Truckers are an interesting bread of people. There is no set persona for being a truckers but in my experience you can usually pick out a few characteristics that define them all. After I graduated from high school I had the opportunity to ride with my friend Justin and his cousin (the truck driver) to Maine and back. I had nothing going on so I accepted the invitation and we were on the road.

First of all it is worth mentioning that a semi is built for two people to ride; having three means someone is constantly laying in the bed behind the cab. I discovered that was going to be my post on the trip. Not many people can truthfully say they slept on a drive from Wisconsin to Maine, I’m sadly one of the few who can.

While I did sleep a good amount of the trip, I was able to inundate myself within the trucker community for some pieces of the trip. I remember getting home and my mom asking me what truckers were really like, I specifically remember responding “Not as messed up as Joyride or Road House and not as fun as Convoy or Smokey and the Bandit”. To this day that is as good as I can come up with.

I remember on one specific instance running into a group of truckers who were debating inside a truck stop café in Ohio. The topic was politics and I was pleased, being a politically savvy person myself. We sat down at the counter and ordered coffee when I began to listen in to what was being said. Expecting the discussion to be focused on a recent topic, I was surprised to here them debating the Presidential election…in 2000. One gentleman commented that “Gore would have just let the faggots run wild,” where another man defended the former Vice President of the United States when he remarked that “Bush is letting them go at it anyway”. A strong defense on Gore’s behalf. When the discussion turned to war one man began to comment that the United States had been attacked by “commie Muslims” a faction of the Islamic religion I did not know existed. Another spoke up and said “whether you believe in the War or not, Iraq had to pay for what they’d done”.

I don’t believe all truckers are dumb. The one driving my truck seemed to have gotten us from point A to point B with little difficulty. What scares me about the whole situation is that at the end of the trip I came to the conclusion that I trusted this faction of the population to deliver my bananas and auto parts….I just don’t want them to vote.

Every time I am abroad I end up explaining the difference between America and Americans to some anti-American drunk at a pub. I enjoy doing so, yet, before this trip I really had no clue what I was talking about.