We traveled across America to ride alongside the folks who ply their trades on the dark, desolate road.
No stick shift, no CB chatter. life in the cab is a bit different from what the movies portray.
Tom Fowlks
We’re chasing the zipper by moonlight, an all-night, 482-mile run from Los Angeles to Tucson. Eastbound and down, just like the song. Silver bullet in the back, just like the movie.
The “zipper” is the white dotted line. At night on a lonely stretch of road, it might be the only thing visible, a metered flash in the headlights. It’s also the only trucker slang Brian Measel used on our drive. My “breaker-breaker, bear-on-your-tail” fantasies dissolve while we were still in L.A. when Measel’s polite inquires as to which lanes were open around a crash go unanswered. “People don’t really use the CB much anymore,” he says. Over the next 400 miles, the radio stays silent, except while passing a container truck onI-10 whose faded blue bulk appears with startling speed when we come up on it doing 40 mph to our 65.
This story originally appeared in Volume 10 of Road & Track.
“Is that thing on?” Measel calls over the radio once we’ve settled into the passing lane. “You’re gonna get run into.” Answer: static.
Measel drives for Pilot Transport, a Michigan-based car shipper that hauls for OEMs and private parties alike. On our run, his six-car trailer has one occupant: an Iridium silver Mercedes-AMG C63 on its way from a dealer in Oregon to its new home in Tucson. Before picking me up, Measel had dropped off a half-million-dollar Ferrari SF90 Stradale. After we unload the Mercedes, he’ll check in at Pilot’s Arizona hub, then head north. Or east. Or west again. He mostly finds out his next cargo and destination a day before. Then he plans his route, using both Google satellite view and a truck-specific GPS that labels low overpasses and restricted roads. He’s allowed just 11 hours of driving time within a 14-hour workday, so routes need to be efficient.
Many truckers drive in pairs to go longer. It takes a lot of trust to sleep while someone else hauls you through the night. Measel once had a trainee who’d zonk out the second the sun went down. “As soon as it was dark, like a parrot.” He prefers to work alone. He’s a perfectionist and a bit of a neat freak, his polo shirt crisp, his truck’s paint shiny, the interior spotless and a no-shoes zone. “The guys call me Martha, like Martha Stewart,” he says as we place our rain-damp sneakers on a bath mat under the console. All through the night, it’s just us and other big trucks. Occasionally, one sways toward the rumble strip, then shuffles back in its lane. “Falling asleep,” Measel says. “You have to know your indicators or you’ll nod off.” His tells are yawning— that means he’s got about three hours left—and rubbing the right side of his neck, meaning about one hour before lights out. He does neither on our drive, boosted by a nice nap the previous afternoon and less-nice coffee from Danny’s Truck Wash and Big Rig Resort in Avondale, Arizona.
Brian Measel and his gleaming rig present a spotless image.
Tom Fowlks
“This was almost $6,” he says, tapping a thermos that smells like kerosene and burnt toast. Still, it keeps him wide awake. In turn, he keeps me wide awake with the gruesome story of a roadside mechanic crushed under an RV that was toppled by the gust from a thoughtless trucker who passed too close.
Very rarely, a passenger car blinks into existence in the fast lane, dashes past, and is gone. Most trucks are speed-limited, trundling forward in a slow leap-frog across the desert. Pilot’s are good for 68 mph. “We used to be 65,” says Measel. “But we begged and they raised it.” He says 3 mph makes a huge difference. “Sure,” I answer. “Now you can pass all the poor suckers stuck at 65.”
For a guy who likes to travel alone, Measel is talkative, covering every subject from show horses—he owns a handsome bay named Harley—to NASCAR. He likes how his black-and-silver company truck and specialized trailer look a bit like a stock-car hauler. In Measel’s opinion, driving a race transporter is the coolest trucking job. He never calls his own truck a hauler, though. “I don’t want to seem like a poser. I just call it a rig.”
Measel’s rig starts at a glittering grille and ends at a tailgate 75 feet, five axles, and 18 wheels later. Twisting around in back of the cab are thick vines of hydraulic and pneumatic lines for car lifts, ride height, and tire pressure. The cab is a Peterbilt 579; its 12.9-liter diesel is barely a hum from outside. Inside, there’s not a sound besides an occasional mechanical cough deep in the works when Measel shifts the automatic transmission. Of all the big-rig stereotyping I brought along, nothing burst my bubble more than learning that manual transmissions are as rare in big trucks as they are in supercars. “Truck schools don’t want to take the time to teach new drivers to handle a manual as well as a trailer,” says Measel. “Plus, the technology is so much better now. They can tune them to shift so gently.” A jarring gearchange is hard on cargo, be it a tanker of milk, a load of doomed livestock, or carefully stacked cars.
Inside the trailer is an M.C. Escher scene of moving platforms, ladders, and rails. Loading is an art form; six Maseratis require a different configuration than three Hummers or one camera-covered autonomous prototype. Cars are growing larger, and that causes issues: The aforementioned Hummers are too long and too heavy to carry six at a time. Even getting a single vehicle in can be a multistep process, Tetris through the eye of a needle. “I’ve got a degree in MacGyverology,” says Measel with a laugh.
Actually, he has an MBA, but a desk job left him fidgety and unsatisfied. “When I graduated, I was like, ‘I just got a master’s degree, I shouldn’t be a truck driver,’” he says. “But I just kept coming back to it.” Measel likes the work because it’s ever-changing. “I’ve heard people say that truckers are heroes of the pandemic,” he says. “You know, ‘If you bought it, a truck brought it.’ Me, I just deliver cars, but it makes people happy to get them.”
In the heavy dark, lit only by the strobe of the zipper, it’s easy to forget there are other people in the universe. As the sun paints Tucson misty pink, the world crowds back in. Measel rubs his right shoulder. The log book ticks down the remaining work hours. It will reset for the evening, and he’ll be back on the road, covering the midnight miles.
Keyword: What You Learn After a Night on the Road With a Long-Haul Trucker