That’s a Big 10-4

I’m sitting in St. Paul, Minnesota as I write this, visiting my son and daughter. It’s not the first time I’ve made the 900-mile drive between the Twin Cities and Ripley by myself and it’s always an adventure.

I left Ripley at the crack of 9:30 a.m. on Thursday last week and made it as far as Peach Street in Erie for a rest stop. Leaving home always makes me nervous. At 10:30 I was back on the road, nerves under control and the radio blaring.

I have a CB radio in my car and I usually have it turned on when I’m going a distance. There isn’t as much chatter on the radio as I remember in years past. Mostly it’s just drivers giving directions or shouting a hello to other drivers they know. But then, you also have the drivers who give the profession a bad name; you know the ones, lots of cussing and swearing, lots of smut talk. Quite often they’re sitting in truck stops, bored, and trying to get a rise out of anyone listening.

Until I met my husband, who drove truck for 40+ years before retiring, I assumed most truckers were stereotypical beer- swilling, cigar smoking, foul-mouthed louts. It just ain’t so. Most of the men and women out there are just hard working folks, trying to get from Point A to Point B in the fastest time possible in order to make a living. Many truck drivers resent the “four-wheelers” on the road and roundly abuse their stupidity. I have to agree. You’d be amazed at the stupid things people do when they’re on the open road; like pulling out in front of 18-wheelers because “trucks have airbrakes, they can stop on a dime.” A 40-ton truck and trailer, airbrakes or not, is not going to stop quickly, and cutting a truck off is tantamount to a death wish.

CBers have a language all their own. Everybody knows 10-4, an answer in the affirmative. A “bear in the middle shootin’ east bounders,” is a highway patrolman sitting in the median, using radar aimed at east bound traffic. A “county mountie” is a county sheriff. “Bear bait” are vehicles travelling at a high rate of speed, bound to attract the attention of the highway patrol, thereby allowing the trucks to “hammer down” undisturbed. Listening in on the CB is a great way to find out where all the speed traps are, not that I would ever speed…. It also alerts you to traffic backups and construction work.

Sadly, accidents occur and the truckers let each other know when there has been one, such as the one I passed just west of Cleveland. In graphic detail, I could hear them relaying the fatality that occurred in the multi-car crash on I-90. Having seen the vehicle in question for myself, there was no doubt in my mind that the driver had gone on to a better place. It shook me up for a lot of miles, making me more alert and cautious.

Any vehicle can be an instrument of death, but an 80,000 pound diesel and trailer deserve some respect. To all the professional drivers out there, you have mine. Be safe out there.