REV-IT-UP, Tales of a Truck Stop Chaplain

By Sherry Blackman

REV-IT-UP, Tales of a Truck Stop Chaplain is a collection of stories from the crossroads of saints and serial killers told by a chaplain who has served at a metropolitan truck stop since 2006. Sherry Blackman shows up again as a spiritual investigative reporter in this series of quick, graphic, gritty, and insig

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dunrovin' Press
• Release date: Nov 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986179957

Book preview

REV. BLACKMAN’S

TOP TEN TRUCK STOP LIST

A lot lizard isn’t a reptile.

Loneliness is a disease that too often leads to other diseases.

Be careful what you wear to a truck stop or you may be mistaken for a different kind of working woman.

To-go coffee cups come in gallon-size containers.

If truck drivers drive long enough, they will tell you that the road becomes their mistress.

For a truck driver, retiring means getting new treads on those wheels, shifting into overdrive, and truckin’ another million miles.

Truck drivers are road angels, though some are the fallen kind. They will be the first ones to stop and help out if you break down on the side of the road and the first ones to strand you alongside the road if you prove to be difficult.

If you listen long and hard enough to these kings and queens of the road, almost every conversation will come around to God all on its own.

Truck stop waitresses know the name of every truck driver. It’s either Honey or Sweetheart.

If you are a woman truck driver, it’s best to run to and from your truck when you leave your cab while parked at a truck stop. Truck drivers are not honking because they love Jesus.

FIELD NOTES

Perhaps I will stay with you for a while, or even spend the winter, so that you can help me on my journey, wherever I go.

—I Corinthians 16:6 (NIV)

I am a truck stop chaplain at the bend in the river, at the gap between mountains, not far from New York City. The truck stop is a way station for cross-country drivers and travelers seeking brief respite. It is a refuge, a place to refuel, a place to recharge. Hot meals are ordered up, big rigs repaired, clothes laundered, and small necessities—milk, Pepto-Bismol, audiobooks, DVDs, even gifts…whatever is needed for the long haul—are sold in the convenience store. Weary drivers can shower and then plunk down into theater seats to escape into a wide-screen television or kill imaginary villains in the arcade.

Almost everything drivers do, they do alone, though not so much in solitude as in solitary confinement. Some three and a half million strong, these men and women who bring to our table seven out of ten items we depend on are often unacknowledged. They spend one-half of their lives, about eleven hours a day, behind the wheel of a big rig, traversing deserts, mountains, lone stretches, main arteries, and blue highways, delivering the abundant life that most of us assume will always be within a Walmart reach. They bring us the fruit of the harvest—corn from the Midwest, raspberries from Canada, cherries from Washington, peaches from Georgia, watermelons from Mexico, and other products from around the globe, including such faraway places as China, Thailand, and India; they load up at ports that are rife with organized crime, human trafficking, and suffocating pollution. Without these men and women, we would starve and, unthinkably, undergo consumer withdrawal, for which no rehab yet exists.

In the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, American truck drivers decided to use their power of presence to protest coronavirus restrictions, like the demonstrations that paralyzed Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, for weeks. According to Reuters News Agency, what began in February of 2022 as more than two dozen eighteen-wheelers, along with fifty pickups and recreational vehicles, left California in a self-styled ‘People’s Convoy’ and headed to the capital’s Beltway, growing exponentially along the way to include hundreds more truck drivers and vehicles, to demand an end to COVID-19 vaccine and mask requirements. Since the restrictions were beginning to be lifted by mid-March, many truck drivers decided to make a statement by their presence but not snarl traffic as they would just be spinning their wheels. This wasn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, that we are reminded of how crucial the trucking industry is to the American economy.

I write this book as both a chaplain and a storyteller, to lift these men and women off the road and onto the page as those who are living sacrifices, who live on the periphery but should not be unacknowledged. I pray these stories, collected at this intersection, will break us open to ourselves, to one another, and help us retrieve the divine from the wreckage of our lives.

Stories heal, even as they wound. As a truck stop chaplain, I hold space for others to hear themselves. Listening is a form of surrender, a willingness to be the invisible character on this life stage we all share. I offer these stories, told to me at the restaurant counter, often surrounded by others, or at a dining booth, and sometimes, in passing. To protect these truthtellers, I have changed everything about them—their names, where they call home, physical characteristics, and sometimes gender—so that the only person recognizable in these struggles, sorrows, and triumphs is oneself. In every story, there is a revelation and a reflection on what it means to be human, how we carry our pasts, our traumas, our memories, our victories and joys with us, wherever we go. My hope is that through this telling and hearing we might create a more compassionate world.

I invite us to be travel companions with these kings and queens of the road, that we might respect those who are too often mistreated and maligned by understanding the sacrifices long-haul drivers and their families make, thus humanizing them in our increasingly dehumanizing world. Each tale is an invitation to find grace and beauty in suffering and to not let suffering have the last word. More, I add a reflection at the end of each story so that we might capture the strand of light woven into and through each story and hold onto it until we see a glimmer of ultimate redemption.

When I started as a chaplain here in 2006, shortly after graduating from seminary, I wore a clergy collar so I wouldn’t be mistaken for a different kind of working woman. Within months, I shed the collar for a T-shirt and a name tag. I have no chapel, no tractor-trailer in the parking lot with a neon cross to stake my claim in Christendom. My sanctuary is the people themselves. No church music is piped in to wake the sleeping soul—only ’60s and ’70s Baby Boomer music transporting sojourners back to young love and old dreams.

I minister at night as parking lot lights shape and interrogate the shadows, always aware of hidden things. Once inside, I thread my way past Taco Bell and Pizza Hut and through the convenience store to the restaurant that smells like a high school cafeteria. A ventilation fan hums a dull tune while exhaling an oily mist over the patrons. Grease clings to clothes and hair, a slimy goo with teeth, mingling with sweat-stained bodies.

A cook shouts out the names of the waitresses—Colleen, Donna, Gail—as he scrapes heavy white dinner plates against a stainless steel shelf. Soft-soled shoes scuff and squeak across the tile floor as another waitress dumps into a plastic bin dirty plates and cups that smash and clank against each other.

Small Sabbaths are carved out within these walls, taken in minutes rather than in hours. The counter is my communion table where I break bread, sip coffee, and engage in deepest conversations amid irreverent banter. I practice a ministry of presence, meaning I listen. I open space for another to hear him—or herself. It’s a ministry that happens in the silences and the space between words and gestures, in the shared vulnerability of storytelling and being heard without judgment or repercussion. It’s a kind of open-air confession where there is no barrier between priest and confessor, where there is a recognition of oneself in the other.

I know, too, that there is more to any story than the one being told. I’ve learned about all kinds of encounters that happen at truck stops over the years, including the kind no one wants to think about, like the serial killer who parked his big rig at the truck stop only twenty miles from here and walked into neighboring streets to target his next victim.

The most profound lesson I’ve learned throughout my tenure as a truck stop chaplain is this: If I listen long and hard enough to a person, every conversation will come around to God all on its own. God still hovers over the faces of the earth and, at the same time, is the root of all things.

These truck drivers and travelers teach me what it means to help one another on the journey, between miles and runs, wherever we go. They’ve taught me that we are each a cartographer of our own life, each deciding who and what will be drawn on our personal map. But most of all, I brim with gratitude for witnessing what lies beneath this geography of human sharing.

REFLECTION: What does it mean to really see someone? To hear someone? Long-haul drivers, like so many others, go unseen in our daily lives and yet are crucial to our well-being. Can we work harder at acknowledging those who work so hard behind the scenes?

BAPTISM BY IMMERSION

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things—air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky—all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.

—Cesare Pavese

On my first night as a chaplain, I found a parking space near the front entrance of the truck stop and uttered a thank you to the heavens for the well-lit space. The ground literally rumbled beneath me from big rigs pulling into the side entrance, lining up to fuel and idle their engines. Sooty black clouds of diesel smoke spewed from their exhaust stacks and muddied the air, choking the lungs, even though I was two hundred feet away.

Why am I doing this? I thought. My husband, a cop, hated that I was there, saying I had no idea of the criminal element that hides behind wheels, those who are never caught because they are always on the move. Prostitutes are notorious at truck stops, he pointed out. I was naïve, unprepared, not street smart enough, he argued. Everything he said was true, but I was going in anyway.

I adjusted my clergy collar, finger-combed my hair, snatched my Bible from the back seat, and locked my car door. It was early August 2006. The tarmac radiated heat, and the tar that mended cracks had melted into a brew that stuck to the soles of my heels. Yes, heels. What was I thinking?

My cell phone vibrated with a message from a priest I had interviewed earlier that day for my Faith Matters column. He said he had prayed for me and this new ministry I was embarking upon tonight. The Holy Spirit revealed to me that you would be safe and your ministry would be blessed, he said.

I saved the message and would end up listening to it often in the weeks ahead.

Seminary definitely had not prepared me for this kind of ministry.

I stepped inside the building, inside the convenience store, and inventoried those who worked there; mostly women, who I was sure were far younger than they appeared. Some wore their life in their posture as if shame was a stone on their back. Some of them had black stumps for teeth and stretched their upper lips over them when they talked to hide them, slurring their speech ever so slightly. Several of them had no teeth at all. Compassion was a stabbing pain inside me.

I met with the restaurant manager, Laura, who had been the rock here for almost forty years. She never revealed her age. At first, I suspected she was in her sixties, but calculating her grown children’s ages, I figured she was somewhere in her seventies. She was a marine fifty-plus years ago and wore a gold marine medallion around her neck to prove it. Petite, standing at best five feet tall, she was mighty in spirit. Her tough demeanor announced she was more a marine than a manager. And as it turned out, she drove a Hummer. Her dyed blonde hair was short and tousled. Her teeth were small and worn from the thousands upon thousands of words she had spoken in her lifetime, many of them to the drivers she served. She clenched her jaw often during the brief orientation. She wore rimless eyeglasses and squinted her eyes when she talked, which formed quotation marks in the skin around them.

I’m still waiting, thirty-five years later, for that man to walk into the truck stop and drive me away, Laura said, smiling and cocking her head to the side.

I asked, Is prostitution prevalent at this truck stop?

There is no prostitution here. This is a safe place. What you’ll find here is that the state police will drop a stray off or a family in need, or a truck driver will have no money to pay for his dinner. That’s when we call you. The chaplain who was here before you, Rev. Houghton, was a wonderful man.

Sounded to me like she was saying that my heels wouldn’t fill his shoes…heels that I would later discard for chucks.

He was so kind, so helpful.

Of course, he was a man, and a handsome one at that. Sounded like she had a crush on him.

Labor Day weekend, four weeks away, I’d be called in for my first emergency to help a stranded traveler when I would meet a couple from the congregation two miles down the road where Rev. Houghton had served as pastor. Five months later, January 2007, I would be ordained in that same church and end up being their pastor for the next seven plus years.

After our brief orientation, I introduced myself to the restaurant help—a waitress who was an immigrant from Bulgaria; the short-order cook who stepped with an extra bounce, as if the floor beneath him was part trampoline; and Zach, a fifty-something porter from Poland. The truck stop was one part United Nations with few translators.

Wandering downstairs by the fuel and service desk where truck drivers were coming in to pay their bills or have their trucks repaired, I struck up a conversation with David, who was leaning against the glass wall that looked out on the dozens of diesel pumps. He was waiting for the air conditioner in his eighteen-wheeler to be fixed. His clothes were sweat-soaked, his hair wet and combed back without a part, and his forehead glistened with the fluorescent light that beamed down from the overhead fixture. He rambled on about the decline and demise of the trucking industry.

They call each other ‘Hey Driver,’ he complained. It felt like a deliberate brutality to him, an act of dehumanizing the other when one person refused to acknowledge another’s name, especially when his name was embroidered in red across his shirt pocket. Drained, miserable, angry, and disillusioned was how he described today’s drivers. They are afraid to speak out against the unfair practices out of fear of losing their jobs. He talked some more about the plight and flight of drivers and then turned the conversation to his family. Would you pray for my sister, Judy? She’s got cancer.

I reassured him I would, then listened some more. He jumped a jagged course through the short history of his life—the death of siblings, never having married, that he was childless. Even his monologue seemed cut on shards of glass. He offered torn pieces of story, then constraint, but every few sentences, something like rage boiled up and his face threatened to heave.

When his cell phone rang, he answered it and talked about paying a delinquent bill. I had a truck that put me into bankruptcy, he explained after hanging up.

Not long into the conversation, he paused and said, You touched my soul. You are a great listener.

Really? Tell my kids that, I wanted to say. Having spent decades as a journalist, I was accustomed to firing off questions on my truth-seeking missions that would save lives, or at least my life. It took a constant conscious inner muting not to ask him question after question.

I found the Lord as a child, he added, as if this was all the information I needed to know that he would survive, that he had found a deep-set dignity no one could steal from him despite the weight of his losses.

David was my tutor that first night at the truck stop. He showed me how loneliness and intimacy can converge in a few minutes, and how humanizing it is to stop, stand still, steady my gaze, and let his story soak into my marrow for the both of us.

Once, the roads were so beautiful. Now, the streams alongside are polluted—the same ones I used to be able to drink out of, said Harry, a fourteen-year veteran of the road, who was sharing a table with a fellow driver, and they’d invited me to join them.

They were from Oklahoma. Harry had a smoker’s cough and was obese and toothless. He held his side when he coughed, it seemed to keep his innards intact else they might come loose from the strain. I looked to see if he had a nicotine-yellow tongue but couldn’t tell. When he chewed, his lips collapsed onto each other and his round face caved in.

I love truckin’ because of all the beauty you see, said his friend Joe, a thin, tall man who had been on the road ever since he was laid off from his factory job four years ago. I love to see the wildlife.

Joe seemed intent on focusing on the things that were life-sustaining to him. Harry seemed intent on focusing on the things that were contaminated or dying, maybe because he was wrestling with both inside himself and was saying it without saying it. He complained about everything—new trucking regulations, the black box the company had installed in the cab so they couldn’t lie on their logbooks, and other drivers.

There are three kinds of drivers on the road, Harry continued. Professional drivers, truck drivers, and jerks.

A couple of minutes passed before Joe changed course and told me the story of his son. When he was twelve, he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. My family asked for prayer in the church. When he returned for further tests, there was no sign of the disease. He’s twenty-three years old now, plays drums in the church every Sunday morning, evening, and during Wednesday prayer service.

I wondered if Joe saw beauty in the world because he was seeing it every day in his healed son.

REFLECTION: Maybe God lives and breathes in the compassionate gesture, in the wounds that are healed, and in the ones that remain raw and infected. Maybe our wounds are the doors where we invite God in, where God can enter, just as it is through Christ’s wounds that we are invited to experience grace.

RESUSCITATION

Lazarus, come out! The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face. Jesus said to them, Take off the grave clothes and let him go.

—John 11:43–44 (NIV)

It was Monday of Holy Week and I had just finished teaching a class on comparative religions at a community college when my cell phone rang.

My name is Natasha, a woman said, her voice wobbling like a muscle that trembled from lifting too great a weight. I’m at the truck stop. The restaurant manager suggested I give you a call to ask if you would be willing to marry my fiancé and me tomorrow.

A bit stunned, I said, I don’t usually perform wedding ceremonies without getting to know the couple and doing some premarital counseling. I would want to sit down with you and your fiancé to get to know you both before performing the ceremony. It’s also Holy Week, and I have a lot going on in the two churches I am serving.

She persisted, I have a marriage license, and it’ll expire in thirty days.

Okay, I said. Is there some urgency? She sounded too old to be pregnant.

Could you meet us tomorrow night, here at the truck stop? she asked.

I agreed, and the following evening I found Natasha snuggled into one of the restaurant’s booths alongside her twelve-year-old daughter. Her skin was pale and grayish and looked dusted with ashes. Her eyes were a faint blue behind her thick, rimless glasses. Her long hair, more gray than dark blonde, was tied back into a ponytail. Overall, she had the appearance of a woman who had suffered and whose suffering had prematurely aged her. She introduced me to her daughter, Sam, who pressed against her mother’s side and clutched her arm. Sam had youthful, thick, shiny brunette hair, a translucent complexion, and Coke-bottle green eyes. She too seemed older than her age.

As we talked, I learned why Natasha insisted on getting married right away. She was scheduled for her twenty-fifth operation next week due to a botched surgery six years earlier for endometriosis when the surgeon had severed her urethra. Every surgery since had been an attempt to