Great Basin

Romans 1:20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse . . .


They call it the Great Basin, and after the last two days, I know why. I was sent through here with an oversize load of farm equipment, headed through Kansas, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada to California’s Central Valley, 2000 miles through springtime in the American West. With a full day and a night in the Great Basin.


It was certainly a full day for me, 500 miles, more or less, although 150 years ago the trip took much longer. I have the advantage of 450 horsepower, ten gear ratios, 18 wheels, and extremely well-built roads. But the one the permit department assigned me was Highway 50. I looked at my maps, and then asked Dawn, my dispatcher, about it.


“My oversize route through Utah and Nevada says Highway 50, not the Interstate.”


“Take whatever they say. You have to follow the permit route.”


“It’s the old two-lane right through the middle. There’s only two towns and no rest areas for 486 miles. Where do I park the truck for the night?”

Eventually I look more critically at my maps and see a few possibilities. And in truth, I know from spending half my life in the west that stopping for the night is actually not that hard. West of the Rockies, I can find places here and there where a 72-foot truck 12 feet wide and 14 feet high might be tucked in without attracting attention. So I agree, and set off.


Driving a truck across the west is easy compared to the old days. I know, because I can read the evidence in the topography. When a modern road crosses the mountains, it cuts across the ins and outs of the necks and draws, smoothly following curve after gentle curve up and down through the road cuts. But if you look, you can often see the traces of the older road, the one that runs the passes farther into the draws, and farther out on the necks, sharper turns, and steeper grades, necessitated by the smaller graders and dozers of the old days. Often the pavement is still there, a reminder of the Ford V-8s and Nashes that once chugged up that slower and more difficult path, boiling their radiators the whole time. And if you know what to look for, you can sometimes see an earlier road still, one diving even higher in and lurching even farther out, criss-crossing all the newer roadbeds, one built by mules, and by men with picks and shovels. I’ve walked those early roads before, and they speak of Spanish missions and pack trains. Sometimes you find old campsites, and once I picked up an ox shoe off the rocky road bed.

I drive a day and a night through mountains, passes, snow capped ranges, perfectly sloped bajadas and alluvial fans. Where my road passes through the dynamited cuts in the country rock, I am treated to endless cross sections of massive lavas, cinders, pyroclastic flows, ash falls weathering to a rainbow of clays. The horizons are composed of lava flows tilted and eroded flat eons ago, buried again by more ancient eruptions and now exposed once more, standing upright like the giant pages of a stony encyclopedia telling a story of cataclysm and quiet. Occasional sandstones and quartzites tell of wetter days, or sandstorms long gone by.

And life abounds, too, in distinct communities that come, go, and come again as I travel up and down through the life zones that radiate from a eutectic of elevation, water, and solar aspect. Ephemeral herbs in the wet springtime playas give way to upland sages and Mormon tea, which then yield to Limber Pines, Pinyons, and Junipers. In the canyons the mule deer look up as I pass, always startled somehow by my noisy arrival, so different from the self-composed bighorn sheep that won’t deign to lift their gaze even when I let the air horns loose to see if they care. Jackrabbits and avocets, vultures, ravens and bluebirds, all ignore me as I pass, but sometimes come close to investigate when I stop to check the chains holding my load. And of course, I know that the real world comes alive at night, when the kangaroo rats dig themselves out of their hidey-holes to look for seeds, and the kit foxes come out of their own holes to look for the kangaroo rats. Three kangaroo rats a night, I remember, and a kit fox never needs to drink liquid water. Bats and bears, pocket mice and wood rats, snakes, lizards, moths and beetles, the Great Basin is an immense and interlocking system of flora, fauna, minerals, and topography, all intricately linked together to maintain a dynamic equilibrium that reflects relationships maintained for millennia. Like a marble rolling to the bottom of a mixing bowl, the different life zones that I pass all hold together in their own way, and adapt to changes in the orientation of the bowl by rolling to a new center, a new balance point, one that automatically shifts to recover stability.

I see the handiwork of Creation in this stability, in these various self-correcting systems that characterize the world, and not just here in the Great Basin. To me, they are sufficient evidence of a Creator. But then, I’m easily convinced. It’s just as easy to look at them and deny the role of conscious creation in their patterns of balance and complexity. Various non-theist Friends tell me in conversation that nothing is demonstrated by nature’s balances that can’t be easily explained without the imposition of a conscious hand at work behind them. Nature needs no explanation other than nature, they say, and the complexities are of no more consequence than the complex shape of a puddle of water that just happens to fit its depression in the ground with molecular accuracy.


And of course, they have an excellent point. If you start with their assumptions, then this view of the universe makes perfect sense. There’s nothing wrong with its logic. Now, understand me when I say that non-theist Friends are a diverse and complex bunch, and some will also explain that non-theism doesn’t discount the possibility of a creator, it just doesn’t require one. But others will sometimes say that they won’t believe in something that can’t be proven, and isn’t necessary to explain the data. In that respect they have some affinities with the first generations of Friends, who also refused to integrate discoveries that were not personal, but sought their own visions like the Paiutes and Shoshone that occupied the valleys I drive through now. But these first Friends also credited the experiences of others as starting points of their own spiritual journeys, and then chose to investigate them themselves, ultimately to possess what they said they professed, to credit the discoveries of others when they were convinced in their own lives. I don’t always see this receptivity among non-theists, this willingness to be convinced.


I once asked a non-theist what physical evidence could convince him of the existence of God. He answered, “Nothing.” And of course, with that attitude, nothing ever could.

Part of the reason may be that many non-theists are strong logical positivists, believers in a philosophy that assumes that the world must be explainable in terms of empirical phenomena, “natural” things that can be tested and verified, at least theoretically. I’ve heard a non-theist explain his beliefs in those terms, and I was surprised. Logical positivism has faded in philosophy in recent decades, but some non-theists will roll it out and dust it off as if it made sense. Among others, Karl Popper punctured the idea that only seeing is believing in the 1930s with his publication of The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Popper showed that in the end, nothing can ever be proven—only disproven, and disproving falsifiable hypotheses is how modern science works. This subtlety escapes a lot of people who claim to believe only in things that can be verified. When I ask them to verify their hypothesis in the non-existence of God, they have asked me if they should believe in any old stupid thing that can’t be disproven, neglecting to notice that their own belief system is one of them.


But as a Christian unprogrammed Quaker, I’m not the person to adequately defend empiricism, or logical positivism, or the various other –isms of the Enlightenment. Although I’m a hard-core defender of a mechanistic universe of orderly laws and principles, I see no conflict with a theistic interpretation, nor do I see any need to assert the old deist argument, the hand that winds the clock, sets it down, and wanders off to other celestial interests and pastimes. To me, the difference is in the assumptions.


Old Thomas Kelly once wrote, “Logic finds, beneath every system of thought, some basic assumptions or postulates from which all other items of belief are derived.” In many ways, my own assumptions are those of a simpleton—I don’t require the world to make sense to me, no matter how much I know about it. I’m willing to believe in things even when they’re metaphysical and just can’t be proven at all. I assume that the ultimate engines of the universe might operate under different laws than those which turn its proximate wheels. When asked the question, “What happened the day before the Big Bang?” one non-theist I know answers by stating “I don’t know, but I’m confident my system of belief will someday have the answer.” I’m a bit different, there. I don’t assume that the world has to cater to my understanding in order to be credible.


This is in sharp contrast to folks who see no need for a Creator. Sometimes when I ask about their assumptions, they tell me that they don’t have any. I once asked an atheist physicist if he could explain his world view to me. He told me, “I don’t have a world view. I merely believe in what nature demonstrates to be true.” He was a tough nut to crack, because somebody who doesn’t even recognize the underpinnings of his own understanding is walking the world in a blindfold.

Ultimately, I suppose the answer lies in whether we require our assumptions to be proven. I don’t require very much proof to be convinced of things, so in many ways I’m a pretty sloppy thinker. But what I do believe, I believe in a positive way, in that I believe in things. When asked what Quakerism meant to him, one non-theist Friend I know of replied: “The rejection of sacraments, the rejection of clergy, the rejection of steeple-houses, the unprogrammed nature of worship, the lack of dogma or doctrine, the lack of an infallible scripture, the Quaker business method, and the commitment to live life through the testimonies and the Quaker community . . .” His view of what he called his religion was essentially negative, a list of things he didn’t believe in. After you took those away, there was actually little left except practice, devoid of underlying meaning, to my way of thinking (not his). Now, this is not bad. Jesus himself had little good to say for belief that didn’t result in practice: “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.” But inherent in my world view is that why you practice something is ultimately significant, sooner or later. I might row a boat across a river in the company of a cheerful and hardworking companion at the oars. But when I reach the other bank and discover that he is a cannibal conducting me to his family’s dinner, you can see that practice is sometimes only equivalent at the surface, and underneath things are not so congruent after all. But of course, a non-theist might reject the existence of an underneath in the first place, or of the other river bank. Again, a difference in assumptions.


And so it is with the Great Basin. As I write, I have left the deserts behind, and a cool night has covered the western end of the valley where I have parked for the night. The air is wet with the smell of irrigated alfalfa, and the evening sounds of a small Nevada town fill the background, passing pickup trucks and clear but distant voices, rather than the quiet heartbeat of a wilderness devoid of human beings. The Great Basin has reminded me of why I believe in the things I do. In my own experience, I find the answers to questions of existence best provided by the metaphysical view of a conscious creator. My assumptions are different from those of my non-theist Friends and acquaintances. And in truth, I find my assumptions supported regularly, when answers come to questions in the form of omens, impossible coincidences, visions, auditions, and the discoveries of others that are coincident with my own. Many non-theists aren’t satisfied with that level of verification, and continue on looking for sharper answers to the hard questions, or give up asking.


But I’m content with my own solution. Like I said, I’m easy to please.

Cleansing the Temple

And the Iewes Passeouer was at hand, & Iesus went vp to Hierusalem. And found in the Temple those that sold oxen, and sheepe, and doues, and the changers of money, sitting. And when he had made a scourge of small cordes, he droue them all out of the Temple, and the sheepe & the oxen, and powred out the changers money, and ouerthrew the tables, And said vnto them that sold doues Take these things hence, make not my fathers house an house of merchandize. And his disciples remembred that it was written, The zeale of thine house hath eaten me vp -- John 2:13-17 --1611 Authorized Edition

You get to meet really interesting people when you drive a truck. Yesterday I was up in a steel mill in Wisconsin, where I’d loaded eleven slinkies onto the trailer to deliver to a wire works in Pennsylvania, the day after Ishtar. A slinkie is more or less just what you might expect it to be, a tightly coiled up roll of wire just like that ancient children’s toy, the one that rings in your hands when you juggle it, and topples down staircases so gracefully. But mine are much bigger and heavier. The ones on the back right now are all 5/16-inch unpickled steel, and each four-foot coil weigh about 4000 pounds. To hold them onto the bed, you have to lace them down with the four-inch nylon straps, weaving the straps in and out and down to the winches so all the slinkies are held tightly to the trailer bed and to each other. When they get unloaded, they’ll turn into log chain, or nuts and bolts, or threaded rod, or fencing wire, or who knows what. It’s raw material for the factories of America, and what I haul by the ton will someday end up cluttering that drawer in your kitchen along with the string, the miscellaneous nails, and the broken screwdrivers.


Anyway, I’d arrived at the mill at midday with just enough legal hours left to load, strap, and tarp the trailer, but not enough to go anywhere else, so I’d resolved to spend the night there and clean up in the morning in Chicago. I can spend the night most anywhere, as I live in my truck and don’t need anything else except a bathroom. And so to pass the afternoon, I walked around helping other drivers strap and tarp their own loads of slinkies. This sort of help is welcomed among flatbedders, especially when the wind is blowing hard and the tarps flop around like angry pterodactyls while you try to hook up the bungees. I get to talk to lots of different people, and they all have stories to tell.


One of them was Robert, a young driver with a delightful enthusiasm for hermeneutics, and a command of Biblical chapter and verse that eventually left me hopping from foot to foot trying to listen and avoid permanent paralysis at the same time. (I sprained my ankle on a load of aluminum extrusions about ten days ago in Michigan, and can’t stand for long. But Robert was too interesting to leave). Robert's Bible was the 1611 Authorized Version, an unusual choice for a trucker. Amid rapid fire excursions into Exodus, Proverbs, Acts, and the Gospels, Robert focused on the New Testament account of the cleansing of the Temple in Jerusalem.


“You ever think about what that means, spiritually, I mean?” he asked, spitting tobacco juice onto the asphalt from his perch on the bed of his truck.


“Sure.”

“No, no, I mean in the context of the temple of your body. What did Paul say about your body?”


“He said that our bodies were the temple, that they made it up. The Body of Christ.”


“Exactly! And what did Jesus do in the Temple in Jerusalem? When he went in there?”


“Well, he tossed out the money changers, let all the animals loose, and generally upset things.”


“Yes! Now, what does the Holy Spirit do in your own body, in the temple of the Body of Christ? It cleans out your misplaced passions, it drives out the evil, it sweeps it clean. See? The same things. And what did Jesus do after all that?”


“He wouldn’t let anybody else come into the temple while he was in there, taking shortcuts or setting up the tables again.”


“Yes! Remember what he said about the wicked spirits in Matthew 12:44? About how if they come back and find it cleaned up, but empty, they just move back in and you’re worse off? That’s what Jesus does—he comes into the Temple, into your own heart, he cleans it up, he throws out the dirt, and then if you let him, he lives in there, and keeps it occupied, and keeps the wicked spirits from returning.”


“You got it, Robert.”


Robert pauses again to spit more tobacco.


“See? The whole story was set up so Jesus could explain in the Bible what he was going to be doing inside the hearts of people, if they would let him in. He would clean them up, keep them clean, and make them into what they were supposed to be. That day he planned a lesson for us right now”

As the shadows lengthened and the light grew yellow, Robert and I talked about other discoveries he had made in Scripture, among the parables, and within symbolic narratives. Actually, Robert talked, and I listened, and tried to remember as much as I could. Robert was an inspiring evangelist, a man whose enthusiasm for God was boundless, and only matched by his amazing happiness in the discoveries he lived. He told of problems he had, too little money and too many bills. Also, he said, “I’m not very prompt.” Not a good trait for a truck driver. But after he became a Christian, he said, he looked up and visited every person from his past he could find that he had ever wronged, and apologized to them, face to face.

And he was happy. His face literally shone with it in the golden light in the evening. He was an inspiring visitation, an example of one who had welcomed God into his own heart, and had had the money changers thrown out, and the Light take residence inside him. So it should be for us all.
 I go back to this mill regularly, and I’ll see Robert again. I have more questions to ask, and I know he’ll have answers to some of them.


But next time, I’ll be ready with a pen and paper.

Driving with Big Trucks

I’ve held down a lot of different job titles over the years. Some of them are sort of normal-sounding, things like Cashier, or Technical Documentations Manager, or Apple Picker. Some of them are a bit arcane: Jug Hustler, Air Gun Mechanic, Roustabout. Some of them sound familiar, but indicate that there’s a story in there somewhere: Cowhand, Beekeeper, Paleontologist. The job I currently hold down might fall into the last category: Big Truck Driver. I drive a Big Truck for a living now, and while lots of people might consider that a fairly mundane way to spend 70-hour work weeks, I can attest that there is a lot that goes on that most people are simply not aware of. I know this personally, because driving a Big Truck exposes me to people every day, in every part of the country, who not only are not aware of what is going on with a Big Truck nearby, but are also unaware of how close they come to death by making bad decisions in its vicinity. Driving 400-plus miles a day for weeks at a time, I see the bodies on the roadside under the sheets often enough to know that some of them came too close.


First, please let me introduce you to a Big Truck: mine. My truck is a fairly standard vehicle, a conventional Freightliner with a sleeper cab. With the 48-foot flatbed trailer that is behind me as I write, I am about 71 feet long, give or take a few yards. Empty, I weigh about 29,000 pounds. Loaded, I come as close to 80,000 pounds as I let the shippers get to. Right now I’m carrying the last of the load of ceiling tiles that I picked up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and brought across Ontario and Quebec to a contractor’s supply house here in Maine. They weighed about 44,000 pounds, so all that the interstate highway had to support was a measley 73,000, only 36 tons as opposed to the 40 it could be. So fully loaded I weigh only about as much as seven elephants.

But I am very large, and I am traveling at 65 miles per hour. I want you to think about that, because I regularly have to compensate for people who don’t, and I genuinely and truly don’t want to be the agency of your death. Because, you see, if you make a mistake driving near a Big Truck, you can die very quickly. In fact, every day in the United States, about 14 people do die in close encounters with commercial vehicles, and it’s very seldom the driver of the Big Truck who gets covered with the sheet that I mentioned earlier. It’s also very seldom the fault of the truck driver.


So I’d like to offer some suggestions about what exactly goes on with a Big Truck, from the perspective of the truck driver, and therefore to help you (who probably don’t drive a Big Truck) to be a bit more aware of how to make a truck driver feel better about sharing the road with you, rather than filling the air waves with colorful radio commentary about your skills and abilities so every truck driver for miles is warned about what you look like and how to stay away from you.


Friends, the most important thing you can do to help me out and to stay safe when you share the road with me is simply to stay as far from me as you can. I am large, slow, and maneuver poorly at highway speeds. There are blind spots on all sides that small snazzy brightly-painted cars can remain hidden in for miles at a time. You can be behind me, to either side, or even in front of me without me being able to see you. Many people like to drive so close behind me that the only way I can keep track of where they are is to look for the faint shadows they cast to either side of my trailer, or the reflections of their lights in the wet pavement. This is dangerous, because if I don’t know where you are, I can’t always avoid you if I have to move quickly.


When you decide to pass me, do it decisively. There are 18 very large tires on my truck, and although they last a long time, they sometimes choose to go out with a bang. An exploding tire sends heavy rubber shrapnel in all directions, and if you are loitering alongside when one hits a road hazard and lets go, it can destroy your car. If you ride a motorcycle, pass trucks quickly and in a far lane if you can. Don’t drive alongside me any longer than you have to.


Sometimes the wind hits a truck and tips it over on its side into the next lane. Think about that.


Think about what lane you’re driving in, as well. In cities, Big Trucks are often restricted to the lanes on the right (except in construction zones, where they make you go left-right-left-right so rapidly you think you’re marching in a parade). This means that a Big Truck can’t always pass you on the left, the normal passing side. So if you see a Big Truck in the mirror coming up behind you and you’re in a middle lane, do everybody a favor and shift to the left or the right, whichever is convenient for you. The truck driver often can’t, and then has to hang back behind you until traffic clears enough in his limited options in order to get by.


By the same token, if the truck driver finally is able to change lanes and starts to pull ahead, let him go. Sometimes I’ll catch up with a driver going slower than me, but as soon as I change lanes and move alongside, he will remember how fast he wanted to be going and will speed up until his speed matches mine. Now I’m stuck, because I can’t return to my lane, and if I slow way down and get back in behind him again, the scenario inevitably just repeats itself a bit farther along. In the meantime he hovers in my blind spot, down there where tires blow out and he can’t maneuver around a pothole or a piece of trash that shows up in his lane. And traffic builds up behind both of us, with everybody back there getting more and more impatient.

If you decide to pass me, please go right ahead. But please don’t get 30 feet in front of me, slip back into my lane, and then slow back down. I keep seven seconds of empty space in front of me, and if you’re in it, I’m doing my best to drop back. But I’m moving 80,000 pounds at 95 feet per second, and if you suddenly have to brake before I can open up a safe following distance, my last sight of you will be as your car disappears under my front wheels. If you do have to merge in closely, move away as quickly as you can. You can make it easier by not slipping back in too soon, and by not slowing down again until you’re up ahead.


This one is sometimes amusing. You know those white stop lines in town, painted across the ends of the traffic lanes, underneath the traffic lights? Notice how sometimes the ones close to the middle of the road have you stopping 10, 15, or even 25 feet farther back than the lanes close to the curb? That’s for me, because when I make that turn, the giant wheels on the back of my trailer cut the corner and cross your lane just in front of those painted stop lines. If an auto driver sleepily ignores them and pulls up in front of them waiting for the light to change, he is parking in my path. There’s not much I can do in that case except to turn as much of the corner as I can and then stop, placing the wheels of my trailer right in front of the now wide-awake auto driver. After a while he generally realizes that neither he nor my truck is going anywhere until he moves out of the way, which means he and everybody behind him has to back up. I just sit and drink my coffee while the lights change, and eventually people figure it out. But it’s nicer for everybody if we don’t have to do it that way


When you merge into traffic from an on-ramp, finish merging before you shift your attention to anything else. It’s a natural tendency to get situated onto the on-ramp, and then to settle down to return to whatever unfinished business was interrupted. But you’re not safely in a traffic lane yet. Over and over, I see people merging into fast-moving traffic flipping open their cell phones and punching in numbers, or reaching down to pick up that fast food bag to make sure that they got their onion rings, or opening up a map to see where the next exit is going to be. Sometimes the next thing they notice is that they are alongside a very long truck that is blocked in by other cars in front, behind, and to the side, and they have to put the cell phone down because they are now driving at highway speeds in the grass. I try to help them out in advance by adjusting my own speed for them, but often there’s nothing I can do. Too often.


Anyway, there’s lots more I could say about this, but I’ll save the rest for another day. Everybody has every right to be out there on the highways, but a Big Truck has lots of limitations that many auto drivers have no reason to ever be aware of. If any of this helps keeps any of you out from under those sheets that I pass by all too often, I am eternally grateful. And if it helps any of you understand why it is that the Big Truck seems to be behaving in a strange way, I hope that that has helped as well.


Happy motoring, and let’s all be safe out there.

Among the Dirty Men

I’ve done a lot of things in my life, been to a lot of places, and seen a lot of different things. I’ve re-invented myself a number of times as well, according to one friend of mine. Of course, he was a Presbyterian cowhand who believed in the transmigration of souls, so I’m still not quite sure what to make of some of his opinions of me.

The most recent change has been from technical copy editor to over-the-road flatbed driver. I used to edit (and re-write) manuals about oil field development and secondary recovery, or perhaps textbooks on implementing cybernetic feedback systems in designing efficiency plans for businesses. Then God said it was time for a change. Now I drive very large vehicles very long distances, and park them in absurdly small places.

Driving a combination vehicle is interesting and honorable work. I’m not expected to lie to people like I was when I wrote computer manuals in Silicon Valley, and I’m not expected to make hundred thousand dollar decisions after three days without sleep, the way I had to as a geologist in the West Texas oil fields. What I do have to do is take a 71-foot machine that weighs 80,000 pounds and pilot it cross-country to a place I’ve never been, across a maze of roads I’ve never seen, into strange and mysterious nooks and crannies of industrial civilization that most people in the dominant culture know only on a theoretical basis.

And I do it among the dirty men. You see, among truck drivers, there are different classes of driver, so to speak. Not upper and lower, because truck drivers are very egalitarian, but different flavors, different styles. There are the dry van drivers, who steer the big silver boxes with loads of paper plates, rolls of newsprint, bottled water, corn and beans, and so on. There are the tanker drivers, carrying diesel, milk, corn syrup, honey, and LPG. The day cabbers drive the doubles and triples for UPS and FedEx, moving packages and mail. And so on. Cranes, dumps, et cetera.

And then there are the flatbedders, like me. The dirty men. You see, all these other guys have one important thing in common. In general, they can stay clean. They don’t usually touch the freight, and often don’t even know what’s inside the locked trailer except by reading the bill of lading when they hook to it and take off. They drive up to the warehouse with an empty, drop it where they’re told to, hook to a loaded trailer and go. Then it’s time to crank up the stereo, turn on the CB, and start peeling miles off the schedule, 500 to 600 yard sticks a day, every day that you can until you run out of legal hours and have to stop and let the world catch up with you.

And while they’re driving off with that clean and locked-up trailer, I’m staring at a 48-foot flat loaded with 27,000 pounds of copper telecommunications cable, in five eight-foot reels. I have to calculate the weight, choose between straps and chains, decide how many to use and where to hook them, crank them down, and make sure nothing is about to come off. By the time I’m done just securing the load, those other guys are 120 miles down the road, or better.

And they’re still clean. I, on the other hand, have just threaded eight rusty and dirt-covered chains through the reels, cranked down on the boomers with my equally rusty cheater pipe, and now look like a monument to iron oxide in the shape of some sort of broad-brimmed Quaker. Or maybe I’ve tarped it. I once delivered 44,000 pounds of smelting minerals from Baltimore to a steel mill in Kentucky, tarped. I arrived in the rain, and pulled the wet tarps across the thick dust in the unloading sheds. Now, folding up and loading a 24 by 30-foot tarp that weighs 150 pounds requires the sort of intimate calisthenics that in notion pictures merits adults-only ratings. By the time I was done with my three tarps in that mill, the tarps, the ground, and me were all covered in a monochromatic mix of dust, rainwater, sweat, and general grime. A typical load for a dirty flatbedder.

We don’t like being dirty, but there is often not much in the way of washing facilities at lumber yards, steel mills, hay fields, chemical plants, foundries, factories, and so on. We drive as far as we can, then try to pull in at a truck stop that has showers. (The showers are generally nice, but cost about ten bucks unless you have enough recent fuel credits.) Where there aren’t showers, we fall back on our trusty Plan B: very large quantities of baby wipes. Did you know that dirty truck drivers are among the greatest fans of baby wipes there are? It’s true. I prefer the unscented styles, myself, but each to his own.

The dirt is inevitable, and we are known for it. I was once talking with my dispatcher in his neat, carpeted and air conditioned cubicle, full of high-tech machinery designed to help him keep track of 30 drivers without going insane. I had delivered a stack of trailers (two 48-foo flatbed trailers stacked on top of a third) in the Wisconsin winter. I had to crawl up underneath each one and attach and tighten the chains while sliding back and forth in four inches of snow on the trailer decks. So all my clothing was covered in dirt and melted snow on the outside, and covered in sweat and melted snow on the inside. I apologized to him for coming in looking like yesterday’s wet mop, and he said, “You look like an typical flatbedder to me.” Which of course was true, and I hear it from other drivers as well.

In the winter, the flatbedder wallows in snow-covered mill yards, and bangs the ice off the winches with the winch bar before they will work. The straps are frozen and won’t roll, and the tarps are so stiff with cold that they’re like folding pieces of plywood. The work is wet, cold, and dirty. In the summer, on the other hand, the dust is thick in the staging and loading areas, and you end up the same color as the 24-foot straps you had to drag through the dirt and roll up. You’re not cold anymore, but the dust sticks to the sweat. The work then is wet, hot, and dirty. Winter or summer, the truck stop shower is the first place I look for after loading.
 
When there is one, anyway.

But the lifestyle has surprisingly wonderful moments. Did I mention that aluminum van trailers in the truck stops sing to each other like gigantic aeolian harps when the wind blows across their roofs? Another time, perhaps. Or that driving cross country in the spring means that I hear half a continent's variety of frog and toad choruses at night in the sloughs behind the truck terminals? Today it's Bufo valliceps, tomorrow Pseudacris triseriata. And when I drive west across the Appalachians of Pennsylvania and New York, I see the entire history of continental collision, orogeny, deposition, and subsidence spread across the country like a textbook cross section.

Being a dirty man has its advantages.