Why on earth would a fifty-something, carefully brought-up mother suddenly make a decision to go trucking?
It’s a great question and, like the majority of good questions it had answers both easy and complex. From ‘it sounds like fun’ through ‘it’s an authentic immigrant job’ via ‘well, earn more dollars in a truck than I could by using a Master’s degree’ with a detour along ‘I’ve driven ambulances and stretch limos, if I want to get bigger it’s either a truck or even plane and this course is cheaper’…none of these reasons quite encapsulated everything.
And these were merely the rationalisations for the much vaguer pull towards the massive beasties that I’d been seeing on the highway since emigrating from the UK to Canada. There was clearly no rationalisation obviously for that other vague pull, a lifelong addiction to doing things merely because they’re slightly odd.
Adding to my list of excuses that it seemed like an excellent angle for a book on trucking helped a bit when trying to explain to those with no imagination, although not much.
In all honesty, I hadn’t expected terror when I breezed into Tri-County Truck Driver Training one afternoon in 2008. I just wanted to determine what it took to be a trucking lady. I wanted to discover the USA, how hard might it be?
Obviously there is a bit of a difference between studying to handle a 75-foot, slow-moving guided missile and dreaming of getting paid to see the continent; and actually earning a living. Spending 14 hours each day smelling of diesel. My first job was taking trailers full of mail from East to West. Team driving across Canada’s unending prairies and across The Rockies, and sometimes getting lucky enough to return home via Texas. That Lake Effect Winter Storm was just one of our countless weather-related narrow squeaks. North American trucking can be quite the storyline.
I’ve been almost arrested in Baltimore, sick as a dog in Tennessee, terrified in Chicago, Dallas and Detroit and dug out of the snow twice in a night in Alberta. I’ve made friends in Virginia and enemies in Ontario. And, given half a chance, I would probably forget all about how impossibly strenuous it is and go out again to steer 18 wheels over the horizon.