All trucks are grey in the dark

At 4:00 am it was still pretty dark outside.

I parked my car, grabbed my duffel bag and went looking for my trainer's truck. All trucks are grey in the dark. I was in the right place, but I couldn't find my trainer and I couldn't find his truck. 

The right place was a dirt lot that filled with identical trucks. I finally located my trainer, climbed aboard his truck and stowed my duffel. This would be my home for the next three weeks. I would sleep in the cramped, top bunk. Bathing, decent coffee and speaking with anybody who shared my liberal politics would become a thing of the past.

It is now the end of that first week.

Once I had climbed up and into that Freightliner tractor, I would begin the real part of my education. Up until then, this whole truck driving thing had all been sort of theoretical. Now, that shit was real.

My company-supplied trainer has trained many before me; he is knowledgeable, patient and is quite the chatterbox. For the first two days, I rode in the passenger seat, listened and soaked up gobs of information, (most of it too boringly truck-specific to bother you with) but I would not be allowed to drive the truck.

When it was still quite dark out, we drove out of that dirt lot in Woodland down I-5, over to I-80 and eventually made it to Milpitas with a load; somebody else's load that was embarrassingly late. The load was so late that the consignee refused us, so we dropped off the entire trailer, still sealed, at one of our company's yards nearby in Lathrop and swapped it for an empty. Then, we drove somewhere else and picked up a load of ketchup and took that replacement trailer all the way up to Everett,WA.

After that, we went here, there and everywhere, picking up and dropping off all sorts of things; new pallets, giant paper rolls, hardware and garden supplies, boxes of paper towels. Nothing really all that special. Just stuff. Anything and everything. Drop off a trailer with stuff, swap it for an empty one. The destinations soon ran together. There were no wasted minutes, there was no time to relax. Sometimes we had to wait for people with forklifts to unload us, but mostly we just swapped full trailers for empty ones and were on our way. I didn't just sit, I helped to do stuff: raising and lowering landing gear, doing pre-trip and post-trip inspections, thumping on tires with a mallet, hooking up and detaching the air supplies and its "pigtail" electrical hookup. But no actual driving.

After a couple of days, my head was about filled with stuff.  (I keep learning gobs of stuff and the memorization never seems to end. I am naturally curious and I like to learn stuff, but come on! Enough already!)

On the third day, my trainer suddenly announced that I would be driving from then on. He would sit over in the passenger seat. I would drive.

Although I had driven a similar, newish Freightliner truck for a few short minutes during my orientation, I had never really driven one, never taken one beyond eighth gear. This new truck sported a 13-speed transmission, and now I needed to learn how to use its "half-gears", whatever the hell those were.

Also, I had never driven a loaded truck; in school I had only pulled empty trailers. That was about to change.

For that matter, I had never driven a loaded truck up and down a real hill of any importance. That changed too.

Lessons on everything continued, plenty of mistakes were made. I made slight improvements. Very, very slight improvements. I also made plenty of mistakes: I missed gears, I grinded gears, I took forever to back up to loading docks, I asked lotsa really dumb questions. But I continued to improve. After awhile, I made fewer stupid errors, though I still have a long way to go. And I will invent new mistakes to make.

As I write this, I am sitting in Gilroy, California, having driven down from Kalama, Washington, around Oregon and Washington for awhile and down I-5, past Ashland, up steep grades over the Siskiyous and down the other side, down through the Sacramento Valley to the Bay Area, down past San Jose to Gilroy, where I finally had a chance to write some of this stuff down, and where I finally got a chance to pee.