Solo

There are phases to a trucking life. You drive with trainers, with teammates, with students. Each one has its own rhythm, its own particular weight. But solo is the one that stays with you. It's the one that tells you who you actually are.

Solo is exactly what it sounds like. It's you, the truck, the load, and if you're paying attention, the slow realization that the road has its own kind of silence.

I've driven solo for the majority of my trucking life. I chose it. I still choose it. But choice doesn't make it simple.

The practical realities are real enough. Running out of hours with no backup driver means the load goes to someone else, or the delivery gets rescheduled, or dispatch sends another driver to swap trailers in a rest area off I-80 at two in the morning. You learn to watch the clock the way other people watch the weather. Four clocks, actually - your 70-hour, your 14-hour, your 11-hour drive time, your 8-hour split. They count down whether you're moving or not, and when they're gone, you stop. That's the job.

But the clock isn't the hard part.

The hard part is what happens in the quiet.

Isolation in a truck cab is its own creature. It can be freedom- wide open sky, your own thoughts, nobody needing anything from you for the next six hundred miles. On those days the road feels like it was built specifically for you. You understand why people do this for thirty years and can't imagine doing anything else.

And then there are the other days.

The days when the phone doesn't ring. When the voices you want to hear don't pick up. When you pull into a diner and the noise of other people's conversations feels like a language you've forgotten how to speak. You're surrounded by people and somehow more alone than if you were the last person on earth. You walk through it like a ghost. Present but not quite there.

On those days I need to work. Not want - need. Movement is the only thing that makes the quiet manageable. But the clock has its own opinion about that, and sometimes the only honest answer is to climb into the bunk, pull the curtain, and let the dog take up more than his fair share of the space.

His name was Bingo. Shelter dog, already ten years old when I got him, already past the age when most people would have chosen him. He didn't care about any of that. He watched for me out the window with an intensity that suggested my return was the most important event in his calendar, which it probably was. His enthusiasm upon that return was directly proportional to whether I'd brought a hot dog back from the truck stop, but it wasn't just the food. It was never just the food.

On the hard nights, I'd curl up next to him and cry into his soft ear and eventually fall asleep.

And I'd pray, because that's what I do when I've run out of other options.

The prayer was always the same.

Please God. Don't let him fart.

That's the honest version of solo driving. Not the logistics, not the clocks, not the load swaps. It's the specific mercy of a dog who doesn't ask hard questions, and the particular grace of falling asleep on the road knowing you'll get up tomorrow and do it again.

That's why we stay out here.

Not for the miles. Not for the money.

For the next morning. And the one after that.

Read more at https://one-safe-mile.com | Proudly hauling with @HillBros