Over the Road

Sorry I've been neglectful of updates here for the past few weeks. I'm back in my phase-2 training and likely will be for most of the month of April. As last reported I'd gotten off the truck of my first phase-2 trainer in Laredo Texas and caught a ride up to Indiana with Buddy and his son. From there I caught a ride to Massachusetts with Kevin, a very interesting fellow who was born and raised in the UK until about eleven years old when his family moved to Oklahoma. Consequently he has one of the most interesting (and difficult to understand) accents I've ever heard - Okey/Cockney.

Kevin had an automatic verbal response of "uh oh" to every new stimulus. The phone would ring, our satellite comm system would beep, we'd go over a bump, a truck would pass us too close, a cow would sit down in the field . . . Surprising how annoying that could become in so short a period of time. Nice guy but had a serious two pack a day smoking habit. I discovered one day when he ran out of cigarettes that he really needed those cigarettes to interact with the world. For two hours after his last cigarette and until we got to the next state in which cartons were considerably cheaper, he sat immobilized in the passenger seat, nearly catatonic. Reminded me of David Sedaris' statement that cigarettes are the only thing holding all his 'ticks' at bay.

While Kevin had been driving truck for more than a decade - essentially the only job he'd ever held - he'd started driving for England just a couple weeks before. (I ended up showing him a lot of things about the truck and the satellite comm-system that he didn't know.) While he had a laptop and camera phone, he really couldn't figure out how to work them together. So he asked me to take a bunch of photos of him in and around the truck so that he (inexplicably) could "prove to my friends that I really do drive this truck". Kevin's 'thing' was country-western line dancing. He met his current girlfriend dancing and liked to do it whenever he had off-duty time at home.

After spending a few days in New Hampshire getting my Commercial Driver License converted from Utah (the temporary I needed to go through the school) to New Hampshire, I caught a ride all the way back to Salt Lake City with Moises (pronounced like the biblical character). Unfortunately, my camera/phone had some technical glitch and my photos of him and a bunch of other stuff is now gone.

Moises is from east Los Angeles and had grown up as a gangster who finally got out of it after being shot in a drive-by shooting at his parents home. He showed me the scars. After that he got into construction doing mostly sheet-rocking until he got mixed up in crystal meth. After a couple years of that he put himself in rehab and now is down to just drinking a couple of beers at the end of every day, which his girlfriend doesn't know about. Imagine a combination of the comedians George Lopez, Gabriel Iglesias and Cheech Marin. He'd call his dad on the phone and yell "Eh?", "Eh?", "Eh?" in Spanish. Every time we drove by a herd of cattle he'd laugh like a madman. He thought cows had such a cool life, just standing in the field and chewing. I started calling them "your buddies" and he'd laugh even harder. Within a few hours of getting on his truck he asked me "do you think I'm fat?" (He was.)

After arriving in Salt Lake I got on a truck with another trainer, a very unpleasant and angry little man with a serious Napoleon complex and a bunch of personal phobias. I stayed with him a week mostly because he had a really great little dog on board with whom I'd play catch a couple times a day. I awoke one morning in a truck stop in Ogden Utah to find a note on the dashboard - "have a great day!" - after I'd specifically asked him the day before how long we'd be in Salt Lake to which he replied "only minutes".

Somewhere along the way I drove us through Saint Louis.

It's all beginning to blur together.

The next day I got on the truck of Yazmani "Manni" Estrada, a 27 year old Mexican American who grew up in the east LA basin and Michoacan Mexico which has made his English vocabulary very interesting and amusing for both of us.

The other day he was describing "the little cars to cut the grass" (riding mowers), which has now become a joke between us.

We had a 34 hour reset in Las Vegas a few days ago and fortunately found a truck stop parking lot within walking distance of the strip. In the one hand of blackjack he played, he won $90 which he then used to get us into a dance club in the MGM grand. Club dancing is his thing. Asking women to dance with him, he's not so comfortable with. Fortunately, asking women to dance with him turns out to be my thing. Yes, he can dance. And he's a good looking guy who keeps in good shape so the ladies like him well. I'm looking forward to our next 34 hours off in some other city in a few days.

Like me, Manni spends much of his off-duty time just staring out the window amazed at what we're driving through. Before starting driving in January, he'd never been anywhere but his town in Mexico and the LA Basin. Now he wants to work his way up to getting a fleet of trucks and mostly make enough money to own a house his mother can live in. He has a great sense of humor, drives safely, and likes to keep his truck very neat and clean. He's even open to some minor off-route adventures. We're getting along very well.

I've never seen the desert so green.

I'm writing this while sitting in the bunk in the sleeper, while Manni is driving us through Iowa on our way to Buffalo, NY with nearly twenty tons of Sorrento cheese in the trailer. (More Cheese Please Grommit.) I drove last night from 9pm till about 8am this morning, almost six hundred miles. Looks like I might be pulling us into Buffalo tomorrow morning at this rate. Then off on another adventure to who knows where. Manni is hoping we work our way down to Miami - the dance club capital of the world - for our next 34 hours off.