Road trip – the 2023 version

They recently ran the 107th Indianapolis 500, which reminds me of the time I was in town for the big race. It was the 45th Indy 500 in 1961, I was 18 years old, and, while I was in Indianapolis that day, I was downtown, not at the Speedway, and just passing through. I was hitchhiking home to Jersey from California.

There was a lot more hitchhiking back then, and the Interstates were still largely unfinished. U.S. 40 was still the primary east-west road that ran directly through downtown Indianapolis as well as Columbus, Ohio, and St. Louis. The guy I was riding with commented that downtown Indianapolis traffic was a bit lighter than it would normally be, even for a Sunday.

“Everyone’s at the track,” he said.

In April, I went through central Indiana for the first time in 62 years on a road trip to visit OOIDA headquarters. I had rooted for these folks for decades before I got to write for them, but I had never been to what they call the mothership – OOIDA headquarters in Grain Valley, Mo. It was time.

The road trip was the farthest I had ever driven alone.

We northeasterners don’t generally go as far as drivers in other parts of the country. I did drive linehaul for a regional LTL in the 1970s, but their longest run was from North Jersey to Boston, and I never got that one. Since it paid well, drivers with higher seniority always took it. So my Grain Valley road trip was both a learning experience and a nostalgia road trip.

The learning began on a Wednesday, when I left my home in Columbia County, N.Y., and headed west on the N.Y. Thruway. Four hours later, I stopped at a rest area near Batavia and decided I had made a big mistake. Those four hours felt like a couple of days.

How do long-haul drivers do it, I wondered? The answer, I would learn, is that like any job you get used to it. And then, if you’re lucky, you get into it. The more I drove, the less tedious it became, and I wasn’t as alone as I had imagined.

There’s the car ahead of me, the truck behind me plus whoever I’m passing and whoever is passing me. It’s a rolling, temporary community. We try to anticipate each other – at least those of us who are paying attention do. Sometimes we cooperate, sometimes we compete, and it’s all in motion. The momentary community changes as it rolls down the highway. New vehicles join as others fall away.

Even when we can’t really see the driver – which is most of the time – we sense a lot by how they drive, from the way their vehicle acts.

Do they have the cruise on, or do we pass them going up a hill and then watch them pass on the way down? Do they show antsiness with quick movements or lack of attention with sloppy lane keeping? We decide without thinking how much to trust them.

Nostalgia arose at the end of the first day as I crossed the state line from Ohio into Richmond, Indiana, where the I-70 exit puts you right on the old U.S. 40. Here was a road I had traveled as a hitchhiker all those years ago. Boy, had things changed.

Of course, I couldn’t recall that particular piece of U.S. 40, but one huge difference stood out anyway. Since it was directly off the interstate, this stretch of the road was lined with places to fuel, eat and sleep. And virtually every one of them was a franchise. Back in 1961, franchises were rare, and there were definitely none here.

In the East and Midwest there was White Castle. In the west there were Bob’s Big Boy and the International House of Pancakes. Waffle House was getting started in the south. But virtually all of those were originally located in urban and suburban neighborhoods, not on the highways. The original highway food chain was Howard Johnson’s, which was at its peak in 1961 with more than 1,000 restaurants nationwide.

Truckers knew them from the eastern toll roads, where they had exclusive contracts for their full-service restaurants. It was nothing but Howard Johnson’s on the Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio turnpikes as well as the New York State Thruway. But many of their toll road locations were poorly run, and no one complained when they were replaced by fast food outlets later in the 1960s and 1970s.

There were no true truck stops in 1961 either.

There were fuel stations, repair shops and restaurants, but only sometimes next to one another and then not always owned by a single entity. Some called themselves truck stops because they served a lot of truckers, but they were usually just fuel stops or cafes. There were a few exceptions, of course, sometimes the forerunners of today’s chains.

The big chains would begin to appear with the opening of the interstate highways and the rise of coast-to-coast trucking later in the 1960s. The opening of the interstates followed by trucking deregulation in 1980 prompted a colossal expansion of trucking. The number of highway tractors more than quadrupled – from 625,996 in 1961 to 2.79 million in 2019.

But in my hitchhiking days, that was all in the future. Going west for the first time, I noticed that by the time you reached Indiana roadside diners had all but disappeared. Instead, the eateries were called cafes, and everyone was privately owned and different from all the others. So were the motels. And almost every one had a neon sign that announced “vacancy” or “no vacancy.” You didn’t have to pull off the road, park, and go inside to ask.

After my first day on the road in April, I stopped at the first place I came to in Richmond, a threadbare Quality Inn where the restaurant was permanently closed and one of two elevators was out of order. In the morning, I came down for the free breakfast only to be told the free coffee was from the vending machine. So I headed for the mile-high Petro sign and its Iron Skillet restaurant.

It was 7 in the morning at the Petro.

I thought the place would be hopping, but inside were only five drivers – sitting as far apart from each other as they could – and one server. It seemed to underline what appears to be fast food’s total victory over the classic, full-service truck stop restaurants, where hungry drivers once chowed down on mighty breakfasts any time of the day or night.

What else is gone – or almost gone? Pay phones, for one thing. Hitchhikers, for another. Of course, the cellphone killed the pay phone, and I suspect the interstates put an end to most hitchhiking. Law enforcement often looked the other way at hitchhikers on the old highways, but they couldn’t on the new interstates. Traffic moved too fast, and the opportunities for fatal accidents were too great.

But some things haven’t changed, and one of them – even though I was in a car – is the timeless appeal of trucking. I’ve spent a lot of time and words knocking the industry, and I hope I’m not done. But my road trip reminded me of something pretty basic.

Yeah, they can make you wait without pay and hassle you at the scales. Technology allows them to watch you 24/7 behind the wheel and reprimand you for hard braking instead of thanking you for preventing an accident. And they can screw you over a thousand different ways at settlement time.

But at some point, you’re behind the wheel, and then it’s a different matter. Then, no matter how heavy the traffic or lousy the weather, no matter what god-awful stop they’re sending you to, the real world slides by your window.

You’re in motion, my friend. You’re rolling. LL