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We Never Close

By Chris Ladd

Scotty’s Truck Stop is in Wilton, New York, but it could be just about anyplace—anyplace with a highway running through it, and these days in America that’s a lot of places. Three quarters of all the freight shipped in the United States, 7.8 billion tons last year, gets where it’s going on trucks. Each of those trucks has a driver, and each of those drivers has to eat.

These men and women (but usually men) take to the road for three and a half weeks of every month with fifty-three feet of sneakers or bananas or soybeans behind their seventeen-foot big-rigs. Somebody hands them a bill with an address some number of miles away and a deadline some number of hours ahead. It’s the driver’s job to connect the dots, and along the way they stop at places like Scotty’s.

Out back, 70 or 80 big rigs sit idling in great, long formations on parking lot of truly Hiroshimic proportions. I walk down the lines of trucks and count thirteen states and three Canadian provinces.  Tennessee. Florida. Oklahoma. Texas. Wisconsin. I don’t count them all. Some have curtains drawn against the windows, drivers asleep on a bunk in the back of the cab. Some have television sets glowing blue through the night. A couple of drivers sit behind the wheel with a map or a logbook. George Smadu, a Romanian from Austrailia who’s been hauling freight for Swift Transportation for two months, sits in Scotty’s lounge, slumped in a red vinyl chair watching a rerun of the new Pope’s first mass on a fifteen inch television bolted to the top of a wall across the room. To his left, six identical phone booths, full booths with little sliding doors, run into a hallway with six locking shower compartments, a coin operated washer and dryer, and a couple of arcade games. Smadu just finished hauling 6,000 pounds of mattresses and bedding from Raleigh, North Carolina to somewhere in upstate New York. He’s waiting here for another job, which he hopes will bring him closer to home—Smadu sets out from North Carolina on the first of each month and crisscrosses the country until the 26th, the end of his shift. Today is the 24th. He drives a full sized tractor-trailer, pulling as much as 80,000 pounds at a time (including the 23,000 pounds of his rig and his trailer). Mattresses aren’t very heavy, and so this haul has been particularly easy for him.

Smadu came to the U.S. two years ago after he won the green card lottery—every year, the U.S. immigration service picks 55,000 lucky foreigners at random from a pool of roughly 9.5 million and grants them special diversity visas. Smadu proudly shows me his green card, his winning lottery ticket. I ask him where he’s been and he starts the list: Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs, Boise, Reno. He’s been to Arizona, to New Mexico, to California. He’s been up and down the East coast, back and forth across the Midwest. He’s been in the U.S. for twenty-one months and he’s seen more of it than I have in twenty-one years.
Big trucking firms like Swift are hurting for drivers like Smadu and, even with the job market so tight, driving is a tough sell. It means taking a lot of your meals at places like Scotty’s and having a lot of your conversations in phone booths like the ones against the wall by the showers. At the same time, the government recently changed trade rules to limit driving time to 11 hours at a stretch on ten hours of rest.  The extra three hours in each day are allotted for time when drivers are on call but not going anyplace, like the time they spend eating cheeseburgers in places like Scotty’s. This means that while drivers take their required fourteen hours away from the wheel every day, their trucks and their cargo take a break too, stopping for more time than they move, taking longer and longer to get to the warehouse. To compensate for this, freight companies rely on teams.

A team of two drivers can push their cargo forward day and night, one driving while the other sleeps in the back, stopping only for gas and food and bathroom breaks in one great American road trip after another. Smadu used to be part of a team, with a Syrian immigrant he now calls “too nervous” and “too radical” to follow road signs, to make split second decisions, to end up on the place it says on the map. As a team, your fates and your paychecks are tied. You must be exactly on time, take exactly the right roads, travel for exactly the right number of hours every day. If a team is early, even by an hour, Smadu says, warehouse employees make that team wait until its scheduled arrival time before the warehouse will take delivery of whatever the team is carrying. If a team is late, both are docked money from their paychecks on a sliding scale. The later they are, the less they take home.

Smadu didn’t trust his partner to lead them and so they didn’t drive at night. They were always late, and they always lost money. The problem, he says, is that teams get better jobs, better pay. Teams get longer routes, usually over a thousand miles at a time. Teams connect distribution hubs. Single drivers waste time loading and unloading, delivering goods to retailers and individual businesses, driving “shit jobs of 400 miles a day.” Once, while he was still training, Smadu drove $3 million worth of cigarettes from R.J. Reynold’s headquarters in Winston Salem, North Carolina to a distribution center in Reno, Nevada. Now, as a single driver, he’d never get so lucky with a big job like that one—$3 million is too tempting a cargo to park unguarded for fourteen hours a day. Drivers hauling for R.J. Reynolds aren’t even allowed to stop at all for at least 200 miles after they leave the factory in North Carolina; that much is in the contract. No food, no gas, no bathroom breaks. The hope is that by that time, any would-be hijackers will have lost the shipment amidst the sea of plain white trailers that drive between there and anyplace else. Six-point-two trillion dollars worth of goods flooded America’s roads behind people like George Smadu in 2002 alone. The last published estimate by the U.S. Department of Labor set the average annual salary for a truck driver at $32,134. A hamburger at Scotty’s costs $3.79.

The food at Scotty’s is good, especially the hamburgers, but it’s not the kind of “good” written about in Gourmet or praised by people like Emeril Lagasse. There is no dry rub at Scotty’s. There is no Bam! Scotty’s is good on the way to Buffalo or Montreal or Nebraska. It is deliciously unremarkable, something to be ordered, eaten, and forgotten. A short stack of pancakes costs $2.59. A cup of coffee costs $1.39. Most everything comes with refills. Scotty’s food is exactly what it should be: cheap, generous, and greasy. It’s the kind of food I learned to love in the company of my father.

Dad has always loved the road, loved AM radio, loved places like Scotty’s. When I was growing up Dad worked at a bank, but I always got the feeling he could have been happy driving a truck. When George Smadu the Romanian talked of the American West, of driving through panoramic stretches of Wyoming and Colorado, I thought of my father. Dad spent his coming of age years in Hawaii on the island of Oahu—an island the rough geographic size of Houston, Texas—and road trips, or at least the kind of road trips my father and I used to go on, do not exist in Hawaii. Perhaps this is why my father and his father spent their vacations on sailboats. My idea of childhood adventure with my father was a round trip from Maine to Baltimore, eating at truck stops and peeing on the side of the road. My father’s idea of childhood adventure with his father was a trip around the island of Maui, cooking SPAM in the galley below deck and peeing off the side of the boat. It’s all the same to Dad, though: one great adventure, road and sea stretching to the horizon. I think that all men, through whatever period in history or place of geography, have had something like the road trip camaraderie my father equates with places like Scottie’s and big green signs with triple-digit mileages. Army buddies.  Hunting expeditions. A pirate’s life for me. What makes Scottie’s different for truckers than it is for tourists is the loneliness.

Even driving in teams, drivers rotate steadily between the front of the cab, behind the wheel and alert, and the back of the cab, under the covers and asleep. Scottie’s two-dozen red-vinyl booths fill one at a time. Phil from Washington D.C. (this much is embroidered on his jacket) comes in, orders a ham sandwich and a glass of milk, pays and leaves a dollar tip under the plate and heads back to his rig. A guy from Ohio sits at the counter and orders a cheeseburger.

“Were you here earlier?” the waitress asks.

“Yeah,” the man says, “I had to unload.”

Drivers are polite and soft-spoken. They’re in this together with the waitresses at two a.m. on a Sunday morning and often, the words “thank you” are followed by “ma’am” when a sandwich or a plate of eggs lands on the table, or a cup of coffee is warmed by another refill.

Smadu tells me he prefers driving alone. He tells me the cab of the truck is too small for anyone else. He talks about driving across America like some kind of Eastern Bloc Cowboy. We talk for a while and the conversation turns to his native country of Romania, how they won’t renew his expired passport without written proof of identity from his father, who still lives in the country, and how they won’t grant a visa on his current Australian passport. In the communist days, he says, you could buy your passport and visa at the airport for $18 American. It’s all bureaucracy, he says. Romania used to be a Soviet satellite, now Romania is a European Union satellite. Nothing changes, he says. After awhile, I’m not saying much, and he’s talking about a woman he doesn’t care for at the Romanian embassy in Washington, a thirty-year old with a great sense of importance and very little sense of history. “My both grandfathers, they fight for Romania in 1918 against the Germans,” he says, “and you will treat me like a foreigner?”

He smiles to highlight this point, the fingers of his hands bending around to point back at his chest. He’s not talking about me now; he’s reenacting one of the conversations he had in Washington. In the end, he says he told them to fuck off, told them he would spend his vacation in Australia. Fuck Romania.

I get the sense he has this conversation a lot. I have trouble keeping focus in the middle of his story; the fledgling Pope still preaching in Latin with a German accent on the television across the room. The competing accents are all getting mixed up. I’ve stopped writing things down.

After a while Smadu loses interest too, and we both end up watching the Pope get comfortable in his new hat. I ask Smadu what he thinks of the new pope. He says something about Poland and communists and Germany and the EU, and then we both get drawn back into the sermon. It is, of course, in Latin, which I don’t think either of us speak. I know I don’t. After a while, I thank Smadu for his time, shake his hand, and go out to the parking lot.

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