Why would a fifty-something, carefully brought-up mother suddenly decide to go trucking?
It’s a really good question and, like most good questions it had answers both basic and complex. From ‘it sounds like fun’ through ‘it’s an authentic immigrant job’ via ‘well, earn more income in a truck than I could using a Master’s degree’ with a detour along ‘I’ve driven ambulances and stretch limos, if I want to be bigger it’s either a truck or possibly a plane and this course is cheaper’…none of these reasons quite encapsulated it all.
And these were merely the rationalisations for just a much vaguer pull towards the massive beasties that I’d been seeing while driving ever since emigrating from the UK to Canada. Clearly there was no rationalisation however for that other vague pull, a lifelong dependence on doing things merely because they are slightly peculiar.
Adding to my list of justifications that it appeared to be a great angle for a book on trucking helped a tad when explaining to individuals with no imagination, although not much.
In reality, I hadn’t anticipated terror when I breezed into Tri-County Truck Driver Training one afternoon in 2008. I merely wished to know what it took to be a trucking lady. I wanted to discover America, how hard would it be?
Needless to say there is a minor distinction between finding out how to handle a 75-foot, slow-moving guided missile and dreaming about getting paid to see the continent; and actually earning a living. Spending 14 hours per day smelling of diesel. My first job was taking trailers filled with mail from East to West. Team driving across Canada’s endless prairies and through The Rockies, and sometimes getting lucky enough to come home via Texas. That Lake Effect Winter Storm was just one of our countless weather-related narrow squeaks. North American trucking can be quite the drama.
Ihave been almost arrested in Baltimore, sick as a dog in Tennessee, terrified in Chicago, Dallas and Detroit and dug out from the snow twice in a night in Alberta. I’ve made pals in Virginia and foes in Ontario. And, given half a chance, I might probably forget about how impossibly tiring it is and go out again to take 18 wheels over the horizon.













