Semi True : Seasons on the Road with a Prairie Home Companion's Resident Writer and Truck Driver

by Russ Ringsak

• ISBN13: 9780762730940
• ISBN10: 0762730943
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2004-08-01
• Publisher: Globe Pequot

Summary

Semi True combines these mostly factual tales with wry observations about the art of truck driving and life along the road, all from the unique perspective of a former suit-wearing office worker.

Author Biography

Russ Ringsak was a registered architect in Minnesota when he bought an over-the-road semi tractor in 1977, a career move that ultimately led him to driving the trucks and writing for the Prairie Home Companion radio show. He has now been with the show for more than twenty years--and about half a million miles. He lives in Stillwater, Minnesota.

Table of Contents

Preface	iv
1 Amateur Night at Ray's Truck Stop	1	(11)
2 New York by Way of Atlanta	12	(19)
3 Suffering an Easy Winter	31	(10)
4 A Muscovy Duck and a Flatland Cafe	41	(20)
5 The Stunt Baby and the Runaway	61	(24)
6 The Loneliest Road in America	85	(14)
7 Tomatoes, Love Letters, and Turkeys	99	(17)
8 Crazy Horse and Millennium Fever	116	(15)
9 A Bookkeeper's Battle with Fiction	131	(10)
10 The Secret Champ	141	(18)
11 Fightin' Words	159	(19)
12 Attitude	178	(10)
13 Geronimo and Robert W. Service	188	(17)
14 Two Shots	205	(17)
15 Cross Country	222	(13)
About the Author	235

Excerpts

SEMI

In September of 1977 I escaped an office career by selling my entire portfolio, $4,000 worth of John Deere stock, and laying it down on a new powder-blue R model Mack costing $38,000; I also bought eight lengths of heavy chain with hooks and eight bright red heavy-duty lever-action come-alongs, to tighten those chains; got a bunch of wood blocking, rented a weary but usable flatbed semitrailer, and signed on as an owner-operator with an outfit that hauled steel around the Twin Cities. There were four other trucks, local guys who had been at it for years, and they were a big help, not out of enthusiasm for my epiphany but out of simple decency. Perhaps even mercy. They all had CB radios and I didn't -- it would be months before I woke up and bought one -- and I was likely the object of a good deal of radio humor.

Short of warfare, the trucking business probably affords a person with as much opportunity to blunder in full view as any trade known to man or woman. An incident stands out from the early years: it was in the first winter, 4:30 AM at Ray's Truck Stop east of St Paul near the St Croix River. I had a fairly heavy morning drop in Wisconsin on the other side of their weigh station and was nervous about it, and Ray's had a scale. Pulled onto the platform and stopped and they gave me the go-ahead over a speaker to pull off and come inside and get the scale ticket. In my amateur condition I somehow forgot I had a trailer back there, turned too sharp and ripped a large yellow bollard, a ten-inch diameter steel pipe filled with concrete, right out of the ground with the trailer wheels. The Mack barely felt it, but I heard a wild squealing back there.
I backed off and went inside and paid the fee. The ticket said 77,800 pounds, which was legal by 2200, and it was under the axle limits -- you can be okay on your gross weight and still have too much on a set of axles, depending on where you set the load on the trailer -- and I told these two tired pump jockeys, looking old before their time and smelling of dirt and petroleum, that I had taken down their bollard. I showed my insurance card. I was the only customer. The place was run-down, the counter grease-stained to black, two bare 60-watt bulbs hanging over it. Fan belts from the 1950s hanging high along the dirty walls, worn-out parts shelves nearly falling over in the shadows, no sense of order in there at all.
The guys looked at me blankly, faces dark with grit lines, showing white only around the eyes, staring like a couple of uncomprehending fuel-soaked owls. As if they'd been in some ecological disaster. I said here's my name and this is the insurance company and here's the phone number, and they just looked at me like I had newly landed from Mars. Neither spoke for a long time. It was a silence where incredulity and disbelief hung like a vapor in the air, until finally the gaunt unshaven long-haired tall one said: "I didn't see nothin'.... Did you?"
Without taking his eyes from me the eyes-close-together long-haired thin-mustache one said, "I didn't see nothin'."
And then I realized that it was my own self who was the uncomprehending one, and who was the object of the disbelief. Real truckers don't think like that. They don't initiate paperwork and they don't take blame. A real trucker, if he said anything at all, would tell them to get that effing yellow post out of the way of a working man. They were accustomed to that; what I did made them think I might be an inspector or an escapee or an insurance guy, or who knows what. But I sure was no truck driver.

. . . .

They are called semis because the semitrailer isn't really a trailer, in that it can't roll on its own wheels like a wagon. The front needs to sit on a truck but it's not exactly a truck either, because it doesn't carry cargo. It's a tractor and it pulls a semitrailer, hence the 'tractor-trailer,' and hence the 'semi,' often just called a 'rig.' Splitting hairs, it's a truck if it has a long frame with a box or a bed, and then it's commonly called a straight truck.
Trucks and tractors come in two main flavors: the cabover, in which the driver sits over the front axle and the entire cab is hinged near the front bumper and falls forward for engine access; and the conventional, an unwieldy name for having a long hood. They should have called it a standard, or at least a longnose, but they had to call it a "conventional," probably because it was the longest word on the list of options.
Over-the-road cabovers were the natural misfit offspring of brightly-burning safety zealots and dim-bulb politicians and bureaucrats, conceived in the legal mistake of limiting the total length of the rig. This meant the shorter the tractor the longer the trailer it could pull and therefore the greater the payload. For a while nearly every fleet operation in the country ran cabovers, for economic reasons. Some designers built a prototype of the ridiculous extreme, a tractor that fit entirely underneath the front of the trailer, so they could haul even more feet of freight. It looked like a ten-wheel cast-iron Indy racing car, with a monster flat engine. It took decades of lobbying to finally get that law changed to simply limit the trailer length, with the result that nearly all of today's over-the-road tractors are conventionals. They are inherently more stable and more comfortable to drive and to live in -- which many do -- and you can check the engine-room vitals without tilting the cab forward and dumping all your stuff into the windshield.
. . . .

Garrison Keillor hosted a morning record show on KSJN in the early 70s. The major sponsor of that show was Jack's Auto Repair, a fictional enterprise with a real softball team; I responded when the call went out for players and ended up the pitcher. This was five years before I bought the Mack. Around 1981 the Prairie Home Companion road show was up and running and I offered that they could save shipping charges if they hired me to rent a truck and haul the equipment when they went touring. By then I was easing free of my full-time participation in the trucking industry anyway, having been weeded out by deregulation and high fuel costs and my own shortage of shrewdness. But it ultimately led to another career change in 1990, when I was given steady employment as a researcher and driver; I had weaseled my way into a writing job.
So the following is a collection of stories heard and observations made, some in Minnesota and others while hauling stage gear over the rest of this amazing nation. It's not every place we went during that time and it's not necessarily in order. Most of it is true for sure and some is hearsay but from good sources. There is possible outright fabrication in here as well, but I wouldn't be able to pick it out from the rest.

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Excerpted from Semi True: Seasons on the Road with a Prairie Home Companion's Resident Writer and Truck Driver by Russell Ringsak
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