Welcome to My Trucking Stories:
We all know how truckers love to tell tales, and here you will find some of mine. From late-night runs through sudden blizzards and white-knuckle driving to the unforgettable characters met at midnight truck stops, these are the unfiltered accounts from life in the cab of a truck. Experience the hard-earned wisdom, legendary loads, and the real daily grind of the men and women keeping the country moving. Here you will find fiction and nonfiction stories of life in a truck.
A short history of how America learned to move by truck
Part One: Before the Engine
Long before diesel engines and interstate highways, America already understood something essential about itself: a growing nation needs a way to move things across enormous distances, and whoever solves that problem well enough tends to shape the whole country's future in the process.
A mother, a daughter, one cab, and 5,000 miles of unfinished conversation
Part One: The Team Nobody Expected
Rosa Villanueva had been driving trucks for twenty-six years before her daughter Camila ever climbed into a cab as anything other than a passenger heading to visit relatives.
How Gus Fenwick hauled 800 miles of somebody else's problem without noticing
Part One: The Drop Lot at 3 A.M.
Forty-one years, one final load, and a road that had a few surprises left in it
Part One: The Countdown
Everett Cole had marked his last day of work the same way he'd marked every workday for the past forty-one years: with a five a.m. alarm, two cups of black coffee, and a pre-trip inspection so thorough his old training officer used to joke you could perform surgery using Everett's tire pressure gauge as a scalpel. The only difference this particular Tuesday was the small paper calendar taped above his kitchen sink, where he'd circled today's date in red ink three months ago and written a single word beneath it: DONE.
Climbing Eisenhower Pass with a Heavy Load
It was a hot summer day, and Bob, a truck driver, was hauling a heavy load eastbound over the Rocky Mountains toward Denver. As his rig crawled up the steep incline at a mere 30 mph, the engine struggled under the strain of the high altitude. Bob had never driven this stretch of highway before. He had heard stories from other drivers, but nothing prepares a man for his first climb. His truck crawled upward at barely 30 mph.
Part One: The Warning Nobody Heeded
Marlene Osei had driven through seventeen Wyoming winters, and every single one of them had taught her the same lesson: the weather service's idea of "moderate snow" and the actual sky's idea of "moderate snow" existed in two completely different universes that occasionally, violently, collided. So when the dispatch board flashed a routine winter advisory for the stretch of I-80 between Rawlins and Rock Springs, she didn't panic. She just did what she always did, which was pack an extra thermos, top off her diesel, and check that her tire chains were exactly where she'd left them.
What trucker Ray Delgado swears happened somewhere outside Roswell, and no, he's not tired of that joke yet
Part One: The Quiet Before
The true-ish tale of Dale Puckett's first load of ping pong balls
Dale Puckett had hauled just about everything a flatbed or a dry van could carry in his nineteen years behind the wheel. He'd hauled frozen chickens through an Alabama heat wave that turned his trailer into a rolling sauna. He'd hauled a load of mattresses that shifted so badly in Wyoming crosswinds that state troopers pulled him over just to ask if he was smuggling a bounce house. He'd even hauled a single, enormous fiberglass cow destined for a steakhouse in Amarillo, an experience that still gave him nightmares about the cow's unblinking painted eyes staring at him in the rearview mirror. But nothing, nothing in nearly two decades of trucking, had prepared him for the day dispatch called and said the words that would change his life forever: "Dale, we got you a load of ping pong balls."
It was a cool summer morning in February 2002 when I woke up at the TA truck stop in Virginia, I was scheduled to pick up a load at a meatpacking plant that OCS assigned me as an owner-operator. So I got down to this place, and it's quite literally a hole in a wall. So I go inside to see what my load is because there's only one door, so I know what door I will be backing into. The shipping associate said, "Follow me."