Mike Vargo: Truck Drivers Who Hitchhike

Have you hitchhiked lately, or picked up a hitchhiker? The practice is now rare in the United States. Much of the decline came during the 1980s, probably due to a confluence of gradual changes in American society. Theorists on the issue have identified these factors: more people having cars of their own. More owners seeing the car as a private home away from home, not to be shared with strangers. Laws against hitching in some places. And a growing fear of others, combined with reluctance to subsidize others: no free rides here. 

I didn’t often thumb but I picked up lots of thumbers — especially on long drives — back when I was young, my car was middle-aged, and the decline of the hitchhiking tradition had not yet reached the tipping point. You know how it is with the gradual extinction of anything. We live fast, and don’t notice that a part of our world is vanishing until the curve drops off a cliff and the vanishing happens fast, at terminal velocity. 

In those not-yet-off-the-cliff times, I was new to the writing game, working gigs as a general-interest reporter. Whenever I mentioned that I liked to pick up hitchhikers, people said “You must get good stories.” And I did. Unfortunately, I mishandled most of them. Time and again I was busy with assigned work and neglected to take notes after a ride. Typically, I’d just tell the stories to friends, in little performances that scored well but did not preserve the content. Stories I thought were unforgettable got lost in the fog of life. 

Only one made it into print, by a circuitous path. It was the story of an oil-country worker from Texas. When I picked him up, I asked what led him to be thumbing across Massachusetts. He said the Texas trouble started when he took a job in offshore drilling. The rotation was 30 days on a platform in the Gulf of Mexico, 30 days off. His wife didn’t like that. He came home from a 30-day shift to find that she had left. This, he could accept. But not what else she did. Somehow — either through legal channels or an underground channel; I can’t remember — she had given away their child. Sent the boy to the care of persons unknown. At a rest stop, the man showed me pictures of the cute rascal. The man was hitchhiking around the USA on a mission, chasing leads, hoping to find his son.

I told this story to a fellow writer. Unlike me, a nonfiction guy, my buddy was a fictionalizer and fantasy-spinner. He churned the tale in his mind repeatedly. It accrued mutations, and came out of his keyboard as a surreal novel. Read the book if you like: A Great Place to Die by Sean Connolly (University Press of New England, 1997). 

Meanwhile, here are two short pieces to read. I had forgotten that I did write down records of a few encounters, years ago. The papers surfaced recently in a dig through old boxes. Working from details and comments in the papers, I’ve put a pair of the stories into proper form. Together I think they might say — well, you be the judge. The cases were unusual. Whereas we’ve all heard of truck drivers giving rides to hitchhikers, twice I came across the opposite: truck drivers hitching a ride. 

**

I met my first hitchhiking truck driver one morning on a freeway near Columbus, Ohio. Studying him as he entered the car, I couldn’t have guessed his occupational identity. Here was a trim, businesslike man of about 30 or so, carrying a briefcase, yet dressed casually in jeans and a windbreaker. He looked like a technician who goes into buildings to inspect the vital systems.

If he was an independent trucker, where was his truck? “Gone,” he smiled. Work had been slow lately, he said. He was behind on the payments. There were calls and letters from the finance company. 

Finally he’d landed some good work hauling meat. That very morning, he was transporting a trailer full of beef. He pulled off at a service area for breakfast. Two men were standing in the lot, waiting for him. As soon as he eased the truck to a halt, they stepped to the driver’s-side door and hemmed him in. They wanted the keys. 

Other than that, he said, the morning had gone smoothly so far. From a pay phone he notified the meat people that they shouldn’t be expecting him. He apologized. They understood. Then he strolled out to the highway, where I had picked him up within a few minutes. 

He was very calm. I’d seen that kind of calm before, I thought. One night, a friend of mine stayed late in the office where he worked, and I brought him a sandwich. We were sitting and talking when the telephone rang and he answered. His face froze. He hung up and said “My father just died.” From that point he was the model of cool efficiency, filing documents in drawers, making further calls, asking me to take care of odds and ends — and gently deflecting my attempts at sympathy — until he buttoned his coat and exited for the airport. 

“What did you say to the men, when they wanted the keys?” I asked. “Not much,” my rider shrugged. “What could I say?”

“Yeah, right …” We drove on for a while in silence. His answer had not satisfied me. True, no words could’ve stopped them from repossessing the truck. But he might have said words that revealed how he felt at the dire moment. And that was what I wanted to know, like a TV reporter at a disaster scene. How did you feel, Mrs. Jones, when you saw your house floating away? 

Then he spoke: “I’ll tell you one thing. Before I got out of the cab, I went through it and made sure I had everything that belonged to me. And I hit the switch that turns off the refrigeration unit in the trailer.”

I glanced over at him, unable to grasp what he meant. “When they came up to me, they said ‘Turn it off,’” he explained. “So I turned it off. If they’re smart, they’ll start that unit up again. If not, they’ll have tons of spoiled meat on their hands, meat that belongs to my client. It’s their responsibility now.”

And now the truck driver was going home, to a small town in southeast Ohio. Luckily it would be on my intended route. No, he had not phoned ahead to the wife and kid. Nor did he care to discuss how he’d get by, absent the truck, saying only “We’ll see” and changing the subject. Consulting his watch, he said brightly “I’ve missed breakfast. But I should be just in time for lunch.” 

The town had a pleasant air, with cheery white houses and green yards under the midday sun. At an intersection, he said I had taken him far enough. He preferred to walk the last few blocks alone. We smiled and said our goodbyes. I wanted a parting image of him, so I watched as he walked away down a side street, swinging his briefcase. 

** 

The episode triggered thoughts and feelings that stayed with me. Of course I felt bad for the truck driver. Hoped he had a source of emergency cash. I imagined the scene at his house when he arrived — but I figured he’d handle that part. He struck me as a man with a sense of the big picture, a sense of history and his place in it. Surely he foresaw future generations telling the legend of the day Grandpa came home without his truck, and he would play the lead role admirably. 

I also felt strangely envious of the truck driver as I watched him walk off. Envious, because misfortune can be liberating. For openers, you know you’ve been punished at last. I was bad. I didn’t pay. So they took the truck, and my conscience is clear. 

(Even greater moral satisfaction is available if you’ve already reformed when you are punished, making you more the victim than the villain. The truck driver wasn’t at home drinking daytime beer when judgment came. He was working.)

Misfortune can close off the past, forcing you to look ahead. When the driver walked down that street, I saw him walking into fields of infinite possibility. There is the sheer joy, too, of having your routine disrupted. As a boy I read H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, and sometimes I wished the Martians would come, so we wouldn’t have to go to school. Some days I still look out the window for them. 

Finally, I remember secretly approving of what had happened to the ex-truck driver, because of a prejudicial attitude I have. To an extent, I enjoy driving. Even drove a taxi on the side to fund my early writing days. However I would never want to drive all day every day, for a lifetime. We have a society that relies on people doing boring jobs. The trick is to find a vocation that won’t grind you to bits. This can be tricky indeed, because boredom is offered in staggering varieties of different forms. And over-the-road truck driving, which may look like a way out of the trap, seems to me an insidious form. 

People tend to over-romanticize the thrill of going “on the road.” The main attraction of the road, to me, is that it leads somewhere. It leads to many places I’d like to visit and spend time in. When I plan my travels, I try to follow the destination principle: You want to do a lot of being there without too much getting there. Truck driving pushes the balance the wrong way; it’s heavy on the get-there and doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room for thereness. Speeding through landscapes of endless possibility, the driver has to sit in the cab and always do the same thing. Sort of the reverse of writing, where you sit in the same room always doing something new. Therefore, any event that could help to nudge a truck driver toward a new line of work was likely to be OK with me. 

**

Ohio River Boulevard, which feeds into Pittsburgh’s North Side, can be a slow road in the morning rush hour. On a day when I needed to take that road, traffic was slower than slow, inching forward like a parade of indecisive turtles. Eventually I saw the cause: orange safety triangles in the right lane and a shiny new semi — with no trailer, nobody behind the wheel — sitting there. About fifty yards past it I met my second hitchhiking truck driver. 

I waved him in. “Broke down?”

“Hey. You know how it breaks down right after you make the last payment? This one broke down before I made the first payment!” Like the previous truck driver he looked 30s-ish, and unfazed by adversity. But he was a tighter, stockier, more kinetic man, the kind you can hear breathing, like a furnace running.

Apparently the problem with the truck was minor. He was thumbing to the dealer’s to have it dealt with. Crawling along in traffic, we had time to talk. “Well,” I said. “Aside from incidents like this, how do you like driving a truck?”

“I hate it,” he said. “Hate to drive.”

“Really?” I lit up. “Then why do you do it? How did you get into it?”

Out came a predictable story. Young dude, wanted to make decent money, liked to run his own show and not take orders from bosses all the time. Being an independent trucker sounded ideal. Then the vicious cycle began. By the time he realized that driving bored him shitless, he’d run up some bills. His first truck, which he had bought used, was about to give out, so he bought a new one so he could pay down his debts. But then there were payments on that vehicle. 

The truck sitting behind us on the Boulevard was his third. “So here I go again, huh?” he asked. 

“Do you have to?” I asked back. To which he gave a remarkable response, one you don’t usually get when you pose such a question. He stopped and thought about it. 

Then he started thinking out loud. He was in better shape financially than the first two times around. And actually, if he did such-and-such … and made another move … “I can do it,” he said. “This is the end. It has to be. I’m going to fix that fucking machine and sell it.” 

I laughed a laugh of cosmic amazement. A truck driver was having an explicit rebirth in my car. And I had been an instrument of the epiphany. 

One more question. Did he have any idea what he’d like to do instead? We were slowly descending the long ramp from the Boulevard to the North Side’s industrial district. The truck dealership was maybe half a mile ahead. All around us were acres of drab warehouses and blank-faced buildings. But what I saw in his eyes, I swear, was the look of a man envisioning his infinite possibilities. 

He said “Yeah. Yeah. I want to be a dispatcher.”

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Mike Vargo is a freelance writer based in Pittsburgh. 

Copyright 2024 Mike Vargo