Highway America: The Life of a Trucker

By Peter Blakeborough

Highway America is a scenic journey through forty states in an 18 wheel semi. It is one man’s experience of life on the road as an interstate trucker with many unexpected twists and turns. Peter Blakeborough writes about his employment and training, working conditions, pay rates, industry practices and driving hours. On his first solo delivery (no GPS) he travels 800 miles from Little Rock to Toledo, takes a load of Honda bikes to Florida and chemicals to Pennsylvania – and right into a dead-end with nowhere to turn. A journey from Iowa to Arizona is halted abruptly in the desert while the temperature is over 100°F. But for this driver/writer it’s all part of the adventure. You won’t put this book down until it’s finished.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Blakeborough
• Release date: Nov 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465782663

Peter Blakeborough

About Peter BlakeboroughAuthor Peter Blakeborough was born in New Zealand in 1937, the eighth of eleven children.In 1954 he learned to fly with the Auckland Aero Club in de Havilland Tiger Moth open-cockpit biplanes and had completed several flying tours around New Zealand by the age of twenty-one.In 1958 he became a foundation member of the Piako Gliding Club, a volunteer glider tow-pilot, instructor, and chief flying instructor. He managed a fund-raising project that enabled the club to double its fleet size.Next, the author worked as an agricultural aviation loader driver in many parts of New Zealand before going to Australia, where he became a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman and sales manager.Back in Auckland in 1964, he drove buses, trucks, and taxis and started a business dealing in coins and stamps.His first non-fiction book, The Coinage of New Zealand, 1840-1967, was published in 1966 by Minerva. He was the founding editor of The New Zealand Coin Journal from 1966-1967, distributed nationally and internationally.The author joined the New Zealand National Party in 1970 and was a candidate in the 1972 general election. Later, he formed the New Zealand Liberal Party and was its leader in the 1975 general election. He joined the New Zealand Party and was a candidate again in 1984.Meanwhile, never afraid to rock the boat, the author operated a taxi business in South Auckland where, despite opposition, he is remembered as the person responsible for launching the first eight-passenger taxi-van service in New Zealand, a concept that changed passenger transport in New Zealand.Next, the author established Panorama Tours, a unique three-hour city tour with hourly departures throughout the day. He also escorted tours to Australia, Malaysia, and along the Silk Road from China to Pakistan.In 2001 and again in 2003, he went to America and drove long-haul trucks through forty states. From that experience, he published Highway America - the adventures of a Kiwi truck driver.Peter Blakeborough has flown more than fifty types of aircraft and, as a flight simulator enthusiast, has added another fifty virtual types. He has been an international yachtsman and has completed numerous walks in remote mountain areas of New Zealand.In 2009, he published the Asker Trilogy of Australian and New Zealand historical fiction. His most recent book is The New Zealand Tour Commentary – a handbook for tour drivers and guides. It has been revised and reprinted many times.The author has also had a long record of serving on committees, including being the founding chairman of Waikato Writers (a branch of the New Zealand Society of Authors) and recently the first president of the Thames Community Club. As a speaker, he frequently talks about writing and publishing, flying, travel and tourism, and climate change.

Book preview

Highway America

The Life of a Trucker

Peter Blakeborough

This EBook edition is published by Gypsy Books at Smashwords in 2011

Copyright 2010-2011 Peter Blakeborough

First published in 2010 as an illustrated print book by

Gypsy Books, PO Box 110, Ngatea 3541, New Zealand

Website: www.gypsybooks.co.nz

Email: [e-mail]

Print book ISBN 978-0-473-16241-2

Smashwords License Statement

This EBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This EBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please go to smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

Also by Peter Blakeborough

Fiction

Nathaniel’s Bloodline

Murder at Wairere

A Twist of Fate

The Life and Times of Freddie Fuddpucker

Non Fiction

The Coinage of New Zealand, 1840-1967 (Minerva)

The New Zealand Tour Commentary

Introduction

Some years ago while studying my family’s history I came to the conclusion that I was destined to be a professional driver several generations before my parents got together to create ten siblings and myself. Driving was in the blood.

Rennie Blakeborough, a distant relative, operated taxis and buses at Morecambe in Lancashire early in the twentieth century and apparently was the first transport operator in the United Kingdom to use pneumatic tires. When I discovered this I knew instantly that he must have been an industry leader, an entrepreneur, a deep thinker and probably a reckless gambler too. Let’s face it all the air could have gone out of the tires at any time and, in those days, probably did quite often.

I recognized similar attributes in my father. Frank Blakeborough, also from Lancashire, was a New Zealand dairy farmer for most of his life, always battling the odds on small uneconomic blocks. He never made much money from farming but he was never-the-less, an industry leader in his own way. He invested heavily, or at least his bank did, in farm improvements and he always had the best fences, the greenest pastures and the best-bred cows in the district. And he was always the first to try something new. Many of his experiments failed and often when they did he demonstrated with his colorful vernacular that, even on overcast days, the air could be turned blue for miles around.

After the family moved to Faraway Farm at Pukapuka north of Auckland in 1945 my mother cooked on a coal range, washed our clothes in a wood-burning copper and washed us kids in the copper too. She ironed with a flat iron heated on top of the coal range and made new clothes on her pride and joy, a 1920s Singer sewing machine powered by her own two industrious feet on a treadle beneath the machine.

Faraway Farm had no electricity, refrigerator or flush toilet. We wore patched-up, hand-me-down shirts and shorts but shoes were beyond the capability of the Singer so mostly we went without them.

Frank soon put his entrepreneurial talents to work modernizing the farm with the help of a press-ganged team of children. For the remainder of 1945 we had no schooling. The local Mahurangi West School was without a teacher and there was no school bus to take us the twelve miles to Warkworth until Frank Blakeborough came up with one of his brain-waves. He had recently purchased a 1936 Morris 8 car and he put that to work as a school bus doing the twenty-four mile (39 kilometer) round trip twice a day from Mahurangi West and Pukapuka to Warkworth.

It was only a little car but he managed to cram eleven children into it. Like most of Frank’s driving endeavors the Morris 8 school bus was destined to be a short-lived venture. To ease the burden on the little old car each morning two or three of the bigger kids would walk up the steepest hill to Windy Ridge near Warkworth. But then one morning we walked all the way to school arriving in time for lunch. The old Morris had given up the ghost and blown its crankshaft.

Meanwhile there was no school for another extended period while we waited for the Education Department to approve an official school bus.

Yet another interruption to our education occurred during the polio epidemic of 1948 when the schools were closed for several months.

After that we travelled with Frank de Latour in a ten or twelve seat 1920s Packard service car. The next school bus driver was Martin Jones who had a larger bus built for the Pukapuka/Mahurangi West run and things settled down until Martin was stopped by the police after drinking one too many for the road. The school bus business then passed to Tom Sullivan (of Sullivan’s Bay, Mahurangi) for the next few years. Tom was a great local personality, a skillful driver and popular with the children.

Meanwhile, to return to my father who as a young man was one of the first people in Cambridge, south of Auckland, to own a brand spanking new automobile. The car was a Buick, and my mother, a very careful and considerate driver, had the distinction of being the first person in the world to drive a Buick from their farm to Cambridge with a teapot and cups and saucers sitting on the running board, and she did it without spilling a drop.

In contrast to Florence, when Frank got behind the wheel he was like a fighter pilot having a nightmare, and many who rode with him had nightmares for years afterwards. He loved to drive but had little idea of how to go about it and even less idea about who the enemy was.

In 1931 my father could have made the Guinness Book of Records for the shortest ever career as a truck driver when he failed to complete his first assignment. The truck was a night-cart; a truck that once carried the cans of slushy brown from houses without flush toilets. It was right after the disastrous Napier Earthquake of February 1931 and he was given the task of delivering a new truck and cans to Napier where it was needed as a temporary measure until the earthquake-damaged sewer system could be repaired. He had to negotiate the notoriously difficult Taupo-Napier road. In typical Frank Blakeborough style he flogged the engine up the hills in top gear and raced it down the other side still in top gear. Somewhere on the journey the brakes overheated and the truck ran away with Frank and his assistant. Years later he recalled, ‘It took both of us to steer it around some of the corners.’ But it is unclear as to whether they were fighting the corners, or fighting each other for control. But that was the last time that he drove the truck and after that Frank had the task of carrying the cans while his former assistant did the driving.

He also recalled that the tremors continued in Napier for several months after the main shake and that often people would rush out of their houses in the middle of the night in a blind panic – sometimes at precisely the same moment that the night-cart man was doing his business with a large can of slushy brown mounted on his shoulders. I have no doubt that he originated all the sayings about getting your own back, and a litany of other expressions that I dare not reproduce in a family publication.

Meanwhile back to Pukapuka and Faraway Farm. Electricity came to the farm about 1948 or 1949 and it came first to the milking shed where electric motors driving mechanical milking machines replaced hand milking. The house had to wait a bit longer for electricity. About that time also a near new Ferguson tractor replaced the draft horses and horse-drawn implements.

Next he acquired a 1929 Rugby car with the back cut off to provide space for a small truck tray, making it a forerunner of the pick-up trucks of today. The kids drove and rode the draft horses and did all manner of farm work with the Ferguson tractor but the Rugby was out of bounds to all except Frank – well officially.

Occasionally our father would walk to the large neighboring farm of Willy and Paddy McElroy to help out in busy times and to earn a little extra money to keep his own farm afloat. Whenever that happened my older brother Don and I would rush through our work so that we would have time to give ourselves some driving lessons in the old Rugby. The Rugby didn’t have an electric starter like modern vehicles. In fact it didn’t have an electrical system or a battery. Everything was run from a magneto once you had the engine running and the engine was started by swinging on a crank handle that protruded from the front of the radiator. It was a brute of a thing to crank so whenever a convenient slope presented itself the Rugby was parked on it and then you just had to run it down the slope and clutch start it whenever you wanted to go driving. Easy! An ideal slope existed right outside the milking shed so that was where the Rugby was usually parked.

Don, then about fourteen, took the first turn at the wheel and eased the Rugby down the slope and let the clutch out just as we got to the road. It fired up instantly and he roared along Pukapuka Road several times showing me how to change up and down through the gears (all three of them) without graunching them. Then he showed me how to take corners without running off the road. To an eleven-year-old he was an expert driver and certainly knew more about driving than the ‘Old Man’, as we called our father, and whom we thought must have been at least a hundred and thirty years old.

Then it was my turn to drive.

To my surprise I found it much easier than I had expected and by the time I got the Rugby into top gear and a couple of hundred yards down the road I was already a better driver than the Old Man. Already I could visualize myself driving all over the world. After about half an hour we arrived back at the milking shed with the Rugby still in one piece and Don took over to back it up the slope ready for the next time it was needed.

He took care to follow the old wheel tracks on the grassy slope and to leave it in exactly the same position as before. He stopped the engine and we got out and had a look. No. It wasn’t quite in the same position. It needed to go further up the slope. So he ran it down the hill to clutch start it again. He got to the road and let the clutch out and surprise, surprise. It didn’t start!

Undeterred we opened a gate on the lower side of the road and pushed it down the slope into the paddock, trying several times to clutch start the old girl. We opened several more gates and eventually we got to the lowest point on the farm.

But we were not beaten.

We harnessed a horse and dragged the old Rugby back up through the paddocks, across the road, and up the starting slope again and there we left it exactly where we had found it.

The next time Frank went to use the Rugby we made sure we were watching from a safe distance. When it failed to start the air turned blue as usual as he made an inspection of the engine and tried hand-cranking. Then he found an axe and we thought he was going to hack it to pieces in his rage so we retreated even further from the scene of the crime. He removed the fuel cap and dipped the axe handle in and withdrew it again. The blue haze thickened alarmingly when he discovered that it had no gasoline.

The Old Man wasn’t as dumb as we had thought and perhaps he was only about ninety something years old.

And so from that tender age on the slopes of Faraway Farm my driving career was launched.

Many years, and several million kilometers later, in March 2001 I was driving a tour coach back to Auckland accompanied by Peter Aitken who told me about his experiences as a interstate truck driver in the USA several years earlier.

I decided then and there that I wanted to do the same thing and that 2001 was the year to do it. My wife and youngest daughter were planning a visit to England and were expecting to be away for several months. I could go to America while they were away.

A phone call that night got my name on the list of drivers wanting to work for CalArk International based at Mabelvale near Little Rock, Arkansas. The relevant forms were faxed through to me that night, completed and faxed back. Then I got my old American road atlas out and looked for Little Rock. A long held dream was about to be realized and at 27 cents a mile I figured that I could earn much better money than driving in New Zealand.

I immediately considered the possibility of turning the adventure into a book but I first needed to complete the fiction trilogy that had occupied my spare time for several years. Although the adventure could go ahead the book about it would have to wait. At 27 cents a mile it wasn’t going to be another Rags to Riches story, to add to the twenty-five or more books published under that title, and I would soon discover that From Snags to Hitches would be a more accurate title. However, after much procrastination I opted for plain Highway America and I hope you enjoy reading it. The paperback version has been selling like hot cakes.

PART ONE

Chapter One

Kiwis in Little Rock

A few days later more forms and screeds of information arrived in the mail from the New Zealand agent for CalArk. American Department of Transport officials, police, immigration, insurance companies and employers are very thorough when it comes to vetting prospective drivers. A couple of weeks later CalArk accepted me subject to getting a work visa, completing their training course, obtaining a social security card and a Class A Arkansas Commercial Driver License.

The process is often quite different in New Zealand where on more than one occasion I’ve received a phone call from a fleet operator desperate for an immediate driver to take a load of tourists some place or other. The phone interview can be as simple as, ‘They’re waiting at the airport now. Take number 65. You’ll find the key under the mat.’

Sometimes, as I prepared to travel to America to start my adventure, when I mentioned my plans to people they would look sideways at me with an unspoken question, although some did ask straight out.

‘Why would you want to do that at the age of sixty-three?’

‘Because if you let the grass grow under your wheels, you’re as good as dead,’ I would usually reply.

A little later while I was taking some tourists around Rotorua my cell phone rang. There was an American voice on the other end.

‘This is the United States consular office in Auckland. We have a visa here with your name on it. It permits you to work in the USA for CalArk International. Would you like to call and collect it?’

So the next day I paid the airfare to Little Rock and went to the consular office to collect the visa only to find that it had been sent to the agent in Masterton, about 300 miles away, who couriered it back to me a few days later. Then I went to the Auckland Driving Academy for a couple of hours of tuition on a 1979 long-nose Kenworth with a semi-trailer.

It was many years since I had hauled a big trailer.

Eleven other Kiwi drivers were going to CalArk on 18th April via LAX and Chicago, a rather long way round I thought, and I found a cheaper fare via LAX and Dallas which was about three hours faster. I also elected to go a day earlier to allow a day for this old-timer to recover from the jet lag before starting training.

Qantas had some technical problems with their Boeing 747 in Auckland and the flight was delayed one and a half hours. But it was a good flight and we made up an hour on the way while I managed two or three hours sleep.

On the ground at LAX I transferred to the American Airlines terminal, arriving just as my next flight was boarding. But there was a long delay after everyone was seated. One of the cargo doors refused to close so we all trooped off again, walked to another gate, boarded another Boeing 757 and left an hour late for Dallas. Once we got going it was another smooth flight with excellent views of LA, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

I thought Dallas was an impressive city from the air as well as on the ground. It’s been well planned with lots of green areas and lakes and it oozed money almost everywhere I looked. A night flight to Little Rock followed in an MD80, finally ending the journey fifteen minutes early in spite of