The one exception was farm products. Transportation of farm products remained unregulated under the Agricultural Exemption of the 1935 law for two reasons. First was that American farmers wouldn’t stand for it. They’d already experienced the benefits of a government-sponsored cartel in the form of the railroads. Farmers had seen enough central planning, thank you very much, at least insofar as it related to transportation. That isn’t to say farmers didn’t want New Deal help in the form of price supports, because they did; they just didn’t want any other industries getting support. The second reason was the Roosevelt administration’s dilemma of how to keep food prices low for the general population while simultaneously boosting farm incomes. The only way to do both was to lower costs in the supply chain (i.e., transportation). The contradiction here is that while it was considered in the national interest to protect large trucking companies throughout the nonfarm economy, it was also considered in the national interest to keep agricultural trucking small and fragmented.
This two-tiered trucking world is what spawned the trucker culture that exists to this day. Your hourly driver is a union man, or a company man, anyway. He’s paid a wage, is home most of the time, and has a pension plan, health insurance, and vacations. He’s the direct descendant of the regulatory system. Your independent driver is a private contractor. He leases or finances his own truck, is probably from a rural area of the Midwest, or Deep South, and is driving a truck because he can’t make a living farming, won’t work in a factory, and refuses to punch a time clock. He’s the direct descendant of the Agricultural Exemption system. The latter group is the culturally dominant one, and the hourly boys take all their cues from the gypsies. Everything from the ubiquity of country music to the cowboy hats and belt buckles, right down to the food in whatever restaurants are left, are remnants of the anti-urban, anti-statist, anti-union origins of the wildcat drivers of the 1930s and ’40s. I personally find the whole thing maddeningly idiotic, as the gypsies would be the biggest beneficiaries of a bit of cartelization. As it stands now, most of them are over-the-road sharecroppers feeding their labor into the insatiable maw of Big Ag, which is happy enough to let them keep their cowboy myth in return for keeping all the money.
Almost all long-haul movers are in the second group, as am I. I lease my truck, I set my own schedule, and my revenue is subject to the shifting winds of each load.
I loaded my first shipment for this Florida trip in Lyndonville, Vermont, north of St. Johnsbury in the early morning. My first shipper’s name was Murray, and it was 1,000 pounds going to Kendall, Florida. It was a mini shipment, maybe thirty pieces or so, and I loaded it at the warehouse which was one of the now unused hangers at Lyndonville’s defunct airport. The road to it was the runway. This was the smallest North American agent I’d been to. The guy who owned it was an ex-long-haul driver taking a shot at owning his own business. I wished him well but didn’t have high hopes.
My second pickup was in a town called Marshfield. I encountered a low bridge outside of town. I didn’t get much of a warning. The sign that said LOW CLEARANCE AHEAD 13 FEET was only twenty yards from the bridge. My trailer runs 13’4”, but I squeaked under it, going slowly with my head out the window looking backward. Truckers call hitting a low bridge “getting a haircut.” So far I’ve avoided that travesty. I haven’t used a runaway truck ramp either. Yet.
This shipment was another 1,000-pound mini belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Howell, who were moving to Largo. They were a charming elderly couple. When I arrived it was just noon, so they invited me to sit down with them for lunch. They served homemade Vermont pickled beets, turkey salad sandwiches, and hot tea. They told me they had come to Marshfield from Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1957 when they bought the general store. Mrs. Howell said the locals were at first suspicious of them, being as they were from out of town, and worse from out of state, and worse from the Deep South, i.e., Massachusetts. After more than forty years in Marshfield they were giving up on winter and snowbirding south. The Howells had bought a double-wide trailer in a retirement park. I hoped they would adjust well down there. It’s true that winters in Florida are mild, but the rest of the year it’s a blazing inferno.
I picked up two more little ones, a Mr. Gross and a Mr. Warren, at a warehouse in Essex Junction and started the three-hundred-mile trudge to Bangor. When you’re a dispatcher sitting in a cube in Indiana, New England looks pretty small, but it isn’t. There are no east/west interstates and my trek on US Route 2 took forever. I went up and over the White Mountains, through New Hampshire and into Maine, breezing through one dead or dying town after another. I hit Dysart’s Truck Stop in Bangor at 3 a.m. and crawled into the sleeper. Five hours later I arrived at Central Maine Moving & Storage on the dot of 8 a.m. Of course nobody was there. This was another one of those weird agents I enjoy going to. This place wasn’t a regular warehouse either; it was an old elementary school. Someone finally showed up around eight fifteen, and while I waited for the paperwork, I sat down in one of those school desks like we had in seventh grade. The classrooms were used as storage units. I kept expecting a bell to go off and see some nun fingering a detention slip and asking me what I was doing.
I had called this agent a few days ago to arrange for some help. They gave me one of their regular guys and told me to pay him twelve dollars an hour. I picked up the bill of lading and directions, and we drove off to South Bangor to load 3,000 pounds belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, who were moving to Naples, Florida. Mr. Taylor had sold his accounting business the year before, and part of the deal was that he had to stay awhile and help them operate it. Now he was moving from a three-story Victorian into a ranch house on a golf course.
My helper’s name was Warren Pease, I swear to God. He was a thorough professional, and we loaded the Taylors in no time.
One of the dirty secrets of the moving business is that a shipper has no idea what kind of human offal a driver might pick up for day labor. Often I can pick up help from the local agent, but not always. At truckstops there are always guys dangling around looking for a day’s work; they’re what we call lot helpers. I can’t get from my truck to the fuel desk at any truckstop in the country without some guy asking, “Hey, driver, you need any help today?” Sometimes they even bang on the truck and wake me up. It can be very annoying or very useful depending upon my labor requirements, though banging on the side of a truck is never a good idea. It’s a great way to get a bullet in the head. Over the years I’ve been reduced to picking up help in soup kitchens, parole offices, and the corner bar.
The higher-end work I do now requires my laborers to have passed a background check, and their names have to be on file with the van line. No longer can I just pick up a guy from the truckstop who may or may not ransack your medicine cabinet to score your expired Oxycontin. I’ve got a little black book with the names of top-notch, executive-class movers in forty-eight states. I don’t give out those names to anyone because these guys are well-paid professionals in high demand.