Marriage and Trucking? Yes!

I wrote this blog post many years ago, but since we just celebrated our 46th anniversary, I thought it deserved a second run! I hope you enjoy!!

Marriage Lessons Learned from Driving a Truck

On the event of his fiftieth wedding anniversary, a friend asked my father-in-law if in all those years he ever considered divorce.

“Never,” he said right away. “I thought about murder once or twice, but never divorce.”

Now his son and I are closing in on the fifty-year mark and I completely understand what he meant.

Our marriage has been a contradiction. We spent a lot of time apart–years in one case–and also a lot of time joined at the hip–again, for years. While the months and more we spent living in separate states was hard, the time we lived in each other’s pockets made the biggest difference in our lives. That’s when I learned the tips of making a marriage last.

Jack and I met in eighth grade algebra class, children of military fathers and a somewhat unsettled lifestyle. He was nice and funny, but before the next year started, he left for private school. We had no contact until sophomore year when he came home for Christmas. On the spur of the moment, he asked me on a double date, and my life changed course.

When he went back to school after the holidays (which set the tenor of our dating years, more apart than together), he pronounced us soul mates and predicted we would marry someday. How romantic! Or at least that’s what I thought.

Jack’s mind took a more practical tack. No roses or poetry for him. He didn’t even believe in dating exclusivity, saying this was our time to make sure we wanted to share our lives with each other. Good advice, but it didn’t quite fit my picture of what Prince Charming would say. Before long, he proved through example what he did believe in, loyalty, fidelity and rock-solid reliability, making him more of a Prince than lots of romantic guys I knew. I was no dummy. As soon as possible I grabbed him by the lapels and dragged him to the nearest church.

Besides me, Jack also loved trucking. He told me over and over while we dated that he someday wanted us to drive a truck together. Naturally I had little knowledge of what that entailed. All I knew of trucks was that where they parked the food was good. That proved to be a little sparse on the details.

“It sounds wonderful,” I said with stars in my eyes. “Yes, let’s do it someday,” someday being the operative word.

So it was some surprise when, a short year after the wedding, Jack diligently went about finding a way we could go on the road. I had a college degree (the only person in my family to make it that far) and felt sure I’d set the world on fire. More than that, I was an only child, and my parents insisted that “trucker” wasn’t a profession for their daughter. What about stability, building a resume, buying a home? What about grandchildren? I assured them they had little to worry about.

“Look at this,” Jack said one Sunday morning. He handed me a copy of Parade magazine with a man and woman on the cover, standing in front of a Peterbuilt truck. “This is what we should be doing.”

The article described their lifestyle driving for a company out of Minnesota. The woman was pretty, the guy handsome, the truck huge with a double bed, TV, and ‘fridge. Wow! Their exploits sounded exciting and adventurous, like modern-day pioneers, except truckers could down icy Cokes on their trek across the desert.

Wanderlust struck like summer lightning. “Where do we sign up?” I asked.

Almost before I got out the words, we gave up our apartment, sold our furniture and resigned our jobs. Jack’s parents waved us off, reconciled to our insanity. My parents weren’t happy but they decided we had to make our own mistakes. We drove to Marietta, Georgia and signed up with a company that operated east of the Mississippi. Jack finally laid hands on a semi and trailer he could load with freight and drive on the open road. I laid my first good gaze on truckers. Oh. My. Gosh.

Now I hate to generalize, but three quarters of the men I met had serious problems keeping teeth in their mouths, hair on their heads and belts below size 48. I began to wonder about the food in those truck stops.

“You aren’t going to become toothless, are you?” I wondered aloud to Jack.

“Why would you ask that?”

“Uh, never mind.” I hated to rain on his parade. Obviously the man had eyes only for his truck.

And what a truck it was. The semi in the Parade article gleamed a nice green and gold and had all the comforts of home. This conglomeration of rusted steel and rivets barely seemed able to make it across the parking lot without losing pieces. The cab held only a suitcase or two, stored under the twin-size bunk. Beneath the dirt, our aged Mack was dull pumpkin orange. I bit my tongue and climbed in.

Jack had the necessary experience to be a lead driver, but I had nothing but the required Class A license, gained in our home state by answering “Yes,” when asked if I’d driven fifteen hundred miles in a Class A vehicle and handing over eighteen dollars. Jack spent every free moment in the truck yard, teaching me to shift gears and start and stop without stalling. Then we traveled back Georgia roads until I acquired the knack of when to shift. By the end of the week we were off. Was I nervous?

“I’m nervous,” I said the first time I drove on the Interstate.

“Keep the shiny side up,” Jack said, and promptly fell asleep.

And here is where I learned the first lesson in making a marriage last. Trust.

Jack trusted me, fool in love that he was. When one partner is driving, maybe tired, maybe in bad weather or horrid traffic, the other partner has to believe in the driver’s judgment and skill. Even though I didn’t have his experience, Jack knew I wouldn’t take chances and that I wouldn’t be too proud to ask for help if I needed it. His trust gave me confidence.

“I did it!” I practically shouted after pulling into a rest area and waking him up. I’d driven fifty-eight whole miles but felt as though I’d won Daytona.

I improved each and every day, driving farther, driving smarter. A few months behind the wheel gave us the self-assurance to apply at the company we read about in the Sunday magazine, and soon we guided a fancy, big truck along the western highways as well as the eastern.

One day we sat chatting with another trucker from our company. “How long you been out here?” he asked me.

“About six months. I’m only doing it for a year, though.”

He shot Jack a toothless grin. “Too late. She’s already got it in her blood,” he said. “You got yourself a trucker.”

Another marriage lesson learned. Go with the flow and be flexible. Fate rarely hands you what you plan. I’d always imagined having five children, a nice house and professional job. Never did I envision living out of a suitcase, traveling North America, spending my time with men (mostly) who didn’t read much more than a Rand McNally. If I had imagined such a scenario, I probably wouldn’t believe how much fun it was, or how much I loved it.

I grasped yet another lesson one cold Montana Sunday morning. We planned to stop at a nearby truck stop for breakfast, so Jack sat up with me while I drove. There was little traffic. If we’d been wolves, we’d have been loping along, chatting pleasantly, without a care. Then a truck passed us, giving up no spray off his tires from what had looked like a wet road.

“You know,” I mused. “I think we might be on black ice.”

“Um, we have been for the past ten or fifteen miles,” Jack said. “I thought you knew.”

“Oh. Oh, sure. I did.” I didn’t change speed, just kept it steady. We pulled into the truck stop a few minutes later, behind the truck that passed us.

“Kinda greasy out there, wasn’t it?” he said as we walked in together.

“Sure was,” I answered knowingly. Jack chuckled and let me off the hook.

The lesson? Stay calm even in bad situations. Every partnership faces trouble at some point. Going off the emotional deep end usually doesn’t help. This wasn’t an easy lesson for me to learn, by the way. I vaguely remember screaming, “We’re gonna die! We’re gonna die!” when Jack fought to keep us from jackknifing on an Oregon mountain. He reminded me to calm down in what I thought an overly stern manner, but I forgave him.

I had a mountain experience, too. I’d just started my driving stint in western Montana when unexpected construction put us on a very narrow two-lane road chugging up a steep incline. I had never driven up or down a mountain that wasn’t part of the Interstate system. I called to Jack.

“There’s no place to pull over and I don’t know what to do,” I explained as he came awake. My hands gripped the wheel but I felt immediate relief when he spoke.

“Just do what you’re doing. You’re fine. Take it easy.” Then he talked, just talked, about nothing in particular, and I answered. Maybe fear led him to the conversation, but he didn’t show it.

I shifted as needed, and before starting downhill made sure I found a gear that would hold us back. “I know I’m going too slow for the line of trucks behind me,” I worried aloud.

“That’s their problem. If they hadn’t had that second cup of coffee back in Butte, they’d be ahead of us.”

I laughed, took a deep breath and did just fine, as Jack predicted I would. At the bottom I asked if I handled everything as I should.

“You’re upright, so you did good.”

Those were good words to hear. Lessons learned: Don’t be afraid to rely on the person you love most in the world. (They should be able to rely on you, too.) Prayer is a powerful thing. You won’t always do everything exactly as the book says, but that’s okay if you come out upright at the end.

Maybe the greatest lesson I learned from trucking was how important it is to choose your mate carefully. For eight years, except for using separate bathrooms in truck stops, Jack and I lived within an arm’s reach of each other. Even when we took time off, we spent our time together. Yet for all that, we never ran out of things to say, ideas to explore, or something to laugh about. Good looks are nice. Sex is great. But loving someone you can talk with even after days together in cramped quarters is the definition of a good marriage, in my mind.

Soon after we stopped driving, Jack became a consultant and took jobs all over the country. Often, contractual obligations kept me from traveling with him and as much as we had been together, we lived separately.

Would we have made it through the apart times as well if we hadn’t learned those marriage lessons from the road? Probably, but I’m glad we didn’t have to find out. During years of dating and our early married life, I was in love with Jack. Trucking is a hard life and not romantic, as many people think. But you can find romance and deep, abiding love. Our time on the road introduced me to my husband, a man I loved.

As his dad later quipped, learning our marriage lessons didn’t keep me (or him) from imagining the occasional murder, but they gave our shared life depth and meaning. They made it so, in the worst of times, we kept truckin’ on.

Thanks for reading and thus sharing our anniversary!

Dee