Great Coastal Express
A retired long haul trucker tells the story of why he chose to quit a profession he loved and never drive again.
Return to the daze of my youth.
Everyone remembers were they were on 9–11 and I’m no exception. After my son turned 18, graduated high school, got a full time job, decided that he wasn’t going to college, spent his first summer working, and still didn’t want to go back to school I ended 17 years of writing child support checks to his mother.
That was 1996 and talk about changing a man’s life.
I could have bought a new car or motorcycle, lots of toys, a boat, any of the things I had done without since my son was born but I had a plan. I started packing the money away while writing my first book and driving trucks for a living.
I owned a paid off mobile home on a rented lot just about 5 miles east of Greensboro, North Carolina but the place was a dump, my neighbors too loud, and I had never planned to stay there in the first place. So in early 2000 I took a job with Great Coastal Express to work out of their Roanoke, Virginia terminal and put a huge down payment on a nice piece of unrestricted mountain land in Floyd County, Virginia just one county west of Roanoke, far from any town, near the Carroll County line. It was beautiful.
Great Coastal Express was founded by the son of the man who founded Estes Express Lines. Other than that the 2 companies are in no way related. Estes is one of the best companies out there. Great Coastal was one of the worst and by far the worst I ever worked for. Great Coastal has since closed its doors and sold its assets to Heartland Express of which I know nothing about. Estes is still going strong.
I was in my early 40s, had skills, knew how to build, owned a van I could camp in, and had longed to live in the mountains all my life. And I didn’t tell a soul what I was planning to do.
When hired at Great Coastal I was promised I’d be off on the weekends. Other than my first weekend, the entire time I worked there the closest I ever got to Roanoke or Greensboro on a weekend was Chesterfield, Virginia — a suburb of Richmond. And being that my camper van was in Roanoke I had no way to go home. Somehow I had thought being off on the weekends meant I would be off at home.
Like I said, I was off my first weekend. As a matter of fact my first 2 weeks on the road with Great Coastal were the best 2 weeks of my 28 years in trucking. Then I got the message from my dispatcher on the Qualcom, “Well Billy, we never met face to face, but it is obvious that you have lots of experience and know how to do your job, so management has decided to take you off the Newby dispatch and give you an assigned dispatcher. Take care out there and thank you for doing such a great job.”
“Thank you,” I typed back, “These 2 weeks have been the best I’ve had in all my years on the road, more miles, more money, good equipment, legal dispatches, it’s been great. You’re the best dispatcher I’ve ever had.”
“Thank you,” he answered, “too bad it won’t always be like that.”
His last remark didn’t sink in right away but it wouldn’t take but a couple of days before I realized that the Newby board had been all gravy and what I was about to get from then on out was nothing but cold dry biscuits with nothing to wash them down. At least he was honest.
The first thing they did was route me back to Chesterfield where I was pulled out of the new truck they had first assigned me and reassigned to a 10 year old Freightliner with well over 2 million miles on it. The truck smelled like diesel fuel inside and out. The fabric seat bottoms had been worn out and recovered with sweaty vinyl. The air conditioner didn’t work. The muffler was burned out. The AM-FM radio didn’t work. And everything rattled, clattered, shuddered, squeaked… Well, I probably couldn’t have heard the radio if it had worked.
I had driven worse on short hauls but I had never been expected to live in worse. Sure, it would probably pass a DOT safety inspection but that was about all you could say for it. After about a week of scrubbing, several bottles of Ozium air freshener, and a few scented pine trees I finally got the smell to disappear.
The night dispatchers — the only dispatchers we ever met face to face — told me that my day dispatcher was a recently retired Navy enlisted man with no experience in the trucking industry. Great Coastal, like lots of companies, bragged about their love for veterans and they always hired them for jobs where they could do the most damage. This idiot actually got angry that I didn’t answer his Qualcom messages with “Yes, Sir,” and “No, Sir.” He seemed to think that a tractor-trailer could be driven down any road his Honda could be driven down and just as quickly.
One night near the west end of the Pennsylvania Turnpike with a load scheduled to be delivered the next day in New York City a tire blew out on my trailer. This was my only bad tire experience while I worked for them as I had long before learned how to take care of tires. I pulled safely off the road and walked back to verify that all I needed was a tire then walked back to the cab, picked up the Qualcom and typed in, “Got a blowout on the trailer, need you to send out a new tire.”
I wasn’t worried about where I was, the Qualcom included satellite tracking, they always knew were their trucks were located. “We’ve got a tire service in the area,” someone typed back to me, “might take a couple of hours, get some sleep and he’ll wake you when he gets there.”
“No problem.” I answered.
I woke up about 4 hours later wondering if the tire service had come and gone but when I checked I still had a blown out tire and no one was there. I went back to the cab and typed into the Qualcom, “Hey, where’s the tire service? It’s been 4 hours.”
“They’re not there yet?” someone typed. “Go back to sleep, I’ll get them out there soon.”
“Cool,” I replied.
Roughly 4 hours later, at 8:00 the next morning my Qualcom went to beeping waking me up with the message, “Where the fuck are you?”
Not being a fan of rude awakenings I typed back, “Where the fuck does your computer say I am?”
“What are you doing there?” came his reply.
“Read your fucking computer logs you stupid, drunk swabbie!!!” I replied back. Yep, he was pissing me off.
Even though we had never met face to face it had become obvious to me after months of communication, this clown was a drunk, a druggie, or an idiot as he never once got any smarter. All was quiet for about a minute and then he wrote, “You can’t drive with one blown out trailer tire.”
Having seen this bullshit before I knew exactly how to reply, “If you will sign off to accept any and all legal responsibility for whatever may happen I’ll drive it. By the way, my gross weight is 79,798 lbs.”
For those who don’t know, the maximum legal limit for a 5 axle tractor-trailer is in most cases, 80,000 lbs. Those tires are there for a reason.
About 10 minutes later and with no more communication a tire service arrived. Our next contact was my empty message in New York early the next morning.
Every trip ended up going to New Jersey, New York, or New England. Like most truckers those are far from my favorite places to go. Every dispatch was late before it was given to me. I was never given enough time to safely complete a delivery, and my dispatcher constantly hounded me via the Qualcom. Perhaps you’ve driven through a truck stop and seen Qualcom units hanging out the windows of trucks dangling by their cords? One of them might have been mine.
Did I mention that my paychecks never again came anywhere close to what I earned on the newby board even though I worked much harder?
They also told me I’d be home for most holidays. The closest I came to that was driving through Greensboro and Roanoke on Thanksgiving Day. It was time I made a plan. I was tired of making payments on land I couldn’t even go see, much less spend my weekends building a home there. I would have been happy for a few years just to be able to sleep in my van, or pitch a tent, and fish in the creek that ran across the property just as long as the dream was still alive.
On 9–11 I was in Arlington, Virginia about a mile from the Pentagon at the first of 3 stops I had on the trailer. The second stop was to be delivered later that same day in Brooklyn, and the 3rd stop on September 12 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
My Brooklyn stop was rerouted to Port Elizabeth, New Jersey on September 12, and I left the remainder on the New Jersey drop yard for them to figure out what to do with it as telephones weren’t working well still.
Weeks of trailer searches and soldiers, sheriffs, troopers, constables, cops, and DOT at every weigh station, rest area, toll plaza, bridge, tunnel, and anywhere else they could find to check for possible truck bombs was bringing back an out of control episode of the PTSD I’ve fought since I was a teenager. Having not been home in almost a year wasn’t helping either. I was certain that terrorist would fly airplanes into the largest petroleum storage facilities east of the Mississippi. Where are those? In my hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. That would have made the Twin Towers look like firecrackers producing an explosion on the scale of a nuke.
But I wasn’t defeated yet. Oh no. I made a plan. I was coming home for Christmas come hell, high water, or terrorists.
In early December while passing through Greensboro I dropped of an extra set of keys to my van with my Daddy. He and Momma then drove to Roanoke, got my van, and drove it to Chesterfield before returning to Greensboro. I spent the next weekend in Greensboro while my assigned rattletrap stayed in Chesterfield. My dispatcher was none too happy that I had figured out a means to drive home without violating the rules against using our trucks for personal trips.
On December 24 I made an early morning delivery in a small town in Connecticut. I picked up the Qualcom and typed in, “Empty, going south.”
Right away I got a reply telling me to go to the New Jersey drop yard, pick up a loaded trailer, and to deliver it to Boston. “Perhaps you have a reading comprehension problem,” I typed, “I’m going south. If you want me to pull this empty trailer all the way back to Chesterfield, then fine, but I’m headed south. End of discussion.”
And with that I started rolling southbound. They knew where I was. How I kept it together enough to deal with holiday traffic I will never know. For the next hour or so the Qualcom was quiet. Then someone typed, “Billy, please drop your empty at the Jersey drop yard and pick up a loaded trailer to be dropped in Chesterfield over the holidays. Thank you.”
Not since my first 2 weeks on the Newby board had anyone said please. Nor had anyone ever called me by my name. Or said thank you. I was balling my eyes out when I replied that I would do them the favor of taking a loaded trailer to Chesterfield but my mind was made up — other than stopping at the Jersey drop yard to switch out trailers and stopping in Chesterfield to pick up my van I drove non stop from Connecticut to Greensboro arriving at my parent’s home on Christmas Day. Other than the security guard at the gate in Chesterfield I didn’t communicate with anyone.
My mobile home had set empty for almost a year. In the meantime I had turned off the electricity, heat, water, everything that made it livable. My parents were happy to have me for a few days during the holidays and someone at Great Coastal had called to say I was welcome to come back any time I wanted to end my Christmas vacation.
But I snapped. While PTSD had long been a problem this time it was the worst it had ever been. I sat in a rocking chair, rocking and crying for 4 months while my entire family looked on with no idea what was wrong with me, no knowledge that I had ever suffered from PTSD, Depression, and the mood disorder the shrink never gave me a name for, but keep somewhat in check with twice daily doses of Topiramate, an off label use from which I suffered several side effects.
It was during those 4 months that I fell behind on the payments on my property but it wouldn’t be until 2011 that I finally found psychiatric help. I could have probably done things to save the property had I been able to think straight but I was out of my head. Not that I wasn’t trying to get help but for so many of us we hide when we are in crisis then go out looking for help when we’re feeling better, while the system is only designed to help those who are in crisis.
And so the dream was lost. There would never be this great place in the mountains where my friends could come visit any time day or night, camp out, ride their bikes, play music, have pig pickings, go fishing, and relive the glory days of our youth.
Please continue reading The Slug.
I’m hoping you’ll see fit to send me a tip by Ko-fi to supplement my Social Security so I can afford to continue writing here. If you can’t afford it I do understand.