Big Rigs

Effingham, IL
On the road to Albuquerque

This country, in case you weren’t aware of it, is truck-dependent. I’m so used to hopping over to the grocery store, or the mall, or the corner deli, I never even considered just how all those products got onto all those shelves. I mean, I’m not stupid. I just never thought about it much. But traveling as we have, back and forth, up and down, over and about, I have seen the light.

Trucking is huge.

If I had a light attached to every big truck I see, it would show a pattern of lines up and down, over and under, here and there, coast to coast. Actually, some people have already done that with traffic at night. It makes a pretty picture.

If you separate out the big rigs from the roadsters, coupes, SUVs, sports cars, family haulers, RV’s, pickups and other types of small vehicles, and if you tracked only them, you would have a pretty clear picture of how this country sends and receives its things we cannot do without. And that’s not counting the government trucks, army trucks and other non-commercial big boys. Not to mention air transport. But that’s a whole ‘nother industry.

The movers-of-stuff-that-keeps-us-going seem to fall into a few categories: container corporations like SeaLand who use independent cabs, shipping companies like Crete who have their own trucks, and the corporate trucks with names like Walmart and Sunkist. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. All of these are driven by truck drivers, men mostly, but increasingly women, and they come in all shapes, ages and sizes, including the cliché big burly guy, but also the petite little blonde who jumped down from a huge semi at a truckstop, much to the pleasure of the other drivers. I wonder if she carries mace. I would, if I were pulling a million dollars worth of cargo in a truck worth almost as much on a lonely stretch of road. Hijacking is a very real threat. I know of someone whose entire household contents were stolen when their moving van was hijacked on a lonely road between New York and Florida. But that too is a whole “nother story.

There’s even an industry based on just the logistics of getting one product from here to there. These people don’t necessarily ship; they facilitate. Consider a widget made in China that must travel by rail to Shanghai, then by cargo ship to England, be transferred to another cargo ship on a particular day and time, then arrive in Toronto and be transferred with the same accuracy to a trans-Canadian truck and transported, say, by rail, to Seattle and then trucked to Terre Haute.

Miss a connection and you’ve just blown all the profit that widget could have made. It happens. That’s why there’s insurance for just such a thing. And why I know about logistics in the first place, because I used to write ads for that particular form of insurance.

Just for fun, here’s a list of some of the big rigs I’ve seen when I’ve looked up from writing this blog. We see these same names every day, over and over. This does not count an equal number of unidentified cargo trucks, or all the ones pulling things like logs, cement, tractors, industrial pipes the size of houses, and other huge cargo. I mean, trucking is big. Really big.

Arnold
Autobahn
Bridge Steel
Butler
Carman
Carter Express
Celedo
Challenger
CHRIS
Con-Way
Crete
D&D Sexton
Dart Advantage
Dick Lavy
England
FEDEX
Freymiller
Frito-Lay
GDS Express
Glen Moore
Great Lakes
Gully
JB Hunt
Kewpoint
Knudsen
Land Span
Manfredi Logistics
Marten
New Century
Ohio Pacific Express
Old Dominion
Oliver
One Freight
OnLine
PAM
Panther
Penske
Prime
REM
Rex
Roadway
Scotlynn
Sherwin-Williams
Southern Cal
Stallion Express
STI Canada
Sunflower
TSI
Tyson
UPS
Walmart