Red Earth Review #2

Yet for all their freedom-loving, rebel talk, most of the truckers I met at the Gunsmoke were slaves to something or other. A clock was always ticking somewhere nearby; there was always some place else they were supposed to be—if not right at that moment, then soon soon soon.

“They’re expecting me at the feedlot right now.”

“Supposed to be in Memphis by morning.”

“Got to be in L.A. by Friday and New York four days later . . . “ The pressure to make these deadlines was enormous, and the obstacles standing in the way were many. Miles. Traffic. Road construction. Weather. Flat tires and other mechanical failures. The speed limit. The max weight limit. The difficult math of keeping a logbook with at least some resemblance to reality. The need to eat, to shower, to sleep . . . Different drivers dealt with the pressure in different ways, but from what I could see, they all felt it, most of them intensely.

Although we saw our share of long-haul reefer drivers, the majority of the truckers who frequented the Gunsmoke were bull haulers—shortto middle-distance truckers who delivered live cattle from feedlots across the southern plains to the packing plants east of town. In theory, bull haulers worked regular hours and slept in their own beds far more often than reefer drivers did. However, in my experience, this difference was mostly an illusion. Driving twenty hours straight was the same fate whether you crossed four states doing it or never left the same four counties of Kansas. Either way, you had to stay awake and arrive where you were supposed to be on time. Then too, both reefer drivers and bull haulers “cooked” their logbooks, broke the speed limit and the max weight limit with impunity, and regularly ingested whatever drugs they could lay their hands on: caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, prescription pain killers, marijuana, speed, cocaine, and, perhaps most of all, a brownish, powdery substance they called “crank” but that nowadays goes by the name of methamphetamine, “meth” for short.

I came into this knowledge gradually. When I first started working at the Gunsmoke, it was Gavin the drivers knew and trusted, not me. I remember one day we were fixing a flat on a trailer belonging to an older driver we called the “Silver Fox” on account of his graying crew cut, pressed blue jeans, and the sparkling condition in which he kept his truck. Halfway through the job, as I was waiting for the patch glue to dry, I saw Gavin and the Fox disappear into the cab of the Fox’s truck. Soon Hank Williams’s “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” was blaring from the cab, and when they emerged, five minutes later, they did so accompanied by a great, billowing cloud of marijuana smoke of the kind you might see in a Cheech & Chong movie, both of them laughing and horsing around.

I was stunned. It was not the fact that Gavin had gotten high at work, or that a truck driver who was about to haul a large and dangerous load had done the same. No, it was the kind of driver combined with the kind of drug that shocked me, for in my mind, men like the Silver Fox—early 5