Trucking as a State of Mind | Hacker News Reader

Trucking as a State of Mind

newyorker.com

86 pointsmhb14 comments

Hauling cross-country means “breezing through one dead or dying town after another” in a landscape that “looks like an episode from ‘The Walking Dead’ ”; everywhere, rings of chain stores and pawnshops surround decaying post-industrial downtowns. Murphy concludes that, outside of the big cities, university towns are the only good places left. Ruminating on American tourism posters—apple orchards in New England, porch swings down South, cowboys out West—he writes, “If a tourist poster of America were made with some verisimilitude, it would show a Subway franchise inside a convenience-store gas station with an under-paid immigrant mopping the floor and a street person at the traffic light holding a cardboard sign that reads ANYTHING HELPS.”

Ya, you might think that of middle America if you only see it from the major highways. Surprisingly, there is great history, culture, and sometimes industry that isn't close enough to the freeway to house a truck stop.

I read this book quite avidly, and the writing is quite good. The insights into changing American life (disposable furniture, gutted city centers) are worth the price of admission. However, I was somewhat shocked at the lack of personal reflection. The book seems to constantly be on the verge of some sort of personal realization but comes up short. Any non-work human relationships in the book are completely blotted out, at one point causing a decades-long gap in the narrative without explanation. It's honestly a bit chilling. Did anyone else get this feeling?

The author addresses the ten year gap in an interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross: https://www.npr.org/2018/02/14/585719252/long-haul-trucker-w...

Relevant section is towards the end, about 80% of the way through.

> You stopped driving for about 10 years. You don't say in the book what you did during those 10 years. Can you give us a sense of what your life was like in the 10 years that you stopped driving?

> MURPHY: Yes. That was in an original draft of the book. Actually, that's going to be my next book, Terry - about what I did. But I will tell you what I did. So I was working for North American Van Lines, and I was getting basically burnt out. And one of the things that I had always intended to do when I left college was to save some money and go into business for myself. And that was really one of the goals. I didn't just quit college and just, you know, sort of flip the bird to everybody. I actually had some kind of a plan. And back then, you could - I could make a lot of money. I was making a hundred thousand dollars a year in 1981 as a mover.

> So I saved a bunch of money. I bought an import company importing - you know those beautiful fisherman's sweaters from Ireland? I used to import those into the United States from the west of Ireland. And I got into the other parts of the textile business and then started importing cashmere sweaters from Scotland and had a very successful business on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts.

...

> MURPHY: So I was on - living on Nantucket Island as a high-profile businessman and citizen and community activist. I was actually chairman of the county commissioners on Nantucket. I was a police commissioner. I was the airport commissioner. I was on the board of the chamber of commerce. I was a successful person, married, living in a small town. And, well, what happened is I got into a relationship with a woman who wasn't my wife. And my life exploded. Or probably more accurately, I took a match to my life and blew it to pieces. And so Nantucket is not a place where that kind of thing is going to be unnoticed or uncommented upon.

I read the book this summer (article is from July 11), and I really enjoyed it. Thanks — I wondered what happened in that 10 year gap. It’s a good book.

Seems like he could have put in a couple of paragraphs about that to whet our appetite for the next book.

Isn't that just pointless marketing that doesn't do anything for us as readers though? A few paragraphs isn't enough to depict anything accurately about ten silent years before a 180 degree life change. Let's get excited about his next book when it's here.

I read it. It is now history. The glory of the long-haul isnt like that anymore. Truckers dont have free time to read books when 14+10 is broken down into split shifts. The freedom is limited by gps monitoring from the home office, satphones telling you to divert because of cheaper gas, and the use of multiple trailers that lock such trucks onto rails.

Movers are also different than truckers. Movers use a truck for part of thier job. They arent full-time drivers. They know thier loads and pick thier routes. Normal truckers do not. Normal truckers are measured not by the quality of the trip but by what percentage of thier day is driving. Squezing that extra percent or two is all that matters.

Nope, no more split shifts.

In another life I drove the trucks and when they changed the hours of service it became increasingly harder -- I'm not really designed to drive 11 hours straight but more of a drive 5 to 6 hours, get something to eat and mess around for a while or take a nap then drive through the night until the sun comes up, repeat as necessary until the destination is reached.

Now the truck needs to be parked 14 hours after you make your first mark in the logbook which means no slacking off if you need to be somewhere. If the shippers hold you up then you lose that time out of your 14 hours even if you were sleeping the whole time.

Things may be different today (haven't driven a truck in 10 years) but afaik that is still the law.

You didnt drive in canada then:

"Drivers are required to take at least 10 hours off-duty or sleeper-berth time within a day. Two hours of the total 10 hours can be taken throughout the day in blocks of no less than 30 minutes. The two hours cannot be counted as part of a required 8-hour break. Please note, however, that the two additional hours can be added onto a required 8-hour break, thereby creating a consecutive 10-hour break."

You might have to 'sleep' while the truck is being loaded. Two rest hours can also be 'defered' to other days as needed/dictated by the boss. And the allowed hours become even longer for drivers in the north.

That's pretty close (or exactly) the old way in the states but they changed the law a while back to make it "safer".

I did some cross-country hitchhiking in my youth. I forget why, but tractor trailer drivers where generally prohibited by laws or company rules (probably both) from picking up hitchhikers. Moving trucks, however, were the exception. For some reason they were able to pick up hitchhikers and I rode many miles in them.

Am I wrong in concluding that this article is entirely plagiarized from nytimes's review of this book at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/books/review-long-haul-tr... ?

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