It is the first day of truck driving school at the International Institute of Transportation Resource in Creswell, Oregon, and the class is silently watching a video about hauling hazardous materials. It seems to be narrated by a character from “Smokey and the Bandit,” a hefty, circa 1977 Southerner with an open-collared shirt that exposes sunburn and chest hair.  Drivers, rely on your “horse sense” when unloading toxic materials, he exhorts. The class members – half a dozen or so – nod in agreement. The video seems a strange choice to start four weeks of truck driving training: the class is still sipping morning AMPM coffee and Mountain Dew and already hearing of the terrible fates that befall truckers who lose their radioactive, corrosive loads on steep, snowy mountain roads. Not that they seem put off. The students would rather be here than where they were before – unemployed, imprisoned, underpaid or enlisted.  In fact, they (or the government agency sponsoring them) have paid $4,700 for a month of instruction leading to a Commercial Driver’s License, and, they hope, a new life as a trucker.

The 3.5 million truckers in America are responsible for transporting 70 percent of all freight.  That means our chickens, couches, milk, petroleum, toothbrushes, tractors, and just about everything else we buy, eat, or use spends at least some time on an 18-wheeler. But right now, in the late spring of 2008, the trucking industry is in two kinds of trouble. First are record high oil prices. For owner-operators (who own their own rigs and lease them to companies) the costs are crippling – diesel prices edge up closer to $5 per gallon every day, spurring truckers to protest from Spain to Washington D.C. But the impact of the high diesel prices hasn’t yet trickled down to company truckers – they are still in wild demand. Despite the promise of a decent paycheck, the strenuous lifestyle of trucking, especially the long-haul variety, means that some companies have turnover rates of 126 percent.  Still, there’s an economic promise unmatched by many other blue-collar jobs: new truckers can expect to make about $32,000 in their first year. Specialized or experienced truckers can make upwards of $50,000, and the top percentage of drivers (mostly owner-operators) make more than $100,000. For a job that requires little education, that’s a tantalizing paycheck. 

The people filling the chairs in this thin-walled classroom that smells of Folgers and Windex are mostly men. All are white. Tim sits in the middle row. He is big and tall and looks ill at ease behind a desk. For now, he lives in his trailer in the parking lot, where he has constructed a special cage for his pit bull Ivory.  After school, he heads to his job delivering Chinese food in Eugene, a leafy college town up the freeway that is a world away from this town of empty lumberyards and rusting pickup trucks.

Michael sits in the back, too. He is a rangy, slouching kid, the youngest in the room at 25. An Iraq war veteran, he is living in a campground a few miles away. He doesn’t think of himself as homeless, though he supposes he doesn’t really have a home at the moment. Allen and Matthew sit up against a wall covered in posters advising safe trucking practices – don’t fall asleep, but don’t do drugs to stay awake, either. Allen is quiet, older, sipping his coffee and nearly melting into the wall. Matthew sits next to him, looking serene and a bit bewildered – something is different about Matthew, though nobody can say what it is yet.

“10-4?” Dick asks the class from the front of the room. He’s the instructor – his perfectly pressed khaki shirt says so, as does his baseball cap. If Don Knotts had become a truck driving school instructor, he would look and sound exactly like Dick. The class nods. 10-4.

The class heads outside to stand and smoke on the back deck of the school, which is housed in a doublewide trailer on a boggy patch of pasture off the Interstate south of Eugene, close enough to I-5 to smell diesel and hear gears shift.

Truck driving has never been just a job. And unlike many other blue-collar jobs like factory work or food service, it is iconic, imbued with a certain mythology. There is an entire sub-genre of country and western songs about trucking: “Woman Behind the Man Behind the Wheel,” “Diesel Drivin’ Donut Dunkin’ Dan,” “I’m Fixin’ To Have Me A Breakdown,” “Caffeine, Nicotine, Benzedrine and Wish Me Luck,” are a few classics whose titles hint at the rich vein of All-American lonesome pathos and humor that accompany the job.  Movies, television shows, and even a resurgent fashion aesthetic (witness the resurgence of “trucker hat” foam baseball caps) celebrate – and belittle – trucking and truckers.

While the trucking industry has changed since its peak of cultural resonance in the 1970s – when Smokey and the Bandit was on TV and suburbanites bought CB radios – the image of the trucker as the modern cowboy of the American highway remains, maybe, in part, because truck drivers occupy the psychic space of tramps, journeymen, seekers present in any culture: they are the people who live everywhere and nowhere, viewing the world from the familiar but mysterious vantage point of the road. Sociologists like author (and truck driver) Lawrence Ouellet have found that Americans view truck drivers as outlaws living a rough-and-ready life on the asphalt frontier. While the reality of the job may be much more tedious, there is an appeal to becoming such a man. (And they are nearly all men -- despite recruitment efforts, less than four percent of America’s truckers are women.) The men who have come to IITR on this muddy spring morning have lost something – usually a job, but sometimes even more. They are looking, in trucking school, to find it again.

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