia or Pakistan.
Country singer Dwight Yoakam spent six years driving truck. His tune “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere,” strikes a chord with the trucker’s lot.
I’m a thousand miles from nowhere
Time don’t matter to me
‘Cause I’m a thousand miles from nowhere
And there’s no place I want to be...
Not surprisingly, country is the preferred music of the trucking set. It is the music of the white working class and truckers will tell you that it “helps the miles slip by.” Coster finds truckers prefer twangy, reedy vocals, and “that long-loping seven-league-boots rhythm, with which the best songs fell into perfect stride with the wheels eating up the highway...”
Country and Western...is truckers’ music because it’s straight-ahead music: no irony, no humour, no skepticism--and because its comfortable lachrymosity makes it only a music for solitude, not loneliness. It makes being alone sound pretty.”

The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is not wanted

There is a paradox inherent in trucking. Most drivers will tell you that they choose the lifestyle because of the freedom that goes with it--freedom of mobility, freedom to set one’s own schedule, the freedom that comes with self-proprietorship.
However, the complete opposite is often the case. Satellite tracking can tell a company where the driver is to within 50 meters on the globe. Drivers are often subject to grueling timetables regardless of weather, traffic and customs delays for which they are rarely paid. Owner operators are independent in name only, and for the most part, are completely reliant on dispatchers for their livelihood. Hefty bank payments make it essential for independents to work long hours, often beyond the legal limit. As well, truck owners can be swamped with complicated paperwork and bureaucratic red tape.
So why do people want to be truckers? Choose to work long hours, often for low pay? Find themselves hunkered down in a sleeper cab in Yorkton, Saskatchewan eating cold soup out of a can?
For one thing, these are mighty machines. Some mountain tractors running the Rockies can have 600 horses under their hoods. Multiple combination trailers in Australia can gross out at 200 tons.
“There is a sense of power,” says Valiquette. “I thought that I would be nervous driving for the first time in heavy traffic. But I’ve been in rush hours in Dallas and Cincinatti and it’s completely relaxing. It’s hard getting in the car and driving home,” he says.
Canadian poet Milton Acorn comments on the regal nature of trucking while hitching a ride with his trucker friend: “Riding with Joe Hensby in a ten speed trailer / down 401 the cab so high we’re on a flying throne / ...the jungle trail clears when the elephant comes.” Acorn develops the animal imagery more fully by comparing truckers to the kings of the jungle: “We live like lions, often moving, often waiting years to pounce.”
Truck drivers feel the ground through their fingertips and the bottoms of their feet. Somewhere on the American leg of his trucking odyssey, Coster has the revelation that truckers are like farmers because of their closeness to the earth.
“Now I see how over-the-road trucking wasn’t simply another kind of outdoor, wide-open-space work. It was next to the land. Through your windscreen you trained your own time-lapse camera on the seasons. You watched the crops around you grow, learned how the landscape worked, saw human habitation scratch the surface, and build, and sometimes blow away again--and saw it all with 20/20 vision. You lived by the weather, you worked with the elements.”

Now I see the secret of making the best persons,
It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

Truck drivers experience every inch of geography. But they don’t really come in contact with the world they move through. This detachment gives the trucker a unique perspective. But it is an eyeview that is coloured with shades of melancholy.
For years my only experience of Hallowe’en--and this was when my boys were little--was catching a glimpse of costumed children with their bags walking under a bridge of the 401 at Prescott or Brockville on my way to Montreal.
At other times, in a hurry to make an AM pick up in Toledo, I’d watch the farmhouses lighting up across Essex County.

You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much!

I’d wonder what kind of people lived in those houses? What kind of dogs and kids? Who would sit down to breakfast? Who has hung a plant in the frost-etched window?
And always there would be the shuddering longing ache of contact. I’d imagine the people I loved asleep in their beds at night as I droned across mid-Michigan, trying to tune in American talk shows on the crackly AM radio, occasionally slapping myself to stay awake.
But then there are the ecstatic moments. Few and far between, but unforgettable. The sun glistening just so off the Detroit River as it rises over the flat roofs of industrial Windsor. Other spectacular dawns that imbue the bleakest suburb with a rare, hopeful light so that even Toronto looks divine on a summer morning (no easy task). Innumerable sunsets beyond cliché across hydro fields, swamps, parking lots and scrub lands. Dozens of shooting stars at key times in my life. A moonrise on Lake Ontario that jumped right out of a Japanese poem. The Northern Lights over Lanark, Ont. that make you pull up on the side of the dark highway and stand gaping and shivering under the shimmering curtain.
James Doel dispatches for Jade Transport of Perth, Ont. His eyes twinkle when he talks about his driving days. “The best moments are driving through Montana on a clear night,” he says. “Running along about 75 mph and the temperature is perfect. The engine is purring along and there are no cops around. The stars are so close to the top of the trailer that you can almost reach out and touch them.”
Stephen McGrath agrees. “Trucking is the only desk job in the world with a picture window that never has the same view twice,” he says. “Specific moments capture inexplicable beauty and truck drivers get to witness them because, most times, they’re the only ones there.”

Here a great personal deed has room.

Constable Bettina Schwarze of the Brighton OPP is a trucker and a cop. She’s better known by her handle, “Goldielocks” to truckers passing her corridor between Toronto and Montreal. When she’s not catching speeders or safety checking trucks, Schwarze runs the occasional load to Georgia for a broker friend or works locally for a cartage company.
“I’ve always been interested in police work and trucks,” she says. “I’m lucky enough to be able to combine the two.”
Schwarze doesn’t mind if the truckers call her Goldielocks on the CB radio (the three bears are the other male officers in her traffic unit). “Drivers tell me that they find out if I’m working when they cross the bridge at Detroit.”
“It’s nice to know there is a cop out there who knows something about trucks,” says Marc de la Courneuve. The Caliber Transport driver has a dedicated run weekdays between St. Catherine’s and Cornwall. “This used to be a bit of a wild stretch through here,” he says.
“Talk to any driver in Montreal and they all know her,” adds Reg Oliver of Verspeeten Cartage. “This is a bad area and everybody plays by the rules.”
Schwarze’s tough but fair approach engenders tremendous loyalty from truck drives. “The first thing a lot of drivers do when I pull them over is shake my hand.”
Schwarze cites dozens of occasions when truckers have helped her with public safety matters. In one case trucks slowed down an intoxicated driver. In another incident, drivers kept her informed on the CB radio about the progress of a wrong-way vehicle. Truckers have also assisted in shutting down the highway while police dealt with a serious situation.
“Most of the Provincial Police’s focus is on community-oriented policing, but the 401 has never been thought of as a community,” she says. “I think it should be.”
As such, truckers are the highway’s first denizens. “They’re up and down the highways and see so many things,” she says. “Often they’re the first ones to come on an accident.”
Schwarze thinks that trucking and police work share many similarities. “They’re both out there all the time, and they’re both dealing with the same situations.”
She pauses and thinks for a moment before telling me what she likes about truckers. “Most of the good truck drivers are very humble,” Schwarze says. “They’re life-smart. I’ve always admired people who could deal with practical situations.”

Wisdom is not finally tested in schools...
Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible to proof, is its own proof...

Truck driving is a liminal activity because it involves transition. As author Ronald Primeau puts it, “roads themselves became the place to be: the place for searching, escape and self-discovery.”
The truck driver is the embodiment of the quest/hero archetype. What mythologist Joseph Campbell calls “the champion of things becoming, not of things become.”
The truck, itself, is akin to Campbell’s “insulating horse.” A mechanical vehicle which would “keep the hero out of immediate touch with the earth and yet permit him to promenade among the peoples of the world.”

I will scatter myself among men and women as I go

On the road the driver is free from the fetters of family, the city, the home terminal. Anything can happen. The world and all its manifestations opens up. There is, at least, the illusion of freedom and untapped possibilities.
Dean Moriarity, hero-goof-saint of Jack Kerouac’s generational-fluxing novel, On the Road deduces that “the road must eventually lead to the whole world. Ain’t nowhere else it can go--right?”
I think heroic deeds were all conceived in the open air, and all free poems also,”

For Kerouac, the road is a “holy” place. His narrator, Sal Paradise finds “eternity at the wheel,” and suggests that driving for the sake of driving is a near-primal activity. “We were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.”
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’s Ronald M. Pirsig codifies the metaphysics of the highway in Duncan’s Rule 10:
“The theology of the road forms its own religion, combining bits and pieces of other beliefs. It relies on technology (a vehicle) yet respects the forces of nature. Its deity is the Road Spirits; its principal practice is the pilgrimage.”

I know they go toward the best--toward something great...

But it doesn’t take a Whitman or a Kerouac to tell you what motivates truck drivers. Truckers truck because they find comfort, solace, therapy, identity, beauty, renewal, redemption and perhaps a little salvation between the white lines.

To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls

The same soul shared by D. H. Lawrence and a million truck drivers:

The soul is not to pile up defenses around herself. She is not to withdraw and seek her heavens inwardly, in mystical ecstasies. She is not to cry to some God beyond for salvation. She is to go down the open road, as the road opens, into the unknown, keeping company with those whose soul draws them to her, accomplishing nothing save the journey, and the works incident to the journey, in the long life-travel into the unknown, the soul in her subtle sympathies accomplishing herself by the way.

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It's a great to be invited on the Dave Nemo show again. Next time will be on Canadian Thanksgiving (Columbus Day in the US) 10 AM EST on Monday, October 12. Dave does a regular show for truckers on XM Sirius satellite, somewhere on the dial, I've never experienced the world of satellite radio, but I know it's big with many drivers. Anyway, if you can't get home for turkey and pumpkin pie Monday, tune in and you can hear about some Canadian trucking history—we're just starting World War I.

Radio's a new medium for me. As opposed to sitting down at my trusty 'puter, a radio interview requires some quick mental footwork. A couple of times I was caught flat-footed when Dave asked me something.

Did you know, for instance, that the first driver shortage in Canada occurred in 1856? True fact. At the heart of this story is the great figure of William Hendrie. Born in 1831 in Glasgow and started his career at 17 with the Glasgow and Southern Railway. Working his way up, he was offered a job with the Great Western Railway (predecessor of CN Rail) and in 1855 moved to Hamilton, Ont.

Within a year, he and his partner John Shedden, had a monopoly on the cartage service for Great Western. He's credited with developing the straight through bill of lading. Before that time, draymen would try to collect monies or bring back signed notes, but there was no system in place causing great difficulties for the railway to collect freight charges. Hendrie would have the drivers get a standard bill of lading signed and collect money owed. The railway did not have to worry about collecting, delivery of goods or warehousing--Hendrie took care of all that—they simply paid out a percentage for cartage fees. Sounds like modern day logistics, doesn't it?

Hence, within a year, and still only a young lad of 25, he and his partner were offered all the cartage for Great Western Railway from Detroit to Montreal to Buffalo, a sweet deal, but one that caused consternation among the teamsters in Montreal. I'm using teamster here in the true sense, one who can handle a “team” of horses. The teamsters in Montreal rioted a couple of times, set fire to Hendrie's freight sheds and threatened the lives of Hendrie and Shedden.

With all the new business Hendrie faced a driver shortage and sent his foreman down to meet the trains as new immigrants were arriving in Toronto. Any Scot that spoke with a brogue was offered a job. In 1858 Hendrie and Shedden split the business down the midde of Toronto—Shedden taking everything on the east side of Yonge Street all the way to Montreal, while Hendrie took everything going west to and from Detroit.

Hendrie became a great horse breeder as well, for both cartage horses and thoroughbreds. Hendrie Cartage did about 150 years of business with CN Rail . The company was a small empire and tops at machinery moving among other things in its time. It's survived by some remnants: Provincial Trailer Rentals, PTR, can trace its lineage back to William Hendrie.

The Scots' connection to trucking in Ontario is palpable. Just look at the names of the big family companies: MacKinnon, Mackie, McKevitt, Walker, Muir. I'm sure I'm missing a few.

My friend David Logan started as a teamster for Dominion Cartage in 1935 and switched to a Mack truck the next year when he got a job with Hendrie. The Mack's engine was water-cooled and the company gave him old horse blankets to put over the hood while he was making deliveries in Toronto. “I couldn't get away from horses. But I liked the smell of them.,” he told me at one time. Last I heard he was in Baycrest Centre getting care and I wish him well. At one time David looked after all the machinery moving Hendrie did in the province. “I knew every low bridge between Toronto and Montreal.” And he was instrumental in getting much of Ontario's infrastructure in place, bridges and the like, during the formative years after WW II.

Here's some more cool stuff on horses and early trucking from my research. Note that freight rate cutting was happening on the Caribo trail in the 1860s, as were double freight wagons, predecessors of LCVs. The more things change...

At the end of the 18th Century, there was at least one good roadway that served as a portage around Niagara Falls. This was an original Native trade route that had been improved and widened by soldiers and traders. Up to 50 large wagons a day rolled from Queenston to Chippewa and some travelled further to Fort Erie. These were large carts that were usually pulled by four or more oxen. They carried rum and other trade goods upstream to Lake Erie, and furs towards Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence.

Oxen were as common as horses at the beginning of the 19th century. Although slow, the ox was very strong and would not get stuck easily. Teams of oxen and horses were also essential for the construction of roads as well as the movement of goods. Along with the animals came their handler—the teamster (one who could handle a team).

Teamsters quickly assumed an important role in pioneer Canada, operating for-hire wagons and cartage services. Today’s truck drivers are direct descendants of these early haulers. Most of the first teamsters were owner-operators—they owned their own cart and horses, but the distinction must have soon arisen between owners and hired drivers.

These first Canadian drivers were tough. Their wagons were crudely adapted farm carts that rattled and swayed—open boxes with primitive suspensions, or clumsy carriages that hung on leather straps. The vehicles rolled on wooden wheels with iron rims and made a great deal of noise. The axles had to be frequently greased, which would be done with a bucket of grease and a long pole. The driver sat perched on a plank suspended between two poles or walked alongside.

Canadian historian, Edwin Guillet writes admiringly of these teamsters: “The very nature of the business required men inured to every hardship and equal to any emergency. And if one of them failed to negotiate the terror of drivers—Herriman Hill between Colborne and Grafton—or some of the other innumerable hazards…little blame could be attached to anyone except those responsible for the intolerable roads.”

John McDonald documented the hardships of wagon travel in 1821. He accompanied a group of homesteaders from Brockville to a settlement near Perth, Ont. Some of the wagons were upset along the way. “One boy was killed on the spot, several were very much hurt,” McDonald writes. “One man got his arm broken, and our own wagoner, in spite all of his care and skill, was baffled, his horse having laired in a miry part of the road where he stuck fast.”

A winter sled-route between Kingston and Toronto was established in 1817, and year-round stagecoach operation followed about ten years later. By 1842, the stagecoach era was in full swing with lines running across Ontario and Quebec. They hauled mail and passengers and some amount of cargo. But the coming of the railroads in the 1850s meant that the coaches were doomed. By 1870 most of the stagecoach operations across the provinces had been abandoned.

Road networks were slower to develop on the prairies. Early overland travel took place on trails. Metis cart trains, comprised of oxen, mules or horses pulling large-wheeled Red River carts or wagons, were operating between points in Manitoba and St. Paul, Minnesota as early as 1840. By 1870 a well-worn cart trail ran northwest between Winnipeg and Edmonton.

In the 1880s a good wagon could be purchased in Winnipeg for $175 and a Red River cart could be had for $20, but overland freight rates were prohibitively expensive. In 1882 it cost $168 to ship 100 pounds the 460 miles between St. Paul and Fort Garry (Winnipeg). The coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1881 made many of the cart routes obsolete but the problem remained in getting from the rail station to one’s land.

British Columbia’s first road was built by sailors from the Royal Navy in 1854. It ran from Esquimalt to Victoria. The discovery of gold at Hope a few years later brought a flood of people into the Thompson and Fraser River valleys. This necessitated the building of a wagon road through the mountains to service the newly established towns.

The Cariboo Road was started in 1862 and completed in three years. It was an engineering marvel of its time, eventually running 650 km along the Fraser River from Yale to Barkerville. The road was built by out-of-work miners under the supervision of Royal Engineers and private contractors at a cost of $2 million. They blasted through mountains and slung trestles and suspensions bridges across near-impossible terrain.

Today, the Trans-Canada Highway follows much of this early route. The Cariboo Road became an essential link to the interior gold fields of British Columbia and the settlers in the region. Freight would travel by steamship to Yale on the Fraser River, where packhorses, mules and freight wagons (one or two wagons coupled together) pulled by a teams of 4 to 12 horses, or up to 18 oxen, would then take the cargo inland and distribute it. Even with the coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway to Ashcroft in 1885, freight wagons were the main means of transport to interior mountain villages like Lillooet and Barkerville.

The Ashcroft Journal reported that in the month of June, 1895, there were about 100 wagon trains on the Cariboo Road, as well as 400 pack animals--about 1,000 animals altogether. The wagons and pack animals carried groceries and supplies upwards and gold on the return leg. Horse and oxen drawn freight wagons could take 3-4 weeks to get to their destination, or sometimes up to twelve weeks in bad weather, while a fast-moving stage could cover the distance from Ashcroft to Barkerville in four days with stops at mile houses during the night.

The mountain teamsters, like today’s truckers, faced a competitive marketplace. The standard freight rate was just 2 ½ cents per pound, but some of the operators cut the rate when freight was scarce. As well, the drivers had to pay $150 for a ton of hay to feed their animals in the upper mountains and some of the innkeepers of the mile houses were unwilling to let the drivers run a tab. In the last years of the horse-drawn freighters, the Cariboo Teamsters Union was created to set fixed rates, just as trucks began to appearing in the mountains. These teamsters were forced to make the transition to motor freight drivers, swapping reins for steering wheels. The steep grades made the horse drawn freight wagon obsolete. By 1913 the last horse-drawn freight wagon was gone from the Cariboo Trail.

But horses continued to work alongside trucks for many more decades in the rest of Canada. Road builders used teams of horses well into the 1930s. National Cartage of Winnipeg only switched their horse-drawn vehicles to Ford trucks in 1933, while Buckley Cartage of Toronto remained faithful to their Clydesdale-pulled wagons well into the 1940s. Dairies were among the last to abandon their animals. Most city dairies had replaced their stables of horses with trucks by the mid-1950s.

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Truck drivers know why they truck, but they can't always explain it. Leave it to some outsiders to delve into the psychological aspects of gear jamming, why we come back day after day and enjoy this job. For one thing, it's a profession that exists in the real world, with real people and real situations, some of whom are extremely charming and multi-dimensional. I wrote the following piece on white collar professionals who turned to trucking, about 6 years ago and I'd love to know what these people are doing now. I suspect some of them have moved on to other occupations. Still, they offer some insight of the most compelling reasons to drive truck. Heck, I'll find redemption in P & D work, yet!

Oh yes, I'm going to be on the Dave Nemo show on XM Sirius this Thurs. Sept. 24 at 10 am Eastern Time...Something about Canadian trucking history, eh?

Stepping off the Treadmill and onto the Highway:
Soldier, Preacher, AdMan, Trucker: Burned out professionals find fulfilment, even salvation in driving big trucks

Jacob Froese says trucking saved his life--literally. Four and a half years ago he was a practising Mennonite minister with a busy parish in Edmonton, Alta. But beneath a rock-like exterior, Froese was dealing with what he describes as suicidal bouts of depression. After 19 years behind the pulpit he was overextended and on the brink of psychological collapse.
Having worked as a trucker while attending seminary, Froese grasped at truck driving as a lifeline. “I actually suffered a nervous breakdown while heavily involved in urban ministry. My yearning was for the open road because I’d actually tasted it,” he says. “At the worst times, I’d romanticize the sound of the tires on the pavement.”
Froese quickly found a broker from the Yanke Group willing to sign him on. After a few months on the open board, he was both the pilot and owner of a 98 Freightliner.
Born in Saskatchewan, from Old Colony Mennonite descent, he looks like a prairie boy, tall and tanned, sipping coffee in a Brampton, Ont. diner. His rig waits in the lineup outside. The 54 year old Calgary-based driver has just dropped a trailer at the company yard and is on his way to hook to a load of paper towels bound for Wisconsin. His steel blue eyes stare through gold-rimmed aviator glasses as he talks openly about his transformation from pulpit to owner-operator. A small silver cross dangles around his neck
“I’d wake up in my cab and sweat about what meeting I had that day. Then this great feeling of relief came over me when I realized all I had to do today was drive 1,000 kilometers.”
But the pastor-come-trucker does not consider his new occupation to be that different from his former calling. “I’m still touching people. I connect with some of the real things in life, right here in the trucking world,” he says. “Spiritual stuff. You’re dealing with bad communications, frustrated managers and drivers. You know what? I consider that the real world. I have something authentic to participate in.”
For most rookies, getting behind the wheel is less dramatic. Many are introduced to the trade by a friend or relative. A good number have agricultural or mechanical backgrounds. Some drivers originally take up trucking as stepping stone to a better job and end up sticking around. But a new group of metamorphosed draymen is quickly earning its place among the ranks. This is an oddball assortment of highly educated, frayed and burned out professionals, on the rebound from stressful management and executive jobs.
As counselor at the Humber College Transport Training Centre in Rexdale, Ont., Ron Mikula has seen more than a few anguished white collars come sniffing around his school. Office workers, a former IBM executive, and a stock broker have all been through their program
“They’re trying to get away from a high-pressure environment into different kind of job where they can still call the shots. It’s a different kind of pressure,” says Mikula.

Rick Butterworth of Middleville, Ont. is a perfect example. A year ago he would have been tearing his hair designing corporate advertising campaigns from his home in Lanark County. His freelance consulting work was going well, but he was discontented.
“Every time I wanted to strangle a client over a desk, there was a voice that said, ‘Relax, you can always drive a truck.’”
Until then, the biggest thing he’d ever driven was a 28 foot U-haul. With the same diligence he applied to his freelance work, Butterworth investigated half a dozen driving schools and companies. “My research suggested I was suited for long hauls,” he says.
Butterworth chose an Ottawa-area school that streamed him into the Highland Transport system. He obtained his AZ licence late in 1999 and long hauls are what he got. Today he is working on the open board and likely to be anywhere in North America.
I caught up to him on his cell phone, cooking dinner for himself at a rest area near Montgomery, Alabama.
“It’s been really good for me,” he says, positively gleeful about his lifestyle change. “Now I’m no longer staring at the computer. I got off the electronic highway and decided to see the real one.”
Butterworth, like the above-mentioned Froese, has been able to balance married life with long road trips. Both acknowledge long term relationships with understanding spouses as a crucial underpinning of their new work life.
“Living 5 hours from the yard, I tend to stay out for 4-6 weeks,” says Butterworth. “My wife is used to having me away from home for long periods of time, anyway. She was tired of this unhappy, grumpy, middle-aged man sitting around the house.”
The phone crackles and Butterworth’s steak sizzles. He admits that he’s had to adjust to a new pay scale. “I make as much in one week as I used to bill for one day in the 80s,” he says candidly.
But one senses that the rewards of his present job are worth many times his previous invoices. “I always had moral problems with some of the projects I worked on…but there’s definitely something honest and blue collar about driving a truck. It’s definitely a progression from what I’m used to.”

Captain Doug Handforth had a long and varied Air Force career behind him, including service as an assistant logistics officer for the Snowbirds aerobatics team in Moose Jaw, Sask. But he was desperate for a change and tired of pushing pencils. “There was a lot of pressure from a logistics point of view,” he says. “I was in administration. Everything I was dealing with was paper--emails, memos, telephone calls.
He hit on trucking as the perfect solution to his dilemma, despite not having any hands-on experience. Handforth wanted a portable trade should his family decide to move out of Kingston, Ont. (two of his sons are very fine hockey players and his daughter is a competitive swimmer). Further, he was anxious to find another vocation before he reached the difficult, overlooked, unemployable age of 55 (he’s 48.). Lastly, he says, “I thought I had lost touch with my roots. I wanted to get in real life situations with people.”
So far, trucking has supplied that reality for the former military man. Handforth has found a niche that fit his personal situation--running team from Toronto to Moncton, N.B. and back, two times a week.
The intense schedule allows him weekends off and downtime with his family. “I’m happy,” says Handforth. “I don’t know if I can drive a truck for another ten years. It’s demanding on your body. But for now trucking has met all my expectations.”

The above three drivers are not unique. While researching this article, I heard stories of teachers, lawyers, computer scientists, nurses, paramedics, PhDs and exiled civil servants driving truck.
These neo-truckers bring a new element to the industry. They are often workaholics in middle age who come to over-the-road transport as a second or third profession, usually from highly skilled and creative positions, sometimes forsaking large salaries. And they share the vision of an endless panorama of endless sunsets, moon rises and starry skies. For these new drivers, trucking is the coolest job in the world, and they know it.

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I've found a small niche on the Dave Nemo satellite radio show. I guess they liked my contribution to the Do We Need a New Trucking Hero segment. The producer wants to include some Canadian historical content and I've got at least 20,000 words of text that I gathered while I was researching Highway Workplace: the Canadian Truckers Story for the Virtual Museum of Canada (check out www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/Highway. The exhibit has been running since 2004, and although some of the economic and census figures may have changed a little, the historical and cultural facts are still accurate. The exhibition was originally meant to travel across Canada housed in a tractor trailer but for various reasons (some which I'll sound off about in the near future) was never built. What a unique opportunity to reach the Canadian public directly by going right to their communities, schools, fairs, malls and communicate with people on their own turf. Every time I hear someone griping about the poor public image that the trucking community projects, I'm left scratching my head as to why this travelling exhibit was overlooked as a public relations vehicle. The carriers could have flown their flags, OEMs could have demonstrated their products, and a concept like this could have gone a long way to enhance the industry's often-sullied image, and even acted as a recruiting tool in remote regions of the country. Part of the problem may be that this exhibit was about the men and the women that work in the industry, not just the founders and movers and shakers, the so-called "stake-holders" who might think that they are the centre of the universe. But without the dedicated men and women to drive these trucks we would have nothing, the founders would have floundered. It's worth noting some of the people that did support the travelling museum, among them Ross Mackie, Roy Craigen, Teamsters Canada, the CAW, United Steelworkers and Highland Transport, and a number of others who offered their time and resources, not least the OTA who allowed me access to their vast photo archives. And I did manage to collect some terrific material that could be a book someday. I think I'll run some of the segments from time to time as Canadian trucking history is a vast and compelling subject and we should know something about so we know where we're going.

While researching the exhibit, I came across Albert Lincoln who was heir to Fruitbelt Trucking of Ste. Catherine's, Ont. Fruitbelt Trucking was a pioneer in hauling refrigerated produce and was started by Albert's father Ab Lincoln and his partner who got his first truck, a 1928 Ford tandem, as payment for a dept. The company is long gone but was a major player on the trucking scene for several decades, and among the first to use Fruehauf reefers. The last time I saw Albert was about five years ago when he was running a fleet of straight trucks for an organic foods distribution co-op in Etobicoke, Ont. Here's what he had to say. The rail strike he is referring to happened in 1950 when 130,000 rail workers from CPR and CNR dropped their tools and struck. The strike only lasted a week as the workers were ordered back to work, but this event is credited by historians as being a turning point for the Canadian trucking industry. Rail had been dominant up to that time and most observers felt Canada would be crippled by this strike. Not so, Canadian truckers picked up the ball and kept the economy moving, proving they could do as good or better than the railways.

"My dad and his partner were in the wholesale potato business. They’d go up to Shelburne and haul potatoes out of there-they’d haul potatoes down to restaurants and market in Ste. Catherine’s. They’d use the truck for haulage, to pick up a load of cement for the Queen Elizabeth (they were just building it then), or shit, manure, was a big item. You’d go and shovel a load on and hope your truck was dry by the next morning. From that came produce, fruits and vegetables. The grape season was a big deal. They couldn’t get enough trucks and they’d hire them from everywhere.

I started driving in 1951 before I had a licence. Did you work! 16 to 18 hours a day. It was 1956 and I got $55 a week, and 25 cents an hour road expenses. This was the first truck I drove with a licence was a 1949 International with vacuum brakes. I’d driven lots of trucks before that, though.

You had to buy a defroster fan. And they had them pretty early. You’d just wired them into a switch because there weren’t any cigarette lighters. You needed a long stick or something to keep the snow off your wipers because you had vacuum windshield wipers. As soon as you put the pedal down to get some power, they’d just shut off. When you wanted to stop you prepared yourself. I drove that 49 International for quite a while. I remember a number of times the pedal reach down and the pedal would disappear now and again. So you’d pump it, and I guess you’d pump some vacuum back into the system. And then the brakes weren’t too bad. But when you were going down a steep hill and the thing (pedal) would go hard and your heart would stop. For the longest time drivers would come in and ask if they could have a right hand mirror and they were told no, it’s a luxury.

Things changed pretty fast when they changed. Mack put out a beautiful diesel, unbelievably reliable. The B-61 Mack set a precedent. They were the kings for about 10 years, and then White got into the mix.

I remember the week of the great rail strike. I rounded up all my friends and we worked, I still remember that we worked 126 hours in one week. By the end of it, we were all sleeping against a wall on Carlton Street fruit platform in Ste. Catherine’s. You couldn’t even wake us to drive us home.

There was no such thing as a forklift in those days. The closest thing to mechanical aid was a two-wheeled hand cart. And the LTL guys used, like a 4-wheeled cart. The first time I saw a forklift truck, oh I guess in the mid-50s, I almost cried to see such a wonderful piece of machinery."

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Well actually, it was his researcher who found me after I posted a blog titled “Trucker as Anti-Hero.” In the blog I argued that the truck driver is never going to get a fair shake from the public as long as film media continue to depict him as a negative stereo-type, or even worse as a depraved, sinister character.

It's been so long since we've been thought of us as road knights. After the CB craze died down in the 70s, Hollywood soon tired of making flicks with the trucker depicted as rebel hero. Where are the Kris Kristoffersons and Jan Michael Vincents now when we need them?

Since that time, truck drivers are usually cast in a negative light when they get to the big or little screen, and this does nothing to help the public perception of the trucking community.

My opinion was enough to get me a slot on the Dave Nemo satellite radio show one Tuesday morning, along with writer Greg Martin, who's working on a film script called “Dispatch Me Home”, about a gentleman trucker making his last journey across the States in his soon-to-be-retired truck

Nemo is a legend in truck radio broadcasting. I recall picking up his Road Gang show three decades ago on AM radio in my Ford Louisville (or was it a GM Brigadier?), tuning in some whistling signal from Cincinnati, or Cleveland or New York City or Wheeling, West Virginia. I was a young cat tearing down the 401 doing a peddle run around Windsor, Ont., and the four hour run back and forth to Toronto was like a dream world, dialing the radio and smoking cigarettes to stay awake while working outrageous hours.

During my 24 minutes on air, I made the observation that the road movie and road story is a great American institution, that goes back through Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck. Historically, Americans are miles ahead of us when it comes to highway infrastructure and mythology. Eisenhower initiated the Interstate highway system back in 1947, while Canada only paved the last section of the TransCanada in 1966. Before that time, Canadian drivers would go through the States to get to Vancouver.

My point was that if America is making bad road movies that cast murky shadows on truck drivers, the genre should be reclaimed from the evil-doers, which is what I think Greg Martin is trying to do with his screenplay. Check it a few sample chapters at www.dispatchmehome.com/newsite/Dispatch2.html

The 24 minutes swirled past in no time. I never did find out where the show was broadcast, I suspect Chicago, and since it's satellite radio it probably doesn't matter. But the discussion got me thinking afterwards about the differences between Canadians and Americans, particularly when it comes to “heroes.”

It's worth stating off the bat that Canadians like to think of themselves as quite different from their American cousins, but on the surface we're essentially the same: very similar culturally, but with some subtle yet profound divergences.

A hero is someone who has done something beyond the abilities of ordinary humans, who makes something better for others, sometimes by giving their lives. Well Martin Luther King would fit that bill, so would the captain of the airliner who brought his goose-stricken craft down on the Hudson River. Obama might be that saviour that America awaits (so far), but look at the adulation for the dead Michael Jackson. What do you make of it when a tragically-flawed pop singer is elevated to hero status? Does America need heroes? You bet.

Canadians, on the other hand, are usually more understated and less concerned with celebrity,
The “Greatest Canadian” contest sponsored by the CBC Radio a few years back declared Tommy Douglas the winner. Who's that? The NDP leader and Saskatchewan premier who founded universal medicare in Canada.

It's also interesting to note the transition when rebels become heroes. Take Apache insurrectionist leader Geronimo, who was sentenced to life in prison but allowed out to ride with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Or Canada's own Louis Riel who led two Metis uprisings and finished eleventh in the balloting for the greatest Canadian. He was hanged by Sir John A. Macdonald who refused to grant him a reprieve (Macdonald finished 8th, while Wayne Gretzky was 10th.).

Just a quick survey of some of the two neighbours' attitudes towards various issues exposes some deep gulfs. Remember the United States was founded by a revolution while Canada sloughed along as a colony for so long.

So here are some generalities for your amusement: Canadians are good at lining up, very orderly. But I find Americans to be better and more polite drivers.

Americans are generally more religious than Canucks, more likely to go to church. Canadians are often uncomfortable talking about religion and most would prefer to not do so.

Race is still a major issue in the States. Lots of racism in Canada, too, but we're more oriented toward class. Being under the thumb of the British for so long accounts for this, I suppose.

Americans are somewhat gun crazy. Canadians aren't as interested in fire arms and certainly don't get excited about needing “the right to bear arms.” I followed a recent discussion on the Trucking Bozo one night on AM radio as commercial drivers were calling worried about a new law that could limit their ability to carry firearms between states. What percentage of US drivers carry sidearms, I'd like to know. In Canada I'd say it's very low, most drivers would never think of arming themselves, it's just not part of our culture. But according to Bozo's call-in show, it seems many Yanks are packing heat in their rigs besides the bunk heaters. In my career I met two US drivers who carried guns, and one crazy Canadian in Windsor who kept a pistol in his boot.

As far as universal medicare goes, the US hasn't figured it out yet. Sure there are lots of stresses on the Canadian system but it's one aspect of social reality that our government has gotten right to some degree. But south of the 49th parallel there's huge opposition to this idea if you listen to any of the right wing talk shows (one radio station in upper New York has nothing but right wingers on its masthead: Rush, followed by Inga, followed by Mark, followed by Bill, and the way they squawk and rant, you would think they're already living in a soviet collective eating potato peels. Unfortunately, the 46 million Americans who have no medical insurance coverage whatsoever don't have the same access to the media--maybe that's why the debate appears so one-sided..

I'm not going to bother mentioning the death penalty, same sex marriage or abortion, except to say that approaches and solutions to these issues in Canuckistan are different and less polarizing (we don't have the first, allow the second and third, and although there is some lingering unease, we're OK with this).

But getting back to commonalities and heroes, we don't have to look much further than the American and Canadian soldiers serving in Afghanistan. These are the bona fide heroes and are recognized as such by the numbers of people who jam the overpasses on the 401 every time a fallen soldier lands in Trenton, Ont. The crowds are there to salute the procession on its way to the morgue in Toronto. As a driver, I've seen this phenomenon a few times and can't help getting emotional each time. It's the best and saddest part of being Canadian, and unfortunately it happens too frequently.

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Shunters don't get enough respect in my opinion, and it's probably the most important position in the supply chain of a busy hub or distribution centre. And, too often, it's the rookies that get “shunted” into hydraulics with little or no experience.

This is called Baptism by Fire, and it's a reasonable strategy. But it's a good thing those trucks are tough or they'd implode with some of the abuses foisted on them. Purolator has some Capacitys almost ten years old that work a regular shift. And I've heard of other companies running shunt trucks 6,000 hours a year—that's 20 hours per day! Really, if the engine doesn't die, a shunt truck can live a long and prosperous life, as can the driver.

But difficulties can arise that are challenging to even experienced drivers, i.e like running under the king pin, and getting out from behind that king pin, spinning in the snow.

So the theory is that these neophyte drivers will earn their stripes on the battlefield. This is literally true because they're flying solo with each drop and hook. But you've got to come away from a shift at a frenetically-paced yard with some degree of self-esteem having given your all to make the night work out right, trailers in the doors at precisely the right time, and the yard set up square and tight.

Some of those newbies end up liking the job; I know drivers who have started as shunters and have done nothing else since....and other drivers who choose shunting as a vocation because they like the precision, the pace, the predictable hours, and they particularly don't want to go on the road and fight with traffic, unless it's running to Tim's for coffees for the other drivers. There is some measure of control in shunting, and satisfaction when things go right.

So here's to the professional shunters, who've driven those mules backwards more miles than any of us could imagine. I'm not saying don't start the rookies off shunting, just keep them out of the way for the first few weeks. It's a great way to learn how to drive truck, but that shouldn't diminish our appreciation of great shunters and the job they do daily. A good shunter is on top of moves before they happen, aware of the location of the trailers in the yard, especially the “hot” ones, and what the brokers are doing. Watch a good shunter working, it's a treat.

Wouldn't it be a good idea to have a shunt competition some time? It could be sponsored by one or all of the shunt mfgs. Get out some plastic cones and plot some patterns that get progressively more difficult. Some shunt men (and women) are absolute wizards in spotting trailers. I'd include side door docks (rarely seen these days, but we actually practised this stuff when I got my licence last century at George Brown College, down by the ports off Cherry Street)..

Heck, a shunt competition could be a lot of fun. Various categories including accuracy trials, time trials, yard set up trials, obstacle course etc....I was talking about this with John Uppington of Ottawa and he agreed this would be a good idea. Maybe next year.

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Two old champions shunts (Capacity and Ottawa) mix it up along with newcomer TICO just stepping into the ring.

I have a confession to make...while driving for an unnamed auto carrier from southern Ontario (now defunct), I hauled loads regularly into Utica, Mich., to a Ford Plant (just down the road from where Jimmy Hoffa disappeared at the Red Fox Inn). This must have been 1987, it was one of those Ford plants that dotted Michigan and Ohio in those days, where they put together seat assemblies or something like that. At night, long freight trains would come clanking in, blocking the crossing to the field behind the plant where they keep the empty trailers.

But one day I pull in and they're parking the trailers on the infeild beside a test track. This is a test track where Ford would sometimes bring their cars for speed trials, a gigantic, banked cement bowl. Being young(er) and more demented, I took that load of Woodbridge Foam or Lear seats or whatever on that test track oval and ran her through the gears. It was a Lousville tractor, I'm sure with a Detroit 318, got her up to some good highway speed and rode up sideways so I was perpendicular to the ground, like a midway ride or a NASCAR driver. The faster you go, the higher you can ride up side of the bowl. Anyway after a few minutes of this, it dawned on me that someone could see me and my adventure would show on my tach card (posted speed limit in the yard was 10 mph).
I come from a generation that would smoke the brakes and tires on shunt trucks and day cabs at Canadian Tire in Brampton, working city night shunt. Back in the day, you'd drive them hard to get your work done ahead of schedule so you could go home, banging cans and slotting them into some narrow doorways. CTC management divided an hour into 6 minute increments so they could decimize each move in the yard and city.
Years later, with some of that same spirit of shunting still in me, I get offered a chance to test three off-road shunt trucks for the August issue of TN. Do I jump at the opportunity? Yes, indeed.

So last week, Mike Hignett of Capacity gave me a nice off road machine with 205 horse Cummings and let me roar around their trailer yard in Mississauga jacknifing trailers to my heart's content. Yesterday, a somewhat nervous Aidan Bolger of TICO took me over to a “it-shall-remain nameless” yard somewhere in Anjou, Que., and let me spin and spot empty reefers with the funny-looking TICO amidst truck traffic at a tanker wash facility. And I just got back from Woodbine Truck Centre where John Uppington was waiting for me with a current model Ottawa off-road tractor that I pushed pretty hard, too.

Aside from writing the odd column for TN, my driving job still lets me try my hand at shunting when I want to, and I do like the discipline. Some drivers prefer shunting to other types of trucking, and a good shunter is worth double his or her weight in barrels of crude.

I have to admit that since I've been on linehaul, my backing skills aren't as sharp as they used to be. Still, I know how to give these trucks a good work out, quick starts and stops and sharp maneuvers, smooth and articulate docking and spotting. And I know what I want when it comes to driver comfort. I'll let you know what I think in the August Truck News.

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Things have changed a lot since the mid-70s when truck drivers were viewed as heroic figures. The CB radio craze was followed by a spate of Hollywood films and TV series (Movin' On, BJ and the Bear) that portrayed truckers as good guy heroes who worked hard and fought for what was right and fair, often against unscrupulous trucking magnates and sycophantic cops. White Line Fever starred Jan-Michael Vincent as Carroll Joe Hummer, an independent and unsullied owner operator who returns from Vietnam and then has to battle against a corrupt long haul industry that expects drivers to haul contraband and work long hours. He also has to make a stand against law enforcement officials who are in the back pocket of the baddies. Smokey and the Bandit pitted Burt Reynolds and Sally Fields against Jackie Gleason who played the local yokel sheriff. In Convoy, Kris Kristofferson and Ali McGraw faced off against more corrupt police (the antagonist is Ernest Borgnine as chief county-mounty and he has the National Guard on his side) but this time they had help from a convoy of fellow truckers. Even Clint Eastwood as trucker got into the fray by teaming up with an orangutan to battle evil-doers in the industry (that man broke all the rules).

But somewhere along the way the blush went off the rose. Truckers are no longer heroes in the movies. If anything, the media has latched on to negative stereotypes about the profession. Black Dog, starring Patrck Swayze (1998), is a case in point. Swayze is a former trucker who had been released from jail after serving a term for vehicular manslaughter after falling asleep on the road. He gets a job as a truck mechanic but he's coerced into hauling a load of guns from Georgia to NYC. Swayze tries to quit the job after he discovers what's in the cargo but his boss kidnaps his wife and daughter to get him to comply. Meanwhile, the corrupt shipper of the load (played by singer Meatloaf) is attempting to hijack his own load. The film has some spectacular stunts involving trucks. Swayze's Peterbilt (powered by a CAT engine, he tells us), pushes a truck up a hill when the bad guys try to box him in. Freightliners and Internationals are no match for Swayze's Peterbilt and driving skills. The heroes of this movie are Randy Travis (not a trucker and only along for the ride, an undercover FBI agent who gets killed in the process, and Swayze who, we are told, has given up trucking). But the truckers in the movie are all bad dudes.

I wrote to Ronald Primeau, author of Romance of the Road, to examine this shift and he agreed with me. "No doubt there has been a slow but progressive shift away from the trucker as hero (with perhaps a very idealized, mythis meaning operating) to trucker as sinister, dangerous and all. In traditional road books this probably parallels the move from the Whitmanesque through kerouac and Blue Highways to the parody of Harrison's Good Day to Die or Jim Dodge's Not Fade Away to the road as a place where robbers, criminals and rapists lurk."

Primeau also passed my query on to a couple of his academic colleagues. David Bain wrote: "I think the guy has a point. When I was a kid the trucker was pretty much king; everybody had a CB and truckers were the heroes of all the movies in the theaters and all the songs on the radio. The dark side of the road has always been a subgenre, in horror and otherwise, I think, but I also believe Hollywood would currently rather finance another horror movie about wanderers making a wrong turn into horror than risk something in the spirit of Easy Rider. I think some of this is a subtle (or maybe not so subtle) isolationist turn since 9/11 -- stay at home and defend the hearth, only the boogieman's out there on the road."

Another academic, Barry Alford added, "I think there has been a clear shift in popular media away from the trucker as hero/working class savant toward a more sinister portrayal--movies with truckers as slashers and murderers etc.--parallels the turnin the American road genre from the road as open and Whitmanesque to damaged and deranged...maybe we need a Dudley Doright trucker

Author Greg Martin, who is working on a screenplay about just such a truck driver hero, and thinks the time is right for a new image to be presented by Hollywood. "The times call for a feel-good story about someone we can all relate to, someone who's made a decision in life and done it his way. What's important,” he says, “is to spotlight the industry in a good light and present a positive stereotype. There are a lot of career opportunities in trucking for hard working men and women, it's an opportunity to become your own person.”

Martin and I had fun speculating who would play such a hero. It turns out hehas already consulted various web site forums including “women in trucking” and come up with a short list that includes Kevin Costner, Harrison Ford, Sam Elliot, Tom Sellick, Ed Harris, Bruce Willis, and Sam Shepard..

“What about Clint Eastwood?” I ask Martin on the phone from his home in the San Francisco Bay area. “I think he might be a little too old,” he says. Even Billy Bob Thornton's name comes up, who Martin admits might be perfect for the part.

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So the Harper government wants an explanation from Canada Post as to why it granted a five-year, $100 million plus air cargo contract to Purolator without going to tender (Globe and Mail, June 3/09). The answer should be obvious—can you say “monopoly” Mr. Harper?

The reason Canada Post owns 92% of Purolator is because the crown corporation wanted a foothold into parcel delivery company that could fight off competition from US courier companies that were threatening to usurp its supremacy. I'm old enough to remember the early days before deregulation when UPS was making overtures into the Canadian market. As they didn't have operating authorities, UPS initially started with Checker cars towing U-haul trailers as it grew its Canadian operations. As a counterbalance, Canada Post acquired ownership of Purolator Courier in 1987.

The Globe story goes on to say that junior transport minister Rob Merrifield is waiting for answers from the chair of Canada Post as to why a tendering process was not initiated. According to a Canada Post spokesperson, the crown corporation was forced to act quickly when Air Canada cancelled the air cargo contract because the Post Office refused to pay the fuel surcharge. Hence the hastily-enacted sweetheart deal with its sister corporation.

But other air cargo airlines like FedEx and Cargojet would have loved a crack at the postal contract. And the deal smells bad because the contract involves a partnership with Kelowna Flightcraft which owns the planes operated by Purolator, and the fact that Kelowna Flightcraft's president, Barry Lapointe, owns 7 per cent of Purolator through Barry Lapointe Holdings Ltd., and sits on Purolator's board of directors.

As a journalist and a working truck driver, I feel stifled and awkward when writing about Puro. The company hired me 4 ½ years ago as a linehaul driver, and this fit with my criteria finding something close to home that paid well. For the most part, my expectations have been met. Overall it's a great job, well-remunerated with well-maintained equipment.

And although Purolator has to pay attention to the bottom line (and does so religiously), the same stresses that exist for smaller, regional, and family-owned trucking companies are less prevalent for this industry giant. I.e., when they were growing their logistics LTL business, from my perspective, there seemed to be no problem throwing equipment and personnel into the battle—something a privately-owned company could not, and would not be able to do with a bank looking over its shoulder.

Recently, there have been some economic indicators that the worst part of this recession is over: people are buying homes and the prices are holding, for one thing. But categorically, the same is not true for the trucking industry. There's still a lot of gloom out there and freight volumes are not improving much, if at all. So while revenues are down 10-20% (my estimate), I'm not fretting about my job, although I'm sure many middle managers at Puro are not as comfortable. It's been a rough go for the trucking industry and drivers alike, so there's no smugness in my comments, especially when it comes to the plight of my fellow transport drivers and workers.

Having said that, I noticed Puro has been granted two permits to operated Long Combination Vehicles in Ontario starting in October. The announcement created mixed emotions in me. No doubt, some of the Montreal-Toronto linehauls will go to LCVs, and some work will be lost. On the other hand, I enjoyed my time operating B-trains and I'll probably sign up for training (if they'll have me). If this profession has taught me anything, it's that one shouldn't be afraid of change and improving one's skill set.

But I'm still waiting to see some improvement in the highway infrastructure if the MTO wants these LCVs to coexist on the 400 series roads, especially when it comes to rest area parking. The Ontario government dropped the ball on the service centre closures and I frankly don't believe the promises they make in press releases.

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Aussie Rules Vacation

My whirlwind vacation this year took me to Pelee Island with my birdwatching girlfriend for a few days, then to Vancouver for a week with my son and his family. How's that for culture clash? From an idyllic, rural, nature-saturated community of 200 souls in the middle of Lake Erie, to the sprawling hegemony of Greater Vancouver

My 13 year old godson had a hankering to snowboard Whistler so I brought him along. We caught a very early Air Canada flight out of Pearson one Saturday, and Matthew met us at Vancouver International. It wasn't long before we were rolling along the Sea to Sky Highway toward the mountains. The route is under frenetic construction to convert it to four lanes in time for the 2010 Olympics—with some tricky sections still to negotiate. Signs warn Falling Rock—NO STOPPING.

Good deals on suites and chalets in Whistler this time of year, but what surprised me was the abundance of Australian kids (20-somethings mostly) doing jobs that used to be done by Canucks. These Aussie youths were everywhere in BC, but Whistler was saturated with them. Apparently short term work visas are easy to get for Aussies and the left coast is a prime destination for them, many of whom are avid ski bums and serious boarders.

You wouldn't get me up that mountain, and you need a telescope to watch the skiers. It was actually -4 degrees on top while a fairly balmy plus 8 at the chalets level. The boys made a day of it on the slopes and came back sunburned with aching calves. BC is one province where you can snow ski at Whistler and water ski in the Okanagan the same day, if you have a mind to do so.

In Vancouver we stayed in a hotel in the backpacking and club district. Students and young travellers on the move from all over, always the ubiquitous Australians. And no shortage of street people begging on the corners while the denizens of million dollar condos stroll by nonchalantly.

Vancouver is a beautiful city and a mecca of sorts for entrepreneurs and the socially-challenged alike. All big cities have a curious mix of squalor and abundance, but Vancouver has it in spades. The city is undergoing a face-lift for the upcoming winter Olympics and construction started early on Granville Street outside our hotel window. A few miles east along Hastings, you can witness of shopping market of poverty and the rest of the strata of humanity.

The last time I hitchhiked here was 1980. My marriage broke apart and I fled west in a futile attempt to find myself on the road one last time. I arrived in Vancouver early one October morning after getting a long overnight ride from Keremeos in the interior (don't let anyone tell you there aren`t deserts in Canada, complete with tumbleweeds and desperados), after picking apples for a few weeks in Kelowna.

I promptly and luckily got a job working on a sculpture going up at a new children`s hospital and got fired a couple of days later when it was discovered I didn`t have a union card and a sheet metal worker complained. For a few nights, at least, I went from sleeping on the floor of a crowded trailer in Kelowna with a dozen other fruitpickers, to living in a four star hotel in downtown Vancouver.

Two things happened when I got to Vancouver this time. Gord Campbell and the ruling BC Liberals had just won another majority, and the Vancouver Canucks hockey team got bounced out of the playoffs by the Chicago Black Hawks. The Liberal's victory was really no surprise since the province has always been polarized between the left and right. “Liberal” is really a misnomer, since this party swings to the right side of the metronome, except for the end run that Campbell pulled on the Greens and NDP by introducing a carbon tax last year, a neat rouse which appears to pay lip-service to the environmentalists and didn't detract from his pro-business appeal.

The 'Nucks, on the other hand, blew their best opportunity to win the Stanley Cup in many years—and the last chance for Matts Sundin to get himself a ring. In my opinion, Vancouver gave this series away. It was really theirs to lose and that's what they did. How else do you explain 7 goals on Luongo in the final game. Fortunately their loss allowed me to experience the city without the crass carnival of Stanley Cup fever that would have infused every waking moment with hype and jingoism.

On the whole, I found the “laid-back” descriptor still fit my perception of most Vancouverites. People are generally friendlier than their compatriots in Hogtown; there's a Starbucks around every corner, sometimes on opposite corners, and it's not unusual to get a sniff of BC bud permeating the evening air.

This is a place where a young man or woman can make a stand, destroy themselves, or make a fortune if they're so inclined. In an Irish pub I got talking to a man of Sikh descent who had come to Vancouver via New Jersey and Oklahoma. He told me that he and his wife own a high-end lighting shop in the posh quadrant of Kitsilano and he'd decided to take his receiver out for a bit of a bender.

Across the street a young man from Montreal stopped me on my way into the Mega Pizza. “Two dollars,” he asks. “That's all I need to get a room for $12.” He tells me he's waiting to get a construction job that should be starting any day. This is not an unusual, half the panhandlers are waiting for construction jobs. But this man is grinding his teeth, and he has distant chemical look in his eyes. I pass on throwing any money into his cap and tell him I'll think about it. When I return with my pizza he's no longer in sight. He's either gone to get the room, or to fetch a $10 piece of crack—probably the latter.

But I didn't see any Aussies begging. The ones I met had a penchant for lager rather than hard drugs, and they had a plan and idea about where they were going and what they wanted to do along the way.. Mostly I admired their sense of verve and adventure, something I think is lacking in Canadians these days. Most new Canadians never see much of their province let along the rest of the country.

I have an ex-pat friend who makes his home in Australia now and we email from time to time. He's always reading the Canadian papers online, and I remember being embarrassed when he mentioned the case of the Tim Horton's server in London, Ont. who was fired for giving free a timbit to a toddler. “How typically Canadian,” he snorted to me in an email. “That story tells you so much about Canadians and their anxieties.”

My friend was right. The miserly policies of our proto-Canadian donut chain made us look like fools before the world. And remember when Dave Winfield of the Yankees was charged with animal cruelty for killing a sea gull with a throw to the infield?—on the bounce yet! We gotta loosen up folks!

My transplanted friend goes on: “If I ever move back to the farm, what I will miss most about Australia is the people, all my friends and acquaintances here who are just so much more open and generous and unconflicted...I read today that a woman in Laval, Quebec was fined $420 for failing to use, and then refusing to use when ordered to, the handrail on the escalator from the subway. In Australia there usually is no handrail, and if there were, someone would be sliding down it.”

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A lot of back-slapping must have accompanied the announcement that Ontario is finally ready to start its pilot LCV project this summer. Trucking firms like Robert, Goyette and Bison have been chomping at the bit for months waiting for the green light to commence pulling turnpike doubles. The OTA has a great track record at getting what it wants and David Bradley can chalk up another victory here. But before we break out the champagne, perhaps it might be good to take a sober look at what this means.

I'm not a Luddite and I can fully understand the benefits that double 53s will provide from an economical, environmental and a public safety perspective. Double 53s have a great safety record in jurisdictions where they are utilized, largely because of the strict conditions under which they operate and the fact that only the best, most experienced drivers are chosen to pilot these units and they have to undergo training and certification to do so. Right off the bat, trucking companies who are granted the permits (about 100 are up for grabs according to the MTO) will see a 30% fuel savings in fuel and approximately 40% savings in driver wages (one driver can pull two loads but it takes a while longer as pre-trips, for one thing, have to fulfill a rigourous checklist before the doubles can leave the yard).

But I can't be the only one to notice that the infrastructure to support long trains is not presently available on the 400 series highways. The Ontario government has dropped the ball on providing safe, accessible rest areas along the big roads: half of the service centres are closed or about to be closed for renovation (which may take years) and most of them are a shambles for parking big rigs anyway. You should have your head examined if you want to pull a set of doubles into these places at night.You have to keep the trailers straight and in front of the so-called rest areas, and those spots are among the first to get blocked in by ignorant and selfish truck drivers.

I suppose McGuinty will send out crews to put up signs and create a few lanes for LCV parking (this could be part of the stimulus package we're still waiting to see). But clearly, as in the rest area debacle, I doubt that much will be done before the LCVs start rolling this summer. Surely the MTO realizes that drivers have to stop at least once between Toronto and Montreal and where, I might ask the two Bradleys (transportation minister Jim and the aforementioned David), will they be able to do so safely and without getting blocked in?

And let's not forget the small "c" conservative mentality of this province. The motoring public is a powerful lobby and is already freaked out when it comes to big trucks. Groups like rail proponents CRASH and the four-wheeler oriented CAA may have an easy time playing on the fears of motorists who already think trucks are too big and dominant on the highways as is. I think McGuinty realizes this is a hot-button issue that may come back to sting him. Expect a lot of polling on the subject as the trial gets under way.

But realistically, maybe the provincial government should have gone further. Why not extend the trial to triples and add a few permits for them, as well? This would be the time to try it out. Afterall, what do the Australians know that we don't?

Lastly, we can't discount the fact that some driving jobs will be lost by the introduction of LCVs. This may be fine for times when there is a driver shortage, but last time I checked there was no surfeit of truck driving jobs, unless you want to drive teams--they're still in demand. So there might be some backlash from groups like the Teamsters and OBAC who are happy with the status quo and want to protect the jobs they have now.

However, if my company was to post a notice asking for drivers for LCV training, I might just put my name down. I enjoyed the trial I had driving a set of 53s around the Robert yard in Boucherville, Que. last year. I'm one person who enjoys operating heavy equipment and it was thrilling to watch the tail of the last trailer disappear around the previous corner as I was already negotiating another turn 125 feet ahead. Now if only the province could get it together with the rest areas...

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We sadly note the passing of Michael Augustine Lobraico at the age of 90 on April 4th. A stalwart in the industry, he had a long association with trucking in Ontario and the OTA. Mike was born into a trucking family: his father Peter purchased Okeefe Express from his brother Bill in 1919 and changed the name to OK Express, the same year Michael was born. Along with his brother Vince, Mike did the maintenance on the company vehicles in those early years. Mike was later to become vice president and look after maintenance and purchasing for OK Transportation during its middle era when it was located on Howden Road in Scarborough..

I got to know Mike when OK acquired Taylor Bros. Tspt. of Markham and Janton Leasing in the mid-70s. I'll always remember him as a sunny guy with a joke and a smile who had time to listen to your problems. My friend Ken Helliwell called me with the sad news Sunday morning Here's the obit as it appeared in the Toronto Star

MICHAEL AUGUSTINE LOBRAICO December 18, 1919 - April 4, 2009 Peacefully on April 4th, surrounded by his family. Michael, in his 90th year. Beloved husband of the late Olivia Marie Gardner. Dear father of Marie Hagerty (the late William), Nora Sullivan (Paul), Rose Locking (Norman), Michele Lobraico-Perkell (Gregory) and Kathryn Lobraico (Karen Anson). Beloved grandfather of Michael-Paul (Heather), Nicole (Michael Starcevic), Christopher, Kate, Justin, Anne, Nicholas and Andrew. Dear brother of the late Theresa Cuviello (the late Michael), Rose Paterson (Robert), Vincent (Helene) and Patricia Burnett (James). Loving uncle of many nieces and nephews in the Lobraico and Gardner families. Special thanks to the doctors and nurses in the Palliative Care Unit at York Central Hospital. Visitation will be held on Tuesday, April 7th from 2-4 and 6-9 p.m. at the R.S. Kane Funeral Home (6150 Yonge Street, at Goulding, south of Steeles, 416-221-1159). Funeral Mass will be held on Wednesday, April 8th at 1:30 p.m. at St. Luke's Roman Catholic Church (39 Green Lane, Thornhill, 905-881-2786). Cremation to follow. A private burial service will take place at Mount Hope Cemetery at a later date. Donations in Michael's name may be made to the Canadian Cancer Society or York Central Hospital. Condolences www.rskane.ca Rest In Peace Dad

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Just got back from New France, Hochelaga as they used to call it, before they put a cross on the big hill and renamed it Mount Royal. Hardly a mountain at 300 feet, but 45 smog days so far this winter, “nice place to live but I wouldn't want to breath there.” Actually I was in Anjou for my last scheduled layover (a suburb on the north side of the island named after a pear that straddles the Metropolitan, halved by the knife of the T-Can so to speak) one big Mall on the south side--Galleries des Anjou—and the taxi driver tells me it's going down, no longer upscale like the Carrefour in Laval or Pointe Claire.

This last afternoon, as though the waitress in the International restaurant on Rue Jarry knew this was my last day on this run (I been bumped from the food dish by a bigger dog, but that's another story), she brings me extra coleslaw on a plate piled on top of fresh lettuce, for the times, she says, when they didn't have any to go with my poulet chaud sandwich (hot chicken sandwich) and walking back to the hotel to watch women's curling on TSN, I pass two Saputo buildings by the side of Hwy 40, two towers: this one's for cheese; the other for transport holdings, I suppose. “Just tell me what Saputos are doing, those Himalyas of the Roads”. The secretive giants must be wracking up losses too, in this strained economy.

But don't sell those stocks yet folks we might have hit bottom, and get some leverage off this dead cat bouncing. In the Montreal Gazette I noticed one driver leasing service hiring ($18 Class 1 jobs, maybe permanent) and the guys I talk to on the CB have got jobs but they say it's slow, some laid off.

Tonight I fight with this stupid coaxle cable, the strand of copper wires frayed around the collar, bringing me grief all the way along the St. Lawrence mostly static as I jiggle my $79 Radio Shack CB in the velcro strap occasionally picking up a muted scrambled voice talking about bear sightings and closed chicken houses.

But mostly just static and fading George Noury on Coast to Coast out o f Cleveland 1100 AM band, discussion on crop circles tonight and animal mutations, until the truck hits a rut, and the antennae actually becomes antennaed, and I can hear guys talking: “a lot of trucks with their fog lights on” says one eastbounder and I'm one of those trucks with the fogs but he doesn't know there's some pea soup ahead past Shannonville and we westbounders are weary of turning them off and on as we've done the last 75 kms. The fog gets heavy around Napanee and I don't bother to tell him, the early March rain washing it out in spots. Almost hit a beaver tonight, a quick swerve and I didn't feel any bump under my right wheels.

And for those smart drivers with their snotty channel 19 talk who don't know fog, they're probably running out of Belleville, or Trenton ancestral home of poet Al Purdy, to whose memory I was going to dedicate this anyway, these words come to me just as I'm hitting the 401 split at Pickering with the hammer buried at 101 kms/hr and almost ready for bed.

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I wrote the following a few years ago in a story called Go West, Older Driver: "And what happens if oil prices drop to $30-40 per barrel? It seems unthinkable now, but when this balloon bursts, and historically it always does, that mobile home you just bought for tens of thousands is going to be worth peanuts once again."

At the time oil was $70 per barrel and moving up. I was cautioning truckers who were moving to Alberta in droves, particularly Ft. McMurray, and were thinking about buying a house. Anybody who reads this will think I'm daft, I thought at the time. How could oil prices crash to $30 per barrel, and why would real estate prices collapse in Alberta?

Now I'm wondering whether the legion of truckers, in particular the large number from Newfoundland, who pulled up stakes and moved lock, stock an barrel to northern Alberta, have migrated back again.

But I promised good news and I've noticed a few bright spots. Generally, in Canada, we've avoided the "casino mentality" of our US cousins when it comes to real estate investments. Prices have come down across Canada but they're still solid in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. My youngest son is a project coordinator for a large tile installation company in Vancouver and he tells me they've got a couple of years work in the can, as long as the developers stay solvent. Things are a little slower, he admits, but if anything the economic downturn has eased the skilled trade market. They no longer have to import tradespeople from Albania or eastern Europe.

My oldest son, after kamikazi-ing out of grad school twice, went out and got his DZ licence (the apple doesn't fall far from the tree!), and landed a job driving a bucket truck for the city of Toronto forestry department. He's making great coin and is happier than a puppy with a frisbee. Specialty trucking will always be in demand. And although things look a little bleak right now, trucks will always need to be driven. Adding a specialized skill to your repertoire can only improve employment prospects. During the recession of the early 90s I went and got a student loan and hid out in university myself, while still working for Canadian Tire on weekends banging cans around their Brampton facilities. If your job has dried up recently, this might be the time to consider a new direction. If you're interested, McMaster and University of Windsor both offer degree programs in transportation studies.

A couple of weeks ago I talked to a man in Montreal who had just started a business hauling used cars between dealers, auction houses and a 200 mile radius of the Swamp. He uses a 53 foot trailer float trailer pulled by a F350 pick up with a fifth wheel. The used vehicle business is hot at this time and he's adding another truck and trailer and looking for another driver. It's a small operation but he's already grown 100% in a few short months.

Tracey Raimondo, vp of logistics for Normandin Transit inc., of Napierville, Que., told me they hired 15 drivers in February and have recently added 20 tractors, 55 reefers and 25 dry box trailers to their fleet. Besides LTL loads to the States, pharmaceuticals is one growth area where the company is looking to expand.

And it looks like there is some openings for drivers in the food service industry, either as delivery drivers or working for brokers hauling loads for the big supermarket chains. I've even seen Schneider National (Canadian division I hope) pulling groceries around Ontario--anything to keep their drivers active.

Once again the film industry is expanding in Toronto and will no doubt lead to spin offs in other Canadian locations. The entertainment sector does all right during recessions, and the low Canadian dollar is seducing producers to come north. This means some good paying driving jobs are opening up, although they're not for everybody. IATSE has the monopoly on labour in Toronto while I think the Teamsters call the shots in Vancouver. A film shoot requires lots of equipment shuttled between locations, although a lot of the work involves sitting around. A driver might be on call for outrageous numbers of hours with not much to do except collect overtime and eat the great food supplied by the craft wagons. Drivers with extra skills like generator operators, make even more cabbage without having to do a lot of anything.

Lastly, team drivers are making out better during these austere times than their single counterparts. But even they've slowed down a bit. A team driver for Arnold Bros. told me last night that they used to do the triangle between Montreal, Winnipeg and southern US in four and a half to five days. Now, they have to wait a little longer for loads and it takes them, on average, another day to do the same triangle. But they've got work and that's what counts

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Last Monday's Queen's Park protest was too little too late. One time I arrived at Ford Talbotville and all the gates were locked. The security guard told me someone had just stolen a car and driven it right off the assembly floor.. Clearly a case of locking the gate after the horse had gone.

Spokesperson Scott Mooney looked like he was held up to dry, waiting for reinforcements to come from Cambridge that never arrived, and the handful of trucks that did show up weren't enough to block College Street, let alone ring the legislature.

But I'm not sure an enthusiastic turnout of cheesed-off owner operators would have done much to change public opinion either. However I was categorically wrong stating last year speed limiting Class 8 vehicles could only be safer. How could slowing down velocity result in more accidents?

The epiphany I've had is that limiting top ends means you can't break away from a pack, or speed up in some cases to get in front of merging traffic. Most drivers set the cruise as high as it goes so we get quantum lumps of trucks and four wheelers backed up for kilometres while two rigs spar with each other, gaining and losing millimeters at a time.

However speeds on the 401 have come down since the new year, and few trucks pass me between Toronto and Montreal (those that do aren't doing any great chore either). But all my driving is at night, so maybe the high ballers are still running during the daytime hours.

A driver for Maritime Ontario told me he hadn't had his speed backed off yet, but he's keeping to 104 kph, wary of the bears who seem to be out on the big road thicker than ever these last weeks. Another driver was wondering if there weren't a toggle switch he could install that would take off the limiter when he gets in the States, where trucks are allowed to run at some good clips. No is the answer, though I suppose a mechanic might be able to show you how to access the electronics and set the limit yourself. Anybody know if this is possible? At least we don't have to run tachometers as well, like they do in Europe (remember those things, with the big round clock face and the round graphs?)

The other night, somewhere around the Big Apple (Brighton, Ont., not NYC) another tractor trailer pulls out to pass me. It seems to take awhile, but he or she is nudging up. So when buddy is halfway past, maybe going 101.7 kph, and I'm doing 101.34 kph..so just coming up to my door—I flip off the cruise and buddy is suddenly sliding by like he's a highway superhero...like the old days....but behind me a the bunch in the right lane tailing me closely suddenly they have to adjust their speed, hit their brakes and start cramming into the hammer lane.

Except there's a big hill in front of us, and the guy passing me with all his weight is suddenly dying faster than me backing off the throttle. I'm thinking, better to goose it than have to hit the brakes and really mess up the flow. So suddenly I'm flying up the hill while my new friend is struggling to hold on to high gear.

I see him in the rearview finally getting back into the right lane, but not before a couple of four wheelers pull fabulous NASCAR maneuvers and come roaring by. We get to the top of the next hill and start down the other side and sure enough, here he comes again slipstreaming onto my back door and we start the process all over again.

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Blogging is something new for me, but I'm looking forward to this new type of communicating. As a working truck driver, I want to explore issues that are of importance to my fellow gear jammers. Motor transport is a leading economic indicator, so for my first entry I'd like to talk about the current employment situation out there.

My expertise is the 401 corridor between Toronto and Montreal. Yes, traffic volumes are clearly down and have been falling for some time now, but it's not entirely dismal. And the job market hasn't completely dried up. Indeed, a little digging indicates that good jobs and good employers are still out there. Seems like I'm meeting new drivers just getting started in the industry every day, while some veterans on the big road tell me they've got as much work as they can handle. The company I work for laid off six drivers after Christmas and promptly reactivated them a couple of weeks later.

This time of year is traditionally slow for many carriers and fleets, so it's a little difficult to judge right now. The crunch may still be coming, as employers look at park more power units and remove capacity. But for now, good jobs for qualified drivers are apparently still available, although they're by no means plentiful. What's the vibe out there? Are there still good jobs for drivers who want them?

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