By BILL ARCHER
Bluefield Daily Telegraph
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All of the trucks I drove emitted a variety of smells, and after driving for a while, I could figure out most of them. Thirty weight motor oil had a particular smell, that changed significantly if the engine was running hot. Antifreeze also had a particular smell, just as rusty water, water-saturated motor oil, diesel fuel, burning rubber, clean exhaust, dirty exhaust and mineral oil used in the differential of a truck — all carried a distinct aroma. If I combined those smells with the eau de Chicago, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and just about every other city that pickled steel, I soon learned that every day had its own aromatic array.
Over time, I got so I could detect subtle differences between a re-cap and a front-line rubber tire by the way they hummed at 55 miles-per-hour and by the way the tires smelled rolling on macadam pavement, cement or asphalt. Each surface had a particular aroma and feel, and the nature changed each day with the rise and fall of the sun. In the early 1970s, I would frequently traverse small sections marked “Road Test Surface,” or something like that. I thought that the engineers who studied the road surface were missing the boat if they were just conducting durability studies and how roads held up under constantly-changing weather conditions.
I thought truckers could provide helpful insights into highway construction if people could just look beyond the windshield and ask truckers who regularly traveled on concrete slab interstate highways with ill-conceived expansion joints. Summer, winter, spring and fall, each tar-filled crack between slabs triggered a buck as each set of tires of my five axles encountered each crack. Sometimes I would think that the highway departments designed those kind of highways to keep truckers from traveling too fast. I traveled sections of interstate highway where 25 miles or more were filled with bone-jarring pavement cracks that left a trail of tools, chain binders and four-by-four scotches in my wake.
It never really occurred to me back then why there weren’t a lot of old truckers. Since I’ve been writing these columns, I have heard from several truckers who have managed to survive 35 or more years on the road, but I didn’t think anything like that would be possible for someone who drove tractor-trailer on the roads in the 1970s. Every week when I got back home to Exit II Truck Stop in Claysvile, Pa., I had to make a week’s worth of repairs on my truck. Some of the single coils of cold rolled steel that I hauled would hammer away for 10 to 12 hours on my kidneys, and make me feel like I had been through a heavy weight fight.
The greasy spoon diners of the eastern United States provided an internal balm for a trucker’s innards, but the outside pounding of 18, 22-inch tires beating away at every split, hole, bump and grind of every road everywhere took its toll. The oldest long-haul, heavy hauling steel hauler that I knew was 55, and he looked like he landed on the Mayflower with the Pilgrims. His name was Parkie and he didn’t haul for Mayflower Van Lines. Just like me, he hauled as much steel as he thought he could get away with, because independent steel haulers were paid on a real simple formula based on weight times rate.
Every round I finished seemed like an endurance test. These days, I can hardly drive a couple of blocks from the house without running the air-conditioner in my Buick. Back then, I sweated all the way from New York to Iowa in what my brother used to call: “A test of how much the human body can actually stand.” Stu liked trucks, but after he took just one round with me from Allenport, Pa., to Chicago and back, he wasn’t so enamored about the trucking world after that.
Stu noted the irony of a fork lift in Chicago with a single prong in front and the name, “Gorgee Girl” hand-painted on the side as an appropriate name. He loved the sights of the road, but didn’t care so much for the constant pounding. I don’t think he understood the complexity of all the smells either. He noticed, however, how hard the life of a long haul trucker was on a driver’s body. As a result, he didn’t go out on many rounds with me.
Bill Archer is a senior editor at the Daily Telegraph. Contact him at barcher@bdtonline.com.
