A Shoulder to Lean On

The man with one brown eye and one blue wants to know if I would like his phone number.

“I’m married,” I tell him.

“But I asked you that a minute ago and you said no,” he said.

“You asked me if I was a trucker’s wife and I’m not,” I replied, watching the numbers of his gasoline pump turn round and round, the 150-gallon tank filling up.

On the blacktop of the Giant Truck Stop in Castaic, I can forgive his confusion. The only fuel here is diesel, the only food prepackaged sandwiches and canned soda. The main attractions are the showers and the young men in red jumpsuits who’ll clean the truck windows for the price of your fuel.

But I didn’t come for comfort, I came for answers, and I drove past my question on the way to get here: Why do so many trucks, the big cross-country, semi-trailer kind, park on the shoulder alongside the Foothill Freeway just east of the Sunland exit?

I pass a dozen Friday morning, their truck engines idling with a low growl, cab lights ablaze, parked nose to tail on a broad gravel shoulder just off the pavement. The sunlight, just past dawn, is still dim. “Emergency Parking Only” signs are posted every hundred feet or so, but these drivers, I imagine, are sleeping soundly. They have turned this isolated stretch of L.A. freeway into an informal, amenityless truck stop.

What, I’ve been wondering for months, are they all doing here?

But it was more than that. It bothered me that the trucks were stopped. In motion they were anonymous, machines not men. Stopped, on the side of the road, in plain sight, they were an admission of humanity.

I wondered who was driving the truck, and if the driver were lonely.

At the truck stop in Castaic, the closest place for truckers to refuel, I meet Rod Slaughter. Slaughter, in his mid-30s, never wanted to do anything with his life but drive a long-haul truck. His dad made a pretty good living as a trucker up in Oregon where Slaughter still lives. But the long hours are getting to him.

On the side of his cab “Rod and Mary” is painted in black script, only Mary left him some months back for another man who wasn’t always on the road.

She has their kids, so now Slaughter doesn’t just work in his truck. He lives in it. A brown comforter is heaped in the sleeping berth. The floor is littered with clothing and shoes.

That sliver of road in Sunland, tucked between slopes where the yucca this spring has sprouted as tall as a man, offers splendid isolation for a lonely driver’s nap, Slaughter explains. The millions of inhabitants of the city are walled off by the hills.

He has stopped there himself many times on his way back up the coast, the refrigerated trailer humming away, chilling the flowers he delivers every week to a supermarket in Portland.

“But I’m getting out of it,” he said, his chin covered in a couple days’ growth of beard. “I really enjoy it, but now I wish I’d done something else. It’s cost me too much.”

I guess it’s no real secret that the life of a long-haul trucker is hard. But I’ve always found the idea of the trucker appealing, romantic even, sort of the last of the Old West, the rugged individual in the modern covered wagon.

My Uncle Patrick gave me a toy Tonka truck when I was 5 that I preferred to the baby dolls and stuffed animals a little girl is issued at birth. He even drove a truck for a while, back in the 1970s when truckers were heroes and CB radio seemed futuristic. Truckers now carry, according to industry statistics, more than 80% of all retail freight in this country, far outpacing rail, ship and air transports.

Still, by the time I was a teenager, the most memorable truck driver on celluloid was Large Marge of “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” fame.

Unlike me, the California Highway Patrol is not concerned with past indignities suffered by truckers. When it comes to the trucks parked on the shoulder of the highway--particularly at the site on the Foothill Freeway that piqued my interest--the CHP has a short message: Beat it.

“We wake up the driver and tell them to move along,” said Sgt. Marco Ruiz of the CHP’s Altadena office. “A lot of them are from out of state and they’ll say, ‘I didn’t know.”’

Stopping on the highway is a parking violation, and many drivers would rather pay the fine than take their chances with noise and thieves in the established truck stops or on city streets. And it is a long stretch, some drivers say, from Ontario to the next truck stop in Castaic, about 65 miles away.

Drew Ryder, a vice president of the leading trucking trade magazine publisher, said that lack of legal, accessible and safe places for truckers to pull over is a serious problem in the industry.

“There are not enough truck stops, not only in Los Angeles, but across the country,” said Ryder, who edits the Irvine-based Heavy Duty Trucking magazine. “A lot of the rest areas that do exist, if you pull into them late at night, are totally packed. Parking illegally may be the only option.”

Drivers, said Ryder, are still bound by regulations dating back to the 1930s that require them to rest for eight hours of every 18.

“So, many drivers get mad. They’re tired. They are required to stop and they can’t find any place to do it.”

Roger Nobles, 51, has been driving a truck for nearly half his life. In those years, he said, the job has gotten harder. People want their load delivered “yesterday,” there are more trucks on the road, fewer places to pull over in peace.

“Some degree of quiet, some degree of safety,” is what the former cowboy, who wears a pro rodeo ropers T-shirt pulled tight across his expanding stomach, looks for in places to rest.

He knows the spot on the Foothill Freeway I’m asking about, and says it offers what he wants, along with wide road shoulders that are hard to come by in the Los Angeles area, but it’s not one of his regular destinations on his weekly haul of apples down from Washington State. However, he’s been told to move along at other spots along the busy truck routes of this state.

Ryder said the state and federal government should do more to provide safe places where the drivers can pull over. In Orange County this month, a driver pulled over on a commercial strip to sleep, and when three men tried to steal his $250,000 seafood cargo, he said, he shot and wounded two of them. The driver was not charged.

Nobles said all the bad things that can happen on the road worry him a bit, but he’s spent so much time sleeping in his truck he can’t even measure it.

“How many hours have I slept in the last 25 years?” he asked. “That’s about as many as I’ve spent sleeping on the road.”