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The next few days are a flurry of tests and smoke breaks. The men start to talk to each other. Mostly they explain why they have come, in mid-life, to trucking school. 

Allen is a slight man, with a weary face and a deep slash of a mouth. At breaks he sometimes has a Twinkie in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He seems to have emerged directly from the timberlands that surround Creswell: his flannel shirt tucked neatly into black jeans is the model logger uniform, and his past is written on his clothing. Allen comes to class each day wearing a Rosboro Lumber baseball cap and barn jacket. He worked at Rosboro for 19 years, feeding Doug Fir logs into the machines, running the forklift. One day last fall, he went to work to find that the plant was shutting down, and he was out of a job. The mill was his livelihood, and more. He still wears a silver belt buckle with an ornate mill scene on it, a man standing tall against a background of mountains and logs, a buzzsaw strung across the bottom.

“I need some job security,” Allen spits. “So I told my wife, I’m goin’ out on the road again.”

Allen is nervous about one thing here at truck school: he hadn’t had to do much reading since high school, and he is rusty. At the mill, he could just show up, work hard and get used to doing anything. “Common sense work,” he calls it. But the first week of trucking school is one multiple-choice test after another. Allen squints at the words on the blackboard and follows them along with his finger in the book:

Which item must be included in the driver’s daily log?

All time spent at the controls of a commercial motor vehicle in operation is considered driving time, true or false?

He smokes his cigarette vertically, the glowing embers pointed towards the ground. Though he doesn’t say so, he is worried.

By the second week, the class had learned about tachometers, mandatory rest hours, logbooks and clutch braking. They had moved from the trailer into the “yard” – a gravel lot filled with semi-trucks – old Peterbilt and Eagle rigs with “IITR: Down the Road, It Could Change Your Life” painted on the side. They were in the yard one sunny afternoon when Rosie started calling people in to talk about job placement.

Matthew went in first. He is a tall man with sandy brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, with the mild look of a Portland dad. But something about him was different – he wore the same t-shirt, work boots and Wrangler jeans as the other men, but the clothes weren’t faded or distressed by time and wear. Everything on him looked brand new – the can of chewing tobacco in his back pocket hadn’t even faded a light circle into his jeans. And Matthew wore a mysterious black box the size of an early 1990s cell phone attached to his belt. It was a GPS locator, which explained Matthew’s new wardrobe, too: he had been released from federal prison two months earlier, where he had completed a sentence of nearly seven years. Matthew called the locator his “idiot box,” but the Oregon State Board of Parole called it his Inmate Tracking Locator Device.

Matthew was from Montana. His earlier years had been a bad-luck rodeo full of alcohol, meth, firearms, prison and wives –four wives, three stints in jail.  The most recent lockup was for being a felon in possession of firearms. His hips had been eaten away by vascular compression caused by his alcoholism, and he’d had two hip replacements while in care of the corrections system. He was free and sober now, but he was alone for the first time in his life. He was middle aged and bewildered, and trucking had just sounded like something he could be good at, do for the rest of his life.  Besides stay away from Montana.

Rosie Edwards is in charge of job placement at the school. A round, smiling woman who believes in her children, football and the absolute attainability of the American dream, her job is half social worker, half cheerleader.  Although IITR puts students through a screening process and rejects those with issues that would impair their ability to be employed like drunk driving arrests, speeding tickets, drug charges, physical impairments or felonies, (almost 70 percent of all applicants have at least one “barrier” on their record) they occasionally accept a special case like Matthew, with the caveat that no job is guaranteed. Matthew looked expectantly at Rosie from the other side of the desk.

“You could drive a dump truck or a log truck maybe,” Rosie told Matthew, staring at his file.

“I think I’d like the log truck,” Matthew said. He was eager for anything that didn’t take him out of state – the terms of his probation forbid it.

“Lukas would be the company for you then, let’s shoot them your resume when you have CDL in pocket.”

“Ex-felon friendly?” Matthew asked hopefully.

“They are, pretty much.”

“Right in September I go in and have this thing cut off of my leg,” Matthew said, gesturing at his ankle monitor.

“And you’re free?” Rosie asked.

“Not really, but I got a good probation officer.”

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