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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