Crime Fiction Author Ryan Lowell on the Intersection of Trucking and Storytelling
I wasn’t looking for a job in trucking.
I was 28 when I lost my job as a data analyst in NYC and moved back to my hometown of Bucksport, Maine, a gritty mill town that most tourists pass through without a care on their way to prettier places like Acadia National Park. I connected with a temp agency in Bangor and they offered a gig as overnight dispatcher at a local trucking outfit. I was bit skeptical of the overnight hours, but I took it because I needed money.
The training lasted three nights. I sat with a former marine/truck driver who was retiring in a week—my reason for being there—and he told me stories from his trucking days, and how to handle various calls from drivers. He took calls on speakerphone so I could hear the back and forth, and that first night one driver called in to report that he’d locked himself out of his truck in only his underwear in the freezing cold. I quickly learned that our primary job was to support the drivers. Then I was on my own, solely responsible for over three hundred truckers scattered everywhere east of the Mississippi.
Working nights is not an easy transition. I was living my girlfriend (now wife), and we only saw each other when one of us was getting ready for work and the other was winding down. She was less than thrilled at the sight of me cracking open a Budweiser at seven-thirty in the morning, the end of my shift. I rarely got to hang out with my friends, and it’s hard to sleep during the day when you’re not accustomed to it.
But there’s also an enchanting aspect to working overnight—lacing up the boots and packing the lunch cooler, driving to work when everyone else is going to bed. The snow is falling and everything is quiet and elsewhere the wheels are spinning and I’m in that club now, reserved for misfits and loners and renegades, and there was a sense of mystery to it which faded only slightly when I arrived at the terminal and the second shift dispatcher passed me the sordid torch.
There were two main tasks as overnight dispatcher: answer the phone in no more than four rings (which was impossible during a bathroom or smoke break), and track all the important loads that were moving that night, which meant checking trucker locations on the map and entering into an excel file. There were nights when one driver hauling a hot load would break down and I’d have to send another nearby driver to rescue it, and that would usually earn me a nasty email from a daytime dispatcher for screwing their driver out of miles. But I found out fast that you learn in the trucking industry by messing up. I also learned that attention to detail is key.
The best part was talking with the truck drivers. Some of them I would see in person—when they were starting or ending their week—but a lot of it was over the phone. They might be calling in the middle of the night because their fuel card won’t work, or they blew a tire on the side of the highway and I would need to coordinate road service and heads up the store where they were going that they were going to be late. Some were calling in just to shoot the breeze: bored and lonely on the road, the wife back home was sleeping, and I was the only person that would answer. Often, and especially once I got to know some of them, they would dive into personal stuff: ex-wives or ex-husbands, why they got into truck driving, why they didn’t go into some other career. How easy it used to be drive (illegally) 20 hours straight – and how it was still possible. Funny anecdotes and one-liners they heard at their last delivery. Life advice I didn’t ask for but perhaps should have. It was fascinating to me, imagining a life on the road, flying under the radar of authority, the scenery changing all the time. I was envious.
Truck drivers are great storytellers, maybe because they have plenty of time to talk to themselves and others, honing that skill. During downtime at night, when it was quiet and there was nothing to do but wait for the phone to ring, I would jot down quotes and anecdotes from the drivers in my little composition notebook, and I used much of that for dialogue or conceptual ideas in my short fiction.
Over the next few years, I moved around to other dispatching positions—eventually landing in a daytime spot. Bankers hours, as many of the truckers liked to joke. I had published a few short stories in the Worker’s Write Journal by that time, and I was realizing that my experience in trucking was providing fantastic fuel for what I really wanted—to write a novel.
Writing teaches you to be patient. Put in the work and push the story forward every morning (or night). Existing in a land of storytellers teaches you to be a better listener. A trucker once told me that she didn’t worry about what other drivers were doing, that she stayed in her lane and kept her eyes on the road ahead.
I listened to her.
Curtis, a newly hired dispatcher with a newly pregnant wife at home, holds a scrap of paper that identifies a semi-truck trailer that shouldn’t exist.
Billy Trask is a weathered and charismatic sociopath, who thinks nothing of quietly killing whomever may come in his way, and carefully guards the coordinates for a truck loaded with $10 million dollars-worth of Canadian pharmaceuticals.
Jimmy, Theo, and Sarah are the not-so-innocent locals poised to stand in Billy’s way, none more so than Sarah, a local party girl with the heart and will of a colossus, and who will leave her own trail of mayhem and carnage in her 75-mile-per-hour wake.
In the rough-and-tumble tradition of Dennis Lehane, S.A. Cosby, and classic American noir, Freight is a thrill-ride view of the world of labor, life and love—a searing portrait of men at work and also at their worst.
