New friends

After 20 minutes or so the news on the CB changed. It meandered from "the chopper’s landed" via "someone must be still alive” through “chopper’s leaving” to “both southbound lanes are open now, northbound still closed, you’re not going anywhere just yet, driver.” Amid thanks for the updates – well not from me, I just thought them – we gradually started to move. It was 6 o’clock when Betsy informed me I had arrived at my destination, a huge plant on a vast quantity of open land with a clearly marked driveway for shipping and receiving. I risked driving down it a short way. Big places with signs for trucks usually mean you’ll be able to turn around.

Little places in city centres with no apparent entrance apart from a car park, on the other hand, are lairs of impossibility waiting to trap the unwary rookie. I learned this the hard way at a tiny foundry in Windsor, Ontario. All we had to do was deliver an empty pallet on the way to the border. Presumably they normally send them in a smaller van but we were passing the door, almost. It looked cramped and there wasn’t an obvious way in. I was with my trainer at the time and she recommended parking up on the main road, in the turning lane between the two yellow lines, sticking the hazards on and phoning for instructions. This we had done, with mixed success. The receptionist who answered the phone told us all about how to drive round the building, enter the car park from Seneca Street and the dock was on the left; she had clearly missed the bit about us being in an 18-wheeler.

On that occasion I had dutifully driven round the building into Seneca Street and looked doubtfully at the car park and the dock.
“I don’t think I can turn around in there.”
“I’ll direct you” said my trainer, it’s tight but you can do it.”
I'd wiggled into the car park at just the same moment as a little food and coffee wagon entered from the other end. He parked right in front of the dock, where I would be needing to turn and reverse. We sat and waited politely, noting as we did so that the dock was actually just a big door, there was nothing to reverse up to for a forklift to mess about on. As we sat, people began to emerge and shout. Apparently it was time for them to go home and we were in the way. One particularly obnoxious individual demanded that we get out of his way. My trainer, who does a good line in sweetness and light with menacing undertones told him that we would be doing so just as soon as the coffee wagon got out of our way. This wasn’t good enough. She asked him where he thought we should move to. And he told her. Things were getting a little ugly by the time the forklift driver arrived to say “oh, you’re in here, usually tractor-trailers park in the street and we drive out and unload them from there.”

“Why did you drive in?” another member of the, by now, expanding audience enquired.
“The receptionist told us to…” I was embarrassed, my trainer was furious, the guy who wanted to go home was apoplectic and what with one thing and another, I learned a few lessons about driving onto unknown premises. You can’t go far wrong assuming that there be dragons. I went back to the place with the car-park in Windsor a week or so later and was very pleased with myself for remembering where to park. I forgot something else equally vital, but that’s another tale.

And anyway, we’re in Culpeper now. I drove as far as a barrier by a little guard’s hut. The hut was empty. It had a little paper note stuck to the window that had spent too much time out in the rain. Something about finding the guard at the main entrance to the building and using a phone. It was a pleasant evening, I shut off the engine and went walkabout. I found a fancy main entrance to the building with a place for staff to swipe id cards, but no staff. And no guard. An elderly phone sat on the wall though, and a little sign that said ‘To contact security guard’ so I lifted the receiver. There was a recorded message. I put it down. Was there any point in leaving a message? I didn’t know. I picked it up again. And put it down again. But then, if I was going to call dispatch and tell them the place was deserted they’d ask about that sort of thing wouldn’t they? It would sound better to say “I left a message and nobody came” than “it said leave a message and I didn’t”. So I did.

I continued walking. A good reason to appear to be lost and looking for someone is that it gives you a chance to find the docks and scope out how the hell to set up for them without looking too much like you have no idea what you are doing. And since I was lost and looking for someone anyway, a tour round the outside of the building seemed like a good idea.

I found some docks and a warehousey bit round the back. The doors were open and the lights were on. I could hear some activity around machinery way over to the back but nobody buzzed me with a forklift. I found an office that said SHIPPING on the door. The lights were on and the door was open but it was deserted. It had phones though. I could call dispatch from there and sound more intelligent than from outside the front of the building. Maybe I could find a loo first. Now I had a plan. Wander through the plant looking for the ladies, if accosted, tell people I was trying to find the shipper, then return to the deserted office to make that call if there was still nobody to be found.

The lady with the fierce hair found me as I was telling dispatch, from the phone on her desk, that I was here but nobody else was. “You should have come and found me,” she reproached, “I’m the only one here after five, I can’t be everywhere.” She was tiny, had the sort of glasses that are elaborate enough to count as jewellery, wore a sparkly salmon pink top and reminded me of one of my scarier aunts. I grovelled.
“I’m so sorry, I’m new at this and I’ve not been here before, I didn’t know where to look.”
“Didn’t the guard tell you?”
“I couldn’t find the guard, I’m still parked up by the barrier.”
She softened a bit. And walked me back through the building to show me where I should have looked for the guard. When he wasn’t there, and she tried the phone and got the recorded message, she softened a lot more and declared it her mission for the evening to sort this out. 

We made introductions. “I’m Ursula,” she said, although that isn’t how it sounded. What I heard was “I’m Oooors’la”, which is the ugliest way I’ve ever heard anyone pronounce a pretty name, I thought for a fleeting moment she was unwell. Oors’la bustled and I followed on her heels like a puppy, which is hard to do when you are twice someone’s size, until she found the hapless guard. He apologised, he was new too. He’d been told to patrol the building, nobody told him there would be deliveries. Once we’d all made friends, forgiven each other for first impressions and blamed absent jobsworths he raised the barrier, and I drove round to the dock.

By the time I had made a decent job of reversing in, Oors’la was my best friend. It turned out that she literally was the only person in the shipping department after five, since she it was who beetled in and out of my trailer, unloading it with a forklift. Somehow, I expected from her demeanour that I was dealing with an office person, but who am I to judge by appearance? She drove her forklift in fastidious manner, with pinkies raised, exactly as though she were having a polite cup of tea. I didn’t know that was possible.

My new pal told me all about the best way to drive to Roanoke, where the sneaky speed limit changes were and to “be sure to come back and visit again soon”. I left Culpeper, Virginia a lot more sprightly than I intended to and headed south. 

The Pennsylvania Turnpike

 Up a little before legal driving time for a flurry of wet-wipes by way of a wash. All this stopping late at night nowhere near a truckstop means that the chances of a proper shower are minimal. Once I’m off and running through the day, even if I swing into a truckstop for coffee, fuel or a wee, the pressure to cover enough miles before my 14 hours is up means that making time for a shower is out of the question. That’s what your 10 hour break is for, if you are actually taking it for real. I am getting quite adept at the wetwipe flurry though, and toothcleaning with a tiny mug of water. I have some nifty toileting arrangements too but I’ll spare you the details. A breakfast of trail mix and half an apple and I was ready for anything.

Erie passed by and I turned south, making good time. I sent a satellite message to dispatch…’delayed 4 hrs at shipper, eta 17:00’. I reckoned that catching up on two and a half of my four hour delay and only being an hour and half off target was pretty damned impressive. I’d even remembered to allow for slower driving once I turned west.

Pittsburgh hove into view and the Turnpike began.  I am a little more used to the tollbooths now, although they all vary a bit, so I am never quite sure what's expected and do get a bit flustered. It amuses the staff though and I like to entertain. The toll roads in Indiana and Illinois that I’d used so far just wanted $5 or so to get on to. Pennsylvania seems to like to give you a ticket when you start so that they can charge you by the mile when you leave. Sometimes a person gives you the ticket, sometimes a machine does. Either way, it’s a nuisance having to pull to a stop, especially fully loaded. The lanes all merge back down from half a dozen or so in a very short distance and it takes ages to work up through all the gears to anything like a normal speed. People get impatient and zip round you, becoming hard to avoid once a bit of momentum picks up. I started to regret choosing the Turnpike, it had better be a nice road to drive.

It wasn’t of course. Not only uppy and downy (I sort of assumed that a toll road would have been cut through the landscape a bit) but one huge mass of road works, reducing most of its length to one lane in each direction. And not just coned off with little bollards; these workers were properly protected by temporary concrete barriers on both sides, so that the edges of your lane were alarmingly close and alarmingly, well, concrete. An optical illusions sets in when the side of the road rises up to meet you, you know it’s wide enough but it looks as though it isn’t. The urge to swing from side to side is merciless. I ran through the mantra in my head from training days ‘raise your vision, look ahead, trust the sides, raise your vision, look ahead, trust the sides’ because you do actually know that there is room to pass through, you’re doing it after all. But the moral fibre required to not look down, so that you don’t start to steer away from the concrete, for miles and miles and miles was utterly exhausting.

Of course there was a lot of up and down through the gears as well, the heavier the load the more hills affect your speed, both up and down. The load holds you back and slows you down going up, and the wrong gear can mean grinding to a halt half way up. Going down, a heavy load pushes you forward and speed you up so that the wrong gear can have you going much too fast when you hit a turn at the bottom. Added to which, it’s not a great idea to try and change gear on a hill, the incline messes with the time it takes for the revs to lift or drop the right amount from one gear to the next, making any shift a risk for dropping out completely. To start with they teach you rules for timing gear changes, the revs have to lift or drop by 300rpm and you do it exactly as they say it when they say it until you get the time interval into your head and feet. Of course you are driving around with the same weight in the back all the time in school, and around the same streets. You can learn 6^th for this ramp and 4^th for that hill and get ready for them in advance. Out in the real world the timing changes slightly for each weight you pull and the single interval you have in your head  has to adapt from run to run. And you learn the hard way that some corners need one gear when empty and another when loaded; some hills can be got up by taking it down a mere half a gear when empty but don’t try it loaded or you’ll be in trouble. The rules gradually get replaced by judgement. It’s a slow process, but judging by the rapid decrease in crunching noises, it’s coming along quite nicely now. I do see why they give rookies a crappy, old, nearly-defunct tractor though.

I had a rule of thumb for gear changes that ended up essential on hills that went ‘a bit quicker than normal’, it was seeing me through most situations with a bit of crunching here and there but no actual ignominious stops in front of speeding traffic. Fully loaded on bigger grades, I now know the rule is ‘a lot quicker than normal’ and somehow, annoyed, pissed off and regretting trusting Betsy and the Pennsylvania Turnpike I got across the Appalachians and into the tiny spit of Maryland that runs across the top of the Virginias.

And here I have to meander down a diversion about how weird it is that states look different from each other. You can drive about the UK and Europe and cross from one country to another without the landscape looking much different, and my assumption was that state lines were pretty arbitrary so it always surprises me when I cross a state line and things change right away. There was a colour combination in the trees lining the roads in Maryland that I’ve not seen anywhere else. I took a photo but I don’t think the silvers come over remarkably enough.

Making a mental note to return via Highway 15, I congratulated myself on still having an eta of five o’clock when I turned off the highway and took the road to Culpeper. Of course, it was at a standstill. Traffic backed up for what seemed to be miles. This is when the CB comes in really handy. I don’t generally have it on at all, back when it was cutting edge, the CB was the only way for truckers to pass the time but now, since everyone has a cellphone, Bluetooth etc, those who want a pleasant chat will be talking to their families. Radio traffic seems to me to be restricted to people saying hello to each other, slagging off each other’s driving and moaning about stuff. I can live without it. I certainly don’t use it, my voice and accent are bound to set off a whole load of grief, I’ve heard the reactions when women trainers I’ve driven with are unwise enough to broadcast. But, there are times when it’s useful and this was one of them. As soon as a traffic jam develops, everyone starts asking everyone else what’s going on. Someone will know. Often it’s a truck driving in the opposite direction, who has just passed whatever’s holding you up. He can tell you what’s up, how many lanes are closed and how far the traffic is backed up for. Then someone local will pipe up with whether it’s worth taking another route or not, and if so where to turn off. Eventually you can work out whether to sit tight or who to follow. Here’s a tip for you. Next time you are in a traffic jam, watch the trucks. If they all start to head for one lane or another, follow them, they are being coached by someone who knows.

This time the news wasn’t good. A fatal accident closing off all lanes in both directions. It was on the opposite carriageway to ours but both sides had been closed to await a helicopter. Nothing to do but sit tight and tell dispatch I was stuck. I called on the phone, since I wasn’t moving anywhere.

“We’ll let them know, they’re there until 11, just get there when you can.”
“Ok, what about the pickup?”
I was due to travel further south to Roanoke for a reload that day, I hadn’t even looked it up on the map yet.
“They’re there until midnight but you can pick up tomorrow morning if you like, the load has been ready since Monday and it’s not due back until the 3^rd.”
This was good news, I could sleep before trying to find the next place, hooray.
“Call when you’re loaded in Roanoke, it’s only 12 bins, we’ll send you somewhere else for more.”
This wasn’t so good. It looked like I was going to be out all week and I was running out of clean clothes.

Pick a mountain...

It sounded like it was going to be a nice trip, heading down to Virginia and starting early enough in the day to get a good distance covered in daylight. Virginia is pretty, I’ve been there in the car. There isn’t an obvious way to get there though, what with the mountains and stuff, so I spent a bit of time mulling over the best possible route while I waited to be loaded.

There was time for plenty of mulling. I’d had to drive an hour west to London with a trailer full of empty bins, the company was going to unload those and then put more stuff on before I could head for the border. Since the best crossing for Virginia is at Buffalo, I would be redriving the hour back to Guelph before making any real progress.

My appointment for unloading was 3.30 in the afternoon. I got there 15 minutes late, owing to some shenanigans around load bars. These things are what you use to stop freight from flying about if for some reason the usual straps won’t suffice. And for this load, they wouldn't. This was going to be a full 44,000 lb shipment of heavy bins full of clutch plates and they would be loaded half at the front of the trailer and half over the rear axle, to spread the weight legally. Something hefty behind the rearmost bins was required to stop them walking about every time you have to stop. Automatically worried at the 44,000lb bit of the conversation I’d already asked dispatch about the whole horrible bogie-sliding issue…

”These people are pretty good, they get it right, you shouldn’t have a problem.”
One less thing to worry about, good. But there had to be load bars apparently, straps wouldn't hold these babies down.

“They should be in the trailer from the last trip.”
“I can’t see them, it’s full of bins. Can I assume they’re at the front?”
“They probably are but we shouldn’t take any chances, do you know where we keep them?”
“No, sorry.”
“I’ll meet you outside and show you.”
:Can you show me how they work as well?"

I was very grateful to the kind dispatcher for leaving his desk to help me out until I realised that he fancied a cigarette anyway. The load bar storage trailer was sort of over there, round the back and through a gate. It required reversing up to. Hence the 15 minutes late, so I was initially relieved to be told that the dock they would load me from had another truck still in it...they were running later than I was.

Back to the maps. Culpeper, Virginia lies half way between Interstate 81, which runs between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Appalachians, and Interstate 95, which runs through the Baltimore and Washington conurbation. Given that no-one voluntarily drives round either city, it would be driving some mountains or other but there are two alternatives there too. Highway 15, which follows the path of the Susquehanna River through the top end of the Appalachians, or Interstate 79 through some foothills of the Allegheny mountain range south to Pittsburgh and then the Pennsylvania Turnpike east across the Appalachians. Highway 15 would be bendier, the Turnpike would be uppier and downier, I thought. Possibly. 

I asked Betsy and she wanted to go via Pittsburgh, but then she is set to prefer Interstate roads so she would. I had driven Highway 15 once before, with Challenger and recalled that it is very beautiful but very winding with some sharp turns over bridges. It’s also, not being an Interstate, a bit short on rest stops and I had no idea what time I’d be where for sleeping purposes so decided to let Betsy rule. Bigger road would be better roads after all, and the Turnpike, being a toll road, would naturally be better kept and easier to drive.

I sat waiting for my dock for an hour. Then they told me that I was welcome to back in, but it might be another hour before they got to me. This was ok, it was another of those indoor arrangements, where you can’t see what you’re aiming for until you’ve missed it. Plenty of time to mess about in reverse suited me fine.

But plenty of time is finite and after I’d been waiting three hours I began to fret. I had until 3.30 the following afternoon to get to Culpeper, it was going to be a slow drive, I had to fit in a legal sleep break somewhere so I needed to be heading for the border, now. The unloading began. The guy must have been being paid by the hour, as I’ve never seen a trailer empty out so slowly. He found the errant load bars though, which meant I’d not needed to collect up the extras. I fitted them anyway, here and there along the trailer, it seemed more sensible to have them fixed to the walls than flying about loose. I finally drove out of there four and a half hours after arriving. The sun was going down. If there’s one thing that puts me in a grump it’s sitting about watching the daylight fade, knowing that I could have driven in daylight but now I will drive in the dark instead.

Two hours to the border took me to after 10, I decided to get as far as I could on the other side by midnight, stop while the roads were still flat, get a good sleep and tackle the difficult stuff in daylight. It looked as though I could get through New York State and into Pennsylvania, stopping just before the road turned South at Erie, there was a rest area on the map, that would do. 

Of course, the first time you drive a road there’s no way to assess what the rest areas will be like. Some are huge, some are tiny, some have conventions for how trucks like to park, and where to insinuate yourself when they are officially full. Late at night when commercial traffic has to stop to stay legal there is a spot of ‘anything goes’ which usually involves parking on the shoulder, either as the ramp curves in to the stop or as it leaves. You are at least a lane further from the through traffic just here, but there are limits and you have to make an effort to be safely out of the way. It is always safer to park on the off-ramp, as the traffic coming past you is leaving the stop much more slowly than it would have entered, but if you drive through a full lot to get to the off-ramp and it’s full too, you’re snookered until the next stop, which could be an illegal amount of miles down the road. My rule of thumb is that if there’s a truck on the on-ramp it probably means that the proper spaces and the off-ramp are full. It also means that parking there is acceptable, so I pull in behind it and hope for the best. On a really good day, another truck pulls in behind me, then I know I’m safe and legalish and sleep a lot better.

This was a tiny rest area. Big scary red ‘no-parking’ signs littered the on-ramp and the legal bays were full. Big scary ‘no parking’ signs littered the off-ramp. There was just about room for one truck between where the signs stopped and the ramp ended. It would have to do. I slept bady.