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'She Is A Truck Driver'
She's a big girl, she's a small girl.
She comes in all sizes and shapes: short, tall, skinny and
fat.
Laughing and serious, happy and sad.
She's transportation with a grin on her face,
distribution with a cocked
left eyebrow.
She's progress with diesel fumes in her hair.
She makes her living holding 10 tons of steel in her hands.
She has highways in her eyes.
She's a truck driver.
She hauls milk for the nation's babies, dresses for the nation's ladies.
Steel for our country's
defence, and bread for the nation's breakfast tables.
She likes straight highways, slot machines that payoff,
Friendly
cops, and bonus checks.
The road's her home. She drives today so the world can live tomorrow.
Laughing, she's tough
enough to hold her cargo against
a hurricane, and gentle enough to stop 10 tons of wheeled steel
to let a 12 ounce
kitten cross the road.
She can tell you where to get the best piece of apple pie
on the highway, and where the radar
traps are,
and which road to take to make the fastest time.
She hates, in the order named, phoneys, road-hogs, tough
traffic cops,
highway weigh stations, small town justices of the peace.
Steep hills, cackling cargo, and a weak coffee.
She's America on wheels. She's big business with a road map in her pocket.
She's a truck driver.
Without her, there would be no gasoline to run the nation's automobiles.
No steel to make the
machines, no concrete to build the highways.
No merchandise to spin the wheels of trade.
She has eyes that look over
mountains,
She likes to see the other side of hills.
She eats better than bankers, dresses like a Texas rancher,
is
more independent than a newly elected senator.
She's an authority on politics, highway construction, baseball,
and
the best way to run a trucking company.
She likes the feel of the night wind on her face
and the sound of a purring
motor.
She lives by the code of the road and passes
no man by who needs a helping hand.
She's got problems, and
is not bashful in airing
complaints about the state of the world at large.
Every trip she threatens to get off the
road and live like other women,
but she never does. The highway is a flirting Lorelei who hums
a haunting tune for
the women who chase the horizon on spinning wheels.
And when the tyres sing, and the road is straight,
and the moon
is bright on a ribbon of cross-country highway,
she's the happiest, most useful woman in America.
She's a truck driver.
Author unknown
LADY TRUCKER
"Women Truckers Are a Special Breed - Tough, Romantic and Independent
'WE DRIVE TILL WE GET THERE'" A Special
Report by Hank Whittemore, St. Louis
_Post-Dispatch_Parade_ (Sunday "magazine" insert), July 10, 1988, pp. 4-5.
More
than 100,000 women now drive big trucks, but there's one thing some still
feel they need: 'I want respect, that's all'
Bouncing
on the air-cushioned seat high up in the cab of her 13-speed Kenworth
tractor, pulling a 48-foot trailer bound for the
West Coast, Darlene Dwyer is
"running hard" over the long, flat highway as the Florida sun goes down. She
is
in control of an enormous machine on 18 wheels, carring 40 tons. At the
same time, she is a lone female driver in
a world of macho male truckers who
see her as a vulnerable object of prey.
"This is Biscuit," she yells into the
CB radio, using her "handle" to call
another woman trucker on the road.
A male voice breaks in: "Hi, sweetie!
Where are you?"
"No sweetie in this truck," Dwyer retorts. "I'm a driver!"
"Want to fool around?
Make love?"
"No way, cowboy!" she says, clicking off the CB unit and turning to me as we
roll on: "A lot of these
guys still have the notion that every female out here
is fair game. To be honest, it's lonely and tough on the road."
The
number of lady truckers is rapidly growing, from less than 2 percent of the
total drivers a decade ago to about 4.2 percent
today. Of 2.5 million truckers
hauling rigs of various sizes, just over 100,000 are women. "There has been
steady growth," says Ron Roth of the American Trucking Associations. "I think
women are not so overwhelmed by
the hardships anymore."
The new female drivers include many wives "riding team" with their husbands.
Some,
married to men who are not truckers, drive "short haul" and return to
their families each night. Those women who
pull the big rigs alone, over long
distances for weeks at a time, are mostly single or divorced.
"I don't recommend
it for all women," says Helen Jones, 49, of Hendersonville,
Tenn., who started riding with her husband four years ago
after raising a
family. "It takes a special kind of person who can withstand the stress. You
have to enjoy
physical labor and love the outdoors."
Jones and her husband run from a loading dock in Ohio down to Florida,
Louisiana
and Texas. They alternate behind the wheel for roughly 1300 miles
without stopping, except for short breaks, in
23-hour stretches.
"Handling the truck doesn't take tremendous strength," she says, "but it
requires lots of stamina
and concentration. When I'm driving, my husband is in
the sleeper [inside the cab, just behind the seats], and so
I'm on my own. And
I'm constantly thinking ahead in advance of any trouble.
"What if one of my tires blows?
What if that car suddenly pulls in front of
me? And some days, when the wind is howling and there's freezing rain,
you
wish you were anywhere else. But what did our great-great-grandmothers do?
They went across this country
in covered wagons!"
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