A Song of the Open Road, 1970

"The truckers cruise over the surface of the nation without being a part of it," John Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley. On the road they have their own language of flashed lights and hand signals. Their oases are the dull-colored, neon-lit truck stops that offer chummy waitresses and hearty food, often throwing in hot showers and cheap rooms for a quick snooze. For a look at the truckers' special world, TIME Correspondent William Friedman hitched a ride with two truckers bound from Chicago to Los Angeles. His report:

FROM Ocoya, 90 miles out of Chicago, U.S. 66 slices its way southwestward toward St. Louis through seas of hybrid feed corn. Blackbirds wing over the blowing tassels, plucking caterpillars from among the leaves and blowing silk, oblivious to the round-the-clock rumble of the highway. In this season the land is still hot, the air humid; the prairie wind sears rather than cools, and storms roll in from the west in minutes. Along the four-lane divided highway, humming tires throw up white crushed rock from the shoulders to nick a windshield or chip paint from a fender. From the few knolls in this flat land, the highway shimmers in the heat of distant, mirage-like oil slicks.

Al Gregory, 30, piloted a cab followed by tandem 26-ft. trailers carrying 20 tons of cargo. Neither Gregory nor his partner, Chuck Graves, 42, knew what they were hauling. "Guess we could look, but we usually don't," said Gregory. He complained of a headwind that could add ten hours to the 59 allotted by his company for the Los Angeles run. "It'll knock you down a whole gear," he said. "You get damn tired of pushing all the way to L.A. in ninth."

But Gregory cheered visibly each time he spotted a woman driving alone. Whenever one passed, he waved happily and gave the air-horn cable a long, hard pull. Air-conditioned, stereo-equipped cabs keep truckers cool, clean and reasonably contented. From his perch in the sleeping bunk behind the seats, Graves observed: "I know most people think of us as big, brainless, sweaty old men, but today there's a lot of drivers dressed better than most people." Some even wear neckties on the road. Drivers are no longer required to help with the chores of loading and unloading; mechanics, not drivers, make any necessary repairs to the rig en route.

In the monotonous routine of the road, a break is as welcome to the trucker as it is to any family of tourists jammed into their station wagon. Gregory shifted down and pulled into the Dixie Truckers Home at McLean, a huge truck stop even for the big roads of the Midwest. Outside the Dixie, cattle on the way to market kicked the sides of their trailers, horses neighed, hogs squealed. Dust and diesel fumes mixed with the sweet prairie air and the scent of frying bacon spewing from the kitchen exhaust fans. On U.S. 66 in Illinois, the truck stops have names like Tiny's, the 66 Terminal Cafe, El Roy's, the Mill, the Fleetwood. They are the sort of place that serves Ann Page cherry pie with Sealtest ice cream heaped on plastic plates. With the pork chops or cube steak or fried chicken come piles of mashed potatoes and canned creamed corn or cut green beans. The Dixie puts out a fried-chicken dinner "with that come-back taste"; it also boasts a barbershop and two gift shops that sell 3-D tableaux of the Last Supper and diapers with "I'm a little tax deduction" printed on them. John Geske, 65, a spare and taciturn man of the plains, has run the Dixie for the past 22 years. Truckers are a big part of his business, but he thinks they are overpaid at $18,000 to $20,000 a year. Says Geske: "Here you have men, many without a high school education, who are making more money than the average college professor. Seems intelligence and compensation should move together."

To Al Gregory, pretty waitresses are the most important thing about a truck stop. "It means a lot to come into a place where you're recognized and know the girls," he says. It is a relief from the forced comradeship of the cab. Drivers usually work with the same partner for six months, which can make for trouble. Says Paul Hadaway, a vice president of Navajo Freight Lines: "Rifts between drivers often start over questions of hygiene in the cab and build to criticism of driving technique. When you're in the cab with that fellow for weeks at a stretch, even the way he ties his shoes can become a major problem."

Because drivers spend so much time away from home, family problems become an occupational hazard. Truckers, says Hadaway, "are closer to their partners than their families, in many cases." Says Al Gregory: "You've got to have one hell of a woman at home in this business. You'll find more divorced guys driving trucks than anywhere else in the world."

The driver's lonely perch high above the highway gives him a special perspective; he can spot traffic patterns developing ahead more readily than the car-bound motorist. He scorns the tourists who dart in and out of traffic. Independent trucking operators pose another hazard, for they often overload their rigs and use pep pills to stay awake on long hauls, which can make them dangerously overtired on the road. The men driving for the big companies superstitiously shy away from rigs that they know have been rebuilt after a wreck. The road limits a man's vision of the world, but to many it becomes almost an addiction. "A trucker is a trucker," says Chuck Graves. "You've just got to like it. We like the feeling of the open country--how big it really is."

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