Confessions of an old trucker
 | Rob Crowe
Columnist
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For a time in my life, I tried to be a truck driver. Not just a truck driver, but an owner/operator, doing the maintenance, making the payments and doing the driving. I was not particularly successful for a variety of reasons, but we won't go into that.
One of my most memorable situations but also the one I most try to forget is the one where I ditched my truck in the Moose-Willow flowage area.
The day started out as usual, buttoning up the old White Freightliner one cold winter day after a major repair and trying to make it to a remote log landing some 30 miles away from the shop. I hooked up to the trailer that hadn’t been used in days and drove away but the trailer brake control valve was frozen, rendering the trailer brakes useless. Normally I would have taken the time to thaw the valve out but since I was running late, I kept going. The trip from Grand Rapids to Hill City was uneventful, but as I headed east into the woods, the narrow roads were ice covered from a recent rain. I wasn’t familiar with the area but, running late, I kept my pace up.
A couple of miles into the woods, I rounded a curve to see an abrupt left hand turn, the road intersected with a ditch bank and I was going far too fast to make the turn seeing the road was basically a skating rink. I jabbed the brakes and since the trailer brakes were inoperative, the truck instantly jackknifed. The side of the trailer crushed the left rear corner of the cab as the rig veered to the left, dropped down a steep bank and settled into the swamp, the front of the Freightliner facing the direction from which I had come. I was unhurt, even though I was going too fast for the road, I wasn't going much over 20 miles an hour.
There's more to the story, but, again, we won’t go into that. I was able to get the truck back on the road about a week later, and fixed the cab the next spring. My trucking career ended a year or so later. We won’t go into that either.
One of the things a trucker realizes is that once he or she starts driving down the road in a truck, there is no privacy. The Department Of Transportation hires these Guys, trains them, dresses them in Uniforms, gives them Maroon Vans with Light Bars and tells them to stop as many trucks as they can in a given day and write down every little thing that is wrong with the trucks or drivers on a little piece of paper called a Ticket. This little Ticket can either be a Warning Ticket or it can be a Real, Honest to God Ticket that tells you the Amount of Dollars you must send in to the Justice of the Peace to settle up. The Guy in the Uniform can also tell you to park the rig until everything is up to snuff if he deems it necessary.
The Guy in the Uniform does not need to call in for a Judge’s Approval before he stops your rig, he does not need to see any infraction, it is his job to stop and inspect the truck. Oh, the Guy could also be a Gal. Also, if the trucker is driving along and sees a sign saying SCALE OPEN, the trucker must drive onto the scale and be weighed. Compliance is not optional.
While I was driving truck, I was not particularly fond of the Guys in Uniform, even though I knew they were doing a good job of making the roads safer for all. Most of the time my trucks were in decent shape for their age, but brakes wear out and steering components deteriorate over time, the DOT Inspectors are trained to find the deficiencies. Usually I ended up with a Fix-it Ticket for something or other.
I find the current hysteria over President Bush’s monitoring of Al Qaeda’s communications with people inside the United Stated somewhat tiring. Perhaps the same people that find fault with President Bush could put pressure on the Department of Transportation to stop their warrant-less inspections of thousands of American Citizen truckers who get stopped and ticketed every day.
Rob Crowe chairs the Aitkin County Republicans and raises kids and cows on a farm near Hill City.
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