Tag Archives: truck driver

composite photo of me and my broken arm, from the trucking injury

Suddenly Wrist-less: Anatomy of a Trucking Injury

Leave a Reply

Wounded, on the job, far from Canada

Sometime in early December, 2023

If I didn’t mention it, you wouldn’t be privy to the slow typing and the banging of the cast against my laptop. You also wouldn’t know about my constantly tapping the wrong keys on the keyboard and needing to go back every few words and correct my mistakes. You wouldn’t be aware of my need to stop every ten minutes or so because keyboarding with a new cast on is stressful on my lower arm. Persisting through the discomfort results in stress for the entire arm. These things are regular occurrences for me now, as I sloppily navigate my laptop, with my three-week-old broken wrist. Until the last few days, I wasn’t able to do much at all, on the computer or off it.

I’ve only had one very minor workplace injury before. That fingertip laceration was easily repaired by a short trip to the local hospital’s emergency department and some light bandaging. I’ve never broken a bone, even in many years of playing baseball and in about a thousand karate classes, including during some aggressive sparring.

I’ve had childhood scrapes and bruises, but less than most boys my age. I’ve had a few good bruises from being hit by baseballs on various parts of my body. I’ve jammed toes and fingers from working out on the heavy bag. I’ve had severe bursitis in my shoulder, brought on by trying to be cool on the monkey bars in the water park as a 45-year-old. I’ve also had moderate knee discomfort from many hours of driving the truck non-stop. Physiotherapy and well-placed stretching helped overcome that.

Still, no broken bones.

It’s taken a freak situation for me to finally get my first one at the ripe age of 56. It happened on the job and out of the country, more than a full day’s drive away from home. It happened suddenly, in the early morning hours that I hate so much. Continue reading →

Highway 77, north Carolina, covid, stay home, coronavirus

Into The COVID Coffers

Leave a Reply

Two Different Deaths and Other Isolation Thoughts

1. Mournful

Tuesday April 7, 2020 was an unusually warm evening in this strange new coronavirus world. Just after 9pm, I pulled into my go-to truck stop in Mount Nebo, West Virginia. Usually I park among strangers: road-weary drivers that I don’t know and don’t care to meet. This time my friend Paul parked beside me at the back of the massive lot. He typically drives a different route and on a different schedule, and we talk only on the phone. But the COVID-19 crisis has quickly forced major changes in the trucking industry and on this rare occasion he was in the Carolinas too.

He departed North Carolina an hour later than I did but his loaded trailer was much lighter than mine. So he managed to pass me minutes before the U-Save Travel Plaza. We were glad to have the opportunity for in-person conversation. Of course, we were six feet apart as per now-standard COVID regulations, him sitting in his driver’s seat, me standing outside in the clean air of the Appalachian Mountains.

We talked for a short while before Paul went for a walk to stretch his legs and then ate his late evening dinner. I breezed through my regular 30-minute workout outside my truck then went inside the store for a shower. As I waited for the shower to heat up, I took a quick look at Facebook. I’ve become more curious about my friends’ posts since this virus struck and started upending all our lives.

The first post I saw announced the worst possible news. A woman I know from high school had just lost her husband to the virus. She posted several photos of him smiling and surrounded by family. She wrote a brief and sincere message stating that they always believed he would come back home. I teared up immediately. I looked back at her previous posts to remind myself of her husband’s circumstances. Then I posted a short message of condolence. This was the first person even remotely close to me to contract the virus. I never anticipated the first might be fatal. Continue reading →

firefly-central-park-new-york-city

Oh, The Glow

Leave a Reply

Last evening, July 19, 2019, as dusk turned to dark, Kim and I sat outside on our stone front porch, each armed with a wonderful Cranberry Rosé Cider from the No Boats on Sunday beverage company. I had just return from inside because Kim rightfully suggested that we drink from classy beer glasses rather than straight out of the bottle. We were looking around our neighbourhood and discussing who lived where when we first moved into the townhouse directly across the street 17 years ago. That was seven years before we made the gargantuan leap across the road to our semi-detached backsplit.

It was a particularly warm evening, on the heels of a hot day. Here in Burlington, Ontario we were considerably above the 30-degree Celsius mark, not figuring in the humidex. But that’s nothing compared to what New York City and the rest of the American Eastern Seaboard was facing. We had just returned from NYC a day earlier and were reflecting on the amazing sites we had seen there, having scoured much of central Manhattan and the lower west side. We were grateful not to be there now, because walking around in 30-degree Celsius heat was arduous enough. Now it was closer to 35 and feeling like over 40.

There was little unusual about this evening, other than we only get the chance to do this sitting around and enjoying a beverage in the late evening once every few weeks. That’s because I’m away in the truck so much and Kim is often in bed by nine o’clock. So, here we were together around 9:30pm, with our Maltese Poodle Sydney resting on Kim’s lap. Continue reading →

When The ‘Going’ Gets Rough

Leave a Reply
Highway 19, west virginia, hico, mount nebo, summersville, truck driver

An incredible view along Highway 19 in West Virginia – a place no one should ever want to soil.

I lament the very idea of ‘going’ here

There’s no denying the beauty of driving along Highway 19 in West Virginia. The green covered mountains and lush valleys make you forget – even if just briefly – how poor this state is and how hard life is for its people.

The vast hilly region is absolutely underappreciated. In fact, I’d heard remarkably little about the area until I started driving through it weekly as a long-haul truck driver. That was in the spring of 2017. Prior to then, I knew nothing of the spectacular New River Gorge and the mighty bridge that spans its width.

This entire part of the country is far too beautiful to soil. It’s a shame when you have no choice. Allow me to explain the messy details: Hundreds of trucks pass through these parts daily, en route to destinations where they deliver and pick up freight. It would make perfect sense that any route travelled so heavily by transport trucks would have ample facilities to support the volume. It doesn’t.

For cars, small trucks and motorcycles – plus most campers and even motor homes – it’s easy enough to pull over into any roadside restaurant or store parking lot, in Summersville, Fayetteville or Oak Hill, for instances. These drivers and passengers don’t have to ‘dirty’ the gorgeous environment. After all, no self-respecting human wants to leave behind a remnant of their visit. Continue reading →

Lot Lizards, Lamentably

Leave a Reply

lot lizard, truck driver, trucking, truck stop

Lot lizard graphic from topsimages.com

Imagine a long-haul truck driver hundreds of miles away from home. He’s at the end of a long day of delivering and picking up freight. He’s found a parking spot in a truck stop and has decided he wants company.

Now picture another truck driver who arrived at the truck stop earlier, only to have the first guy park beside him. This driver wants nothing but an evening of peace and quiet, a decent dinner in his truck, a hot shower and a Leafs or Raptors game on the satellite radio. This driver is me.

I don’t care anything about the first driver. What he does on his own time is his own business, so long as it doesn’t affect me in the least. I certainly don’t want to see or hear about his ‘company.’

Check out these interesting “insane” lot lizard stories.

I Want To Pretend That I Didn’t See Anything

Unfortunately, this brings me to an evening a few weeks at my favourite Pilot truck stop in Gaffney, South Carolina. As usual, I parked in the far back corner of the lot. Typically, that’s where you get the most seclusion and least disturbance from the noise and headlights of the incoming trucks in the fuel aisles.

I was sitting in driver’s seat at around eleven o’clock, trying to decide if I should lie down in my bunk. I was fiddling with the radio and looking around when a car pulled around the corner. Continue reading →

Tragedy at Jane Lew Truck Stop

2 Replies

truck stop image, tractor-trailer

A random truck stop parking lot, at dusk

Sadly, it’s not news when a truck driver dies. At least it’s not news to most truck drivers. But what happened on Wednesday, December 5th puts a devastating new spin on truck driver deaths. A young trucker was walking through the Jane Lew Truck Stop and was run over by a rig that had just entered the lot.

I learned of the tragedy on the Twisted Truckers page on Facebook. Initially, I saw the altered image of a truck driving upward toward heaven. That was unusual. Then I read the text and discovered the horrific truth. The last sentence of the post read: “Everyone needs to slow down in these truck stops and pay more attention to everything and everyone around you.”

A follow-up post on Twisted Truckers, a day or two after the tragedy, showed a picture of a set of truck keys, which the author said belonged to the deceased driver. She said the driver had a wife and children who now had to spend the holidays without him. She said she can think of no reason that anyone should be traveling fast enough through a truck stop to kill someone.

Details unknown

I asked my friend Tony if he had heard any of the details. He stops at Jane Lew frequently when he’s passing through West Virginia on his way back from the Carolinas. He later told me that he talked to a waitress at the truck stop’s restaurant. She said the truck in question came barreling into the lot and ran over the victim with all five axles.

How exactly the calamity happened, I don’t know. No doubt an investigation has started that will look at all the possible angles and answer key questions, such as:

  • Was the truck travelling at too high a rate of speed?
  • Was hitting the victim unavoidable? (Were his clothes too dark to see? Was he wearing reflective clothing or carrying a flashlight?)
  • Is it possible that the driver was unaware that he hit the victim?

Continue reading →

Sharing The Road Is A Bitch For Us Too

Leave a Reply
tractor-trailer, truck, cut off, car, accident, crash, highway, road

Just a sample of a random car cutting off a random big truck. Image from livetrucking.com

We’re Big and Slow; You’re Small and Fast – We Get It

Let’s pretend I understand. You’re the driver of a small, fast vehicle. You’re in your sedan / hatchback / SUV / pickup truck –or on your motorcycle – and you want to get where you’re going as fast as possible. You’re willing to put up with some traffic, stop signs and lights and even a bit of bad weather. You’re even prepared to cope with smaller delivery trucks, garbage trucks and the like.

But evidently, from my experience, you’re not much ready to deal with the big boys of the road: the space-hogging tractor-trailers — the very same vehicles that bring all the things you love including food, clothes and cars themselves, to the places where you flock to buy them.

I appreciate that you don’t want to be behind, or even beside or near, one of these monsters. They’re huge, they move slowly (especially when gearing up), they need extra space to make wide turns and they’re scary to be nearby because they will crunch you in a collision.

Maybe most annoyingly, they often block you out even when they don’t intend to. Continue reading →

Green Mountain Optimism

Leave a Reply
mountain highway in Virginia

Somewhere on a mountain highway in Virginia or West Virginia

Driving along I-77 in West Virginia and Virginia can be riveting. The green mountain scenery is astonishing, the air is fresh and cool, the highway curves are long and well-marked and there are several well-maintained roadside rest areas. As a rookie truck driver, I can see that stretches like this are what driving a tractor-trailer is all about.

While many friends and former coworkers are nestled in restrictive office cubicles, I’m out on the open road, enjoying the vistas while maintaining good speed and keeping a cautious watch for bad or distracted drivers … in cars, small trucks, motorcycles and even other tractor-trailers.

Eager for Enjoyment

I’ve been driving on my own for over six months now. Each week I head to North and South Carolina to drop off and pick up an interesting array of goods, including machinery, auto parts, clothes and toys. In this time, I’ve found there’s one thing that sticks with me and comes second only to safety: the desire to enjoy this career and all its trappings. Continue reading →

The Stresses of Truck Driver Testing

2 Replies

truck driver, truck driving, truck driving test, road test, AZ truck driver

This is a reminder to me, to make everyone feel safe when I’m driving.

A Test of Patience

Damn all of the tests and exams I did in high school, university and college. Yes, I graduated from all three institutions. In doing so, I succumbed to the opinions and whims of many teachers, professors and instructors.

You want to know what’s the most damning? Look where all that learning and eternal quizzing got me: a career path that’s disheveled and endlessly discouraging. Sometimes I long to live out the rest of my years on an Nepalese mountainside, actively practicing Buddhism. This past summer, I decided on a career path that’s designed to rescue me from visions of eternal career failure. Guess what I unwittingly pitted myself against? That’s right: more tests and exams.

In the truck driving business, you get trained to get tested. Yeah, I realize life in general is like that. But for the longest time I was evaluated on the type of work I was very good at: writing and relating. Continue reading →

I Have My Truck Driver’s License, Now What?

Leave a Reply

truck, tractor-trailer, truck driver's license

Where will the road take me now that I have my truck driver’s license?

Driving Beyond Fear

A few months ago, I hastily vowed to do something every day that scares the stuffing out of me. I was thinking along the lines of ordering a drink at Starbucks that I’d never tried before. I figured I’d work my way up from there. Eventually, I would try something like parasailing. Then along came this goofy idea to become a truck driver. It was my vision for salvaging my career, post journalism.

It’s a good thing I’m a little fearless. Otherwise, the last two months might have overwhelmed me. Driving an 18-wheeler is not for the faint of spirit. I learned to do it through many hours on the road and in the trucking yard. Recently, I learned that as scary as it is to drive the giant truck with an instructor beside you, it’s even more daunting to take a driver’s test with an examiner next to you, critiquing your every move.

If that’s not scary enough, how about driving a big rig with manual transmission, when you’ve never learned stick shifting in a car? Upshifting and downshifting is tough enough, but try doing it while still paying complete attention to all 70-plus feet of your tractor-trailer. That’s my current challenge. Judging by the buildup of tightness in my neck muscles, it’s been arduous. Continue reading →