Commonwealth Chronicle

Steely said he used to be able to spend more time at home, but the sour economy has forced him to take to the road for longer periods. He used to spend a week on the road before returning to Nashville for a weekend’s rest. Now he’s driving for two to three weeks at a time just to make a profit.

On the road, truckers do their best to create a home on wheels for themselves.

It will be a month before he sees his son again.

“I’ve missed ballgames and his life in general,” he said.

Like Steely, Pendleton has a 13-year-old son who stays at home in Tennessee, cared for by his grandmother.

But because Pendleton’s company doesn’t allow its drivers to travel with minors, she gets to see her son Dustin only when she goes home, once every two weeks. She says it’s difficult to be away from him, but they try to talk on the phone every day.

And, thanks to her trucking job, the little family that used to struggle to get by every day can now afford whitewater rafting and camping trips. But Pendleton knows she would never advise Dustin to go into trucking.

“I would tell him I would rather him go get a good education and something stable and not as lonely,” she said. “The hardest part about this is that it is so lonely.”

Steely agrees. He wants his son to go to college and get the education he never had. But his son, not put off by a long-distance dad, wants to follow in his father’s occupational footsteps.

Like Steely, Wayne Black became a trucker out of sheer love for the open road. But unlike the Nashville trucker, Black, originally a New Yorker, doesn’t find the long-haul life all that lonely. An independent man, Black goes home, but not to see family. Instead, he trades in his 18 wheels for two and hits the road on his motorcycle.

The biker tattoos covering his arms are misleading, because Black, a blood donor and pen pal to third-graders, is anything but a tough guy. He cherishes the freedom of traveling cross country, but chastises truckers who disrespect the industry. The risky road practices of those drivers — illegal parking, speeding and inattention — give trucking a bad rap, he said.

“They don’t realize they’re taking someone’s life in their hands by running down the road four feet off a little car or even another truck,” said Black.

For Pendleton, the loneliness of life on the road makes her see little future in trucking. Her heart is always homeward bound, looking forward to being with her son and her boyfriend, who recently proposed to her. Pendleton proudly flashes her diamond ring, a prized family heirloom.

She insists it’s not an engagement ring, but a confirmation of their strong commitment and devotion to each other. She tries to contain her excitement, because she’s been married before. Dustin’s father divorced her after a 13-year marriage, and she was barely getting by when she met the truck driver who would become her boyfriend. But Pendleton doesn’t only miss spending time with her son and boyfriend at their home in Tennessee.

“I miss my son, and I miss being home, but the thing that I miss the most is being able to jump in that shower anytime you want to,” she said.

Although Pendleton says she’s not a girly girl, she says she still wants to feel like a woman while on the road, which has so far proven to be difficult.

“I had my nails for a while done because I wanted to be a little feminine out here being a truck driver, but you can’t really stop and park at a nail salon to get your nails done in that big truck,” she said.

Darrell Lewis, an owner-operator who is a devout Christian first, doesn’t let small parking lots keep him away from Sunday sermons. For Lewis, his truck cab has been his home-on-the-road and Bible-study-on-wheels for the past 21 years.

Lewis specializes in hauling hazardous materials such as chlorine and paint, a dangerous job for sure, but a far cry from the days when he transported gasoline.

An accident that spilled 5,000 gallons of gasoline and ruptured his inner ear forced him into six months of rehabilitation. He tried to go back to his old job hauling loads of gas, but anxiety attacks finally got the better of him. He switched to the lesser danger of transporting chemicals.

Not risk-free, but then long-haul trucking never is, no matter the load.

“Trucking is trucking, you know what I’m saying? We all have to be safe, it doesn’t matter what we’re hauling,” Lewis said.

“We can all die whether we’re doing cotton candy or chemicals.”

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/distortedsmile/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Tammy Pendleton might not have 19 years of trucking under her belt, but she’s still gone far. She can remember exactly what she was wearing when she was last in California. It was January and she was standing in a strawberry patch, in shorts and taking in the incredible sight of the snowy mountain tops on the horizon.

Tammy Pendleton keeps a photo of her son and her fiancé on the dashboard of her big rig. (BECKY BRATU/The Rockbridge Report)

It has been almost two years since Pendleton traded her housewife apron for an air-ride-equipped 18-wheeler that she’s since driven through at least 40 states.

“If you don’t mind being alone, it’s good,” Pendleton said. “I come across around the corner up in New York and saw Lake Eerie and the blue sky, and the blue lake, and then snow out on the ice. It was just the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

But life on the road is tough for truck drivers, and even more so for a woman driver. Pendleton says she feels she needs to watch her back more because she’s a woman. Her sparkling eyes have gotten her into tight situations a few times already, once while she was delivering a load to a customer.

“This guy says to me, he says, ‘You have the prettiest blue eyes.’ And I said ‘Thank you,’ and he said, ‘You know, those would look really good in a jar on a shelf somewhere.’

“I’m not joking,” she said, shaking her head.

Pendleton thinks women truckers face resentment from their condescending male counterparts, but she said that the situation has gotten better as more women have entered the industry.

Pendleton’s trucker boyfriend taught her how to drive a truck and helped her get a license. She’s grateful for the lessons because she doesn’t think getting a commercial driver’s license was as hard as it should be. Pendleton said she went to trucking school for three weeks and got only an hour of driving time.

“They’re just pushing people through,” she said.

Other professional truckers agree that obtaining a truck license is not difficult.

“It’s a six-week process,” said Chism. “But I mean you can find anybody that, you know, owns a truck that is willing to spend a couple weeks with you to show you how to shift the gears, blah, blah, blah, and, you know. You can take it from there.”

Male or female, truckers say the lessons and special license required of truckers don’t prepare them for the reality of life on the road.

Pendleton has learned through trial and error where it’s safe to stop and where she’s likely to encounter “spooky characters.” She starts her day before sunrise and tries to be in her truck and ready for bed before dark because she doesn’t want any trouble. She learned not to open her truck door at night after being solicited by a surprised female prostitute who quickly halved her price.

Other truckers have learned to tune out those nighttime knocks. But it’s impossible to ignore other concerns, such as the tougher competition in the industry, especially since the economy tanked.

In 2001 The Industrial and Labor Relations Review found the average trucker worked 62 hours a week with only nine days vacation a year. Those hours equal one and a half full-time jobs, according to the review, an academic journal published by Cornell University.

That means less time at home with family. Dissatisfaction with the amount of time truckers are able to spend with their families is a leading cause for high turnover rates in the trucking industry, a Transportation Research Board study found in 1998. The research board is a private, nonprofit institution, operating under the National Research Council.

Steely’s desire to be permanently homeward-bound is further enhanced by his longing to be with 13-year-old son. A rising star as the quarterback for his local middle school, Steely’s son uses Facebook and email to brief Steely on game recaps, schoolwork, and the life of a Nashville teenager.

The old days of the CB radio, celebrated in countless trucker songs, are gone. A Verizon wireless card plugged into his laptop computer connects Steely to his son. Other on-the-road comforts include a satellite radio, which he uses to listen to FOX News and NASCAR races.

Steely’s truck is also equipped with a fax machine and a printer that help him keep track of his orders and organize his business. The cab has all the amenities of a small apartment, including a refrigerator, a small TV set and a microwave oven. Pendleton uses the microwave oven in her truck cab to make her favorite on-the-road snack: Easy Mac.

Steely even brings his son with him for week-long trips when he is on his school breaks. That means Steely has to rearrange his cab so that his son can sleep on the twin bed’s top bunk, an area he usually uses for storage.

“I gotta dismantle everything up there,” he said, laughing.

But Steely isn’t complaining. He says he jumps at the chance to spend time with his son. And that does not happen as much as he’d like. (to be continued)

Cameron and I didn’t find Tammy Pendleton. She found us. We met her while we were interviewing another trucker at the Lee Hi Travel Plaza outside of Lexington, Va.

“You should get a woman’s perspective on this,” the ever-so-sassy Pendleton whispered into my ear, as she passed me.

Needless to say, I ran after her and asked for an interview. Shy at first but unstoppable later on, Pendleton told us shocking, sobering and hilarious stories from her travels across America. Watch the video and then read about a trucker’s life on the road here, here and here.