Keep on Truckin’

My father, a livestock feed trucker for over 40 years, retires this summer. Throughout my life, I’ve joined him for the occasional trip, so I decided to get one more ride-along in the books. We set out at 3 a.m. on an early spring morning to load-in at a feed mill in the Central Texas town of Giddings, grab free coffee at a CEFCO truck stop (a perk of the trade enjoyed by truckers), and hit US 290 well before sunup. The citizens band radio, a relic of days long gone since the invention of the cell phone, still hangs in the cab, though Dad uses it sparingly and never just for fun. He regales me with stories of close calls with deer, complains about the back pain that will likely never go away, and tells me how his first trucking company laid off all the truckers with only three days’ notice.

Despite the hardships, the trucking industry is running strong. More than 66,000 trucking companies operate in Texas alone, each truck maneuvered by humans despite reports of self-driving technology automating truckers out of existence. The stereo­type of the sleep-deprived driver who nods off into a massive pile-up on the highway is largely exaggerated, too, according to Philip Harrison, the vice president of Harrison Truck Lines out of Bellville and a 50-year veteran of the industry. “Trucking is one of the cleanest professions out there,” Harrison says. Truck drivers are subject to frequent drug testing and biennial physicals from the U.S. Department of Transportation, and regulations state that a driver may spend no more than 11 consecutive hours on the road.

My dad says the two best things about driving a truck for a living are that he can feel like he’s his own boss when he’s on the road, with no one looking over his shoulder. “That,” he says, “and I get to see different country.”