"The central fact of the trucking life is its rootlessness, its indeterminacy; the countless times you hole up a thousand miles from nowhere: the road that never ends anywhere, but only ever continues on, and then on." Graham Coster from A Thousand Miles from Nowhere
Writers don’t write about trucks much, and rarely about truck drivers.
John Steinbeck mentions truck drivers only briefly in his road travelogue, Travels with Charlie. He reasons that truckers are not really a part of the communities they pass through. Rather, "they cruise over the surface of the action without being a part of it."
One would expect Jack Kerouac, whose generation-influencing novel On the Road anthemized the highway, to turn his gaze on truck drivers. But his references to truckers are scarce. It’s not until a later work, Visions of Cody, that he talks about observing them:
| ...the same look of adventuring you see on young truck drivers when they stop at a lonely junction Coke stand at night in Texas and their enormous truck trailer sits waiting for them huge across the road, with a spare tire regardent under the cab like the ram shield on a Dodge radiator cap--the flying billy ram of travel-- and both of ‘em dirty and grim and come a long way and quiet and Henry Fonda-like and talk to each other that you can’t hear and when they leave together they move with the same sadness as if their adventure together was persecuting them to grieve the same careful way and off they go into their own night beyond the whatevers of where you who watch them still stay, they are gone like ghosts across your eyes... |
But it takes a Canadian poet to get at the majestic physicality of the trucking experience. The late Milton Acorn hitched more than a few rides with his truck driving friend, Joe Hemsby and wrote a poem about it:
Riding with Joe Hensby (from More Poems for People)
Riding with Joe Hensby in a ten-speed trailer
Down 401 the cab so high we’re on a flying throne;
No need to worry of traffic, it worries you...
The jungle trails clear when the elephant comes.
Thirty tons of steel behind, fifty miles an hour:
No need to worry - if we got stopped sudden
And all that metal came crashing through
You could spread us on a sandwich and we’d never know.
He plays the gears like a man at a piano
Cursing every time - two or three seconds apart;
At no one in particular
He lives the road...he lives the abstract world of his curses.
Sometimes I come into his consciousness, but no one else.
But when that stream of vehicles clogs, we slow:
sitting up there like conjoint kings
One of us’s got to point a moral; and I
The official poet: --
"Jesus Christ Joe
There’s ten million dollars of equipment in sight
-- how is it that we’re poor?"
Call it a machine, call it a beast, call it a kind of hand
For it becomes an extension of the man.
When it roars it’s we together are the lion:
And we live like lions
often moving, often waiting
years to pounce
Phyllis Skinner, is a diminutive navigator/bookkeeper who shares a 2000 Freightliner with her husband Patrick Skinner, a North American Van Lines driver. She handed me this poem at the TransCanada Truck Stop in Chilliwack, B.C. The couple owns a house in St. John’s Newfoundland and their job moving household furniture takes them across North America. When I met them, they hadn't been home in five months. "Not many people are moving to Newfoundland these days," said Phyllis...They were waiting for a load to anywhere.
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.
To Matthew--For those Times
By Harry Rudolfs
It might have been you that I saw
on a bridge over the QEW
pumping your fist madly
at my tractor trailer
as the night sky blossomed behind you
and reaching for the air horn
I knew the two short bleeps
could not say what
was in my heart that second
besides the hard contact
of the tires on pavement
and the icy parking lots
of St. Catherine’s
gleaming with reflected light
It’s Saturday when
I’m writing this
and still cold
I want to tell you
there’s a pattern
in the frost
on the window
but I can’t think
of anything else
16 and on the other side of Canada
I won’t know what kind of man
you’ve become
holding you as a baby
with your eyelids fluttering
and skin burning
I had the idea then
that you were a shaman
and living with you in Parkdale
has confirmed it
I can tell by the way
you wear your
ear warmer on the outside
of your White Sox cap
I want to tell you what to do
in tough times
but I don’t know myself
it’s a bumpy world
we find a few things
and try to keep them together
(a mistake probably)
and sometimes we encounter kindness
Don’t disregard that nagging feeling
of restlessness
it’s kept me going from crisis to zero
and back again
and nothing like a little melancholy
to sweeten a long Sunday afternoon
occasionally I’ve caught a glimpse
of something beyond all the jive
and bullshit and sorrow
a crystalline instant
that transformed everything
into pattern and ecstasy
but I was never able to tell anyone
or understand it myself
and like the kid on the bridge over the QEW
and me sailing past in my truck
all I could do was pull on the air horn
to try to tell him something beyond words
and the kid on the bridge was you
Teamster Love
by Harry Rudolfs
voices in the hallway tonight
dog barks
someone crying/moaning intermittently
(it’s stopped now)
teamster guy sitting alone at his computer
twenty minutes after 3 am
wondering what to write about:
the streetcar outside
or the curious route I took tonight
under low bridges in the west end
and the love
I thought about passing
a donut shop on Dundas
turned down Dufferin
under the bridge on Queen
a two horse union
wondering if a union man
can be a good husband
build a trellis for small roses
paint it white
eat salami and cucumber slices
at a table outside
and when winter comes
leave our shoes on the mat
facing the same direction
Graffiti copied from the door of a toilet stall at the Husky Truck Stop, Dorchester, Ont.
(1978)
Keep the little one in your britches
And the big one between the ditches
Don’t play with the witches
You’ll bring mama the itches