Progress

Check out the pretty highway tractors at the website Cabover Kings. I'd link you to it but I've had my linking privileges lifted by Google algorithms.

There's diesel trucks there that used to haul freight of all kinds from coast to coast. Coast to coast means through the Rocky Mountains, through the Appalachians, and everywhere in between.

Here's what's fucky, to my way of thinking.

Pretty much any truck you see there has less horsepower and less torque than you'll find in a typical V-8 pickup truck at your local Ford, GM, or Dodge dealer.

Around here, that power is generally used to get one guy or gal to their job.

Fifty years ago, that power got 20 tons of freight through a mountain pass in the Rockies.

That's progress for you!

Pot-addled hillbilly writes Christmas card, finds money to buy stamp!

Holy shit!

For the first time in fifty years I got a Christmas card from my old pal Kipling!

I do believe the dude is moving into geriatric sentimentality!

I'm feeling kinda bad. In the first place, while I've often thought about it, I've never actually sent out a Christmas card in my life. Keeping the social end of things up to civilized standards has never been my department, and I therefore rely on the partner of the day to take care of these matters.

I would have thought the same rules obtain in Kipling's house. They have for fifty years!

Wonder what's gone wrong?

Senility is setting in?

In the second place, I'm feeling bad because I only picked up that Season's greeting three weeks post-Xmas. Ya, we're a long ways from the Post Office here at Falling Downs, and once or twice a month is more than enough contact with the outside world.

Nevertheless, I was touched by the generous gesture of my old pal sending a Christmas greeting.

We've seen a lot of bridges submerged beneath the waters of progress, we have.

When those bouncers at The Manor chased me three miles up Waterloo Avenue one drunken night, Kipling was there.

Well, not exactly; he was back at The Manor enjoying his next lap dance...

When we trashed that joint in Fergus, and I had to single-handedly fight off the bouncers, Kipling was there.

Well, not exactly. He was already in the car twisting one up...

When my Dart GTS was steaming south on the Hanlon at an honest 150 mph, on bald tires, Kipling was there, and I remember that because that was the exact moment his girlfriend chose to claw his eyes out over some imagined indiscretion of his with some floozy from The Manor...

Hey, you'd remember that too if it was you hanging on to the steering wheel at 150 mph while a not-too-happy couple was sorting out their marital discords with fisticuffs right next to ya!

At 150 mph...

And he was there when that biker-cum-trucker forced me onto the running board of his Peterbilt for a piss on the 402 highway.

Well, not exactly "there," but inside the cab yucking it up with the driver at the expense of the poor schmuck stuck on the running board with his wang waving in the freezing 70 mph breeze...

Ya, it's been a lot of water under the bridge and a lot of bridges under water...

Thanks for the Christmas card, pal!

The six mile piss

Can't really remember the first time I met Kipling.

I think it was the night he ran his Chevy ll SS into a tree outside my parent's place out on the 86 dragway... or just about a half mile south of the 86 dragway to be precise.

I was the second person to come upon the accident scene, whereupon the first person informed me that the guy driving the Chevy ll was bleeding all over the interior of his new Deville.

So young Kipling plows his car into a tree at 100 mph, and a life-long friendship started.

A year later we both turned up at Budd Automotive, which was at that time the primary employer of niggers of all skin tones, including white, in the entire region.

That's where we really bonded.

I'd pull hilarious pranks like "borrowing" his 340 Duster from Budd's parking lot while he was on the night shift. The cops would be looking for that lime green Duster for months, and he got pulled over relentlessly.

But I always made up for it by returning that car to the Budd parking lot before the end of his shift with a case of beer under the hood. I'd unplug the distributor to make sure he had to open the hood to find that case of beer!

Oh, those were fun times!

There were a lot of real characters at the Budd plant back in the day. The Jamaicans, and there were tons of them, always had a line to really good weed.

That pretty much made them our best buddies.

There was a Polish guy who always showed up in a three piece suit. He didn't want his neighbours to know he worked in a factory. He'd change into work clothes when he got to work. Drove a 'Cuda.

Then there was Frenchie, who rolled his Javelin into the ditch with five brothers inside while trying to make it to the beer store before closing time.

Lotsa characters and lotsa fun! Who has jobs like that anymore?

Anyway, Kipling's dear daddy had a scrapyard in nearby Guelph, and holy shit, was he ever a character!

He was Fred to Kipling's Lamont... through that scrapyard Kipling got to know all sorts of interesting characters.

Like bikers.

This one guy in particular was to leave a lasting impression on me. Married to a native woman, and living on a reservation, he had a finger in pretty much any pie in the local economy, whether that pie was legal or illegal or in that grey zone between.

Used to be a big cheese in the Satan's Choice before they morphed into a Hells Angels franchise in the great patch-over.

So one day me and Kipling are sitting in the diner at the Woodstock Truckstop, and this guy happens along, and before you can say "no thanks, maybe some other time..." we're in Buddy's Peterbilt heading west at 70 mph, jug of Jack Daniels and a hash pipe going round on a too regular basis for my tastes.

An hour later we're on the 403 heading Sarnia way. I'm fucked, and I really really really have to have a piss.

Dude, can ya pull over so I can have a piss?

Buddy looks at me like I'm the most retarded retard he's ever seen in his life.

Ten minutes later; Dude, can you pull over so I can have a piss?

By now I'm practically exploding and having major bladder leakage...

Dude and Kipling are busting out laughing... nobody's going to pull an 18 wheeler over so some dumbfuck passenger can take a piss...

So I did what I had to do. Opened the passenger door, stood on the side-tank, pulled out my wang, and had a six mile long piss along the 403 at seventy miles an hour.

Best piss I ever had.

The trains just keep on coming

It's one train after another. Typically they're well over a hundred cars. A lot of the cars are container cars. Each rail car keeps at least two, three, or four trucks off the road. Every train that goes by means several hundred trucks aren't on the highway. The trains are coming through at three or four per hour. That's a lot of trucks.

Containers. Just one thing Jimmy Hoffa didn't see coming. Hoffa was one of the greatest labour leaders of the post WW II era. A lot of your so-called labour scholars would dispute this. All mobbed up, they say. So what, I say. He came from a tough time. The trucking companies were all mobbed up. Half the state governments were all mobbed up. Most of the other unions were at least somewhat mobbed up. He inherited a mobbed up union. When he disappeared he was working on demobbing it. The 1964 Teamsters National Master Freight agreement still stands as the high-water mark in terms of the relative standard of living of rank and file workers, with a few localized exceptions.

There was a rumour going around Guelph back in the day that one of the local salami factories disposed of the evidence. Hoffa arrived in town in the trunk of that Lincoln and left in a delivery van. I assume it was a joke. I hope so. I ate a lot of calabrese salami from the local shops over the years. Does have some plausibility, though. Guelph is just a few minutes off the 401. You set the cruise control at 85 mph, set your rum and coke on the dash, and you're in Detroit in about three hours. It'd be about the same going the other way.

Yesterday I did a few miles on the Trans-Canada. Went as far as Rossport. Exquisitely pretty place. Chatted with the young fellow at the local museum. Rossport used to have the biggest fishing derby in the world. No more. On the road I was following a skinny old biker with a long white beard on a great big Harley. Traded how-ya-doin's when we both stopped for gas. Nice guy. Had to be in his eighties. He was leaning that Road King into the turns like it was a cafe racer. May he live a thousand years.

So I think Hoffa's biggest mistake, other than thinking he was going to take on the Kennedys, who, while not necessarily all mobbed up by that point, certainly came from all mobbed up, was a decision he made, and made on principle, with respect to the phenomenon of owner-operators. An owner-operator is a guy who buys his own truck and then contracts with some shipper, or even better, a manufacturer or grower, to truck goods independently. It's the iconic "independent trucker" of folklore. Stalone made a movie about them. It's a great gig when it works. Not so great most of the time. Over the long term, it's a race to the bottom for the guys in the game. Say you have a load of turnips in south Ontario. You want to take them to Ohio, where they become rutabagas and are worth more money. The local Teamsters carrier will do it for a thousand bucks. Along comes Mr. Independent Trucker, who just went 120 grand into debt to buy a new Peterbilt. He offers to do it for $900. Great! You just saved a hundred bucks! That's just dandy. Then, out of the blue, here comes another independent who went 120 grand into hock three years ago, and he's a few payments behind; he'll do it for $800. Greater yet! Sooner or later some poor schmuck with a 20 year old Mack held together with duct tape and baler twine is gonna offer to move those rutabagas for just enough to cover his gas and maybe feed his kids for a few days.

The independents are well aware that they're in a race to the bottom, and they were well aware of it back in the sixties. Every time they try to organize, half of them park their rigs, and the other half have twice as much work. So the independents went to the Teamsters looking for support. Hoffa declined. His reason? As a union leader he didn't believe that it was his job to negotiate a return on capital. And these independents, when you get right down to it, are capitalists, are they not? Marx would have been proud of Jimmy. Today there are more independents driving trucks across America than there are Teamsters, and it's never been cheaper to get your rutabagas from Ontario to Ohio. Sometimes your principles can be your undoing.

The eighty year old biker reminds me of the last time I did this trip. Stopped at a little campground at Montreal River, so close to Superior that you could stand at the edge of your campsite and piss in the water. I'm there pitching my tent, getting the lawn chair out, starting the camp fire, getting settled. Gonna be a good night. Got the whole place to myself. Oops, here comes Mr. Biker, the full nine yards of Road King hard bags, trunk, the Mrs. in the queen seat.... surely to God he's not gonna... no...no..please...PLEASE DON'T TAKE THE CAMPSITE 2O FUCKING FEET AWAY WHEN THE WHOLE PLACE IS EMPTY!!! But he did. I hate when people do that. Anyway, it worked out. He was a real biker, real as in when people talk about gangs and stuff. From Montreal. Heading back after a business meeting in Winnipeg. His english was a little rough, but helluva decent chap. So he pitches his tent. It's twice the size of mine. He got a cooler out from somewhere. Next time I look he's walking around with a tackle box and a fishing rod. Oh look, they're starting a campfire too... they got firewood in the saddlebags? They've got nicer lawn chairs than me. How the hell does that happen? They're on a bike for God's sake! I was half expecting him to pull a canoe out of one of those saddle bags.

One of the localized exceptions were the building trades in New York City. Building trades unions everywhere in North America have done a pretty good job for their members, but these guys were doing way better than that. They had contracts for the shop stewards - I guess they call them business agents in the building trades, that had them paid their hourly wage anytime any of their members were on the site. Excuse me? That would be pretty much 24-7. It was. Good for them. And while I don't have a lot of fondness for Donald Trump, I was very impressed that he went out of his way to give credit to the building trade union guys in New York City when he wrote The Art of the Deal. A lot of people, when they get to where Mr. Trump got, seem to forget who did the actual sweat and blood labour that got them there.

Another localized exception to the Teamsters high water mark was what happened on the west coast when the IWA and the coastal logging companies went from piece-work to an hourly wage for the guys who cut the trees down. The main plank of the changeover was that nobody was going to be paid less than they'd made under piece-work, so overnight every bucker and faller was making an hourly wage equivalent to what the most productive among them had made under the old regime. That wage scale of course trickled down to the IWA members who had never been on piece-work in the first place. There are welders in southern Ontario today working for the same hourly wage that I made in my little IWA shop in Victoria over thirty years ago. That was a good gig. Good enough that Peter C. Newman had a shit hemorage about it in print; he was utterly aghast at the thought that mere forestry workers were doing the grand tour of Europe with their families, just like their betters in the front offices. I suppose he's breathing easier now.

I've been enjoying the clean air and the trains and the view and walking paths my POW grandaddy walked. But I miss Falling Downs. I'll be heading back soon. The grass is probably a foot high by now.

I wonder what's in all those containers? I'm guessing the eastbound containers are mostly plastic shit from China and the westbound containers are mostly empty.

The trains just keep on coming.