Ideas - The Way of the Trucker

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

An Ontario trucking union predicts a shortage of 30,000 truckers in Canada as old hands retire faster than new ones take on the job. IDEAS producer Tom Howell visits a trucking school in northern Ontario, where recruits consider their options, and the road ahead.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. How are you feeling?

I feel good. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Gurvinder Singh Grewal always dreamed of driving big trucks. His dream began when he was growing up in northern India. I like to do adventures. And with your passion, trucking is my passion, and you're doing adventures. It's perfect. Here in Canada, our entire economy, maybe even our entire society, depends on people doing this job. Well, without trucks, there would be nothing where it needs to be.

No matter what the commodity is, at some point before it gets to its end user, it ends up on a truck. Grant Transport used to have on the side of their trailer a picture of a baby, and it was the only thing not delivered by a truck. And that's pretty near the truth. Someday we may see trucks driving themselves around Canada. But for the time being, the usefulness of humans driving trucks is beyond debate. And yet, despite the vital role of truckers and the visibility of their trucks, for some, they've come to symbolize a subculture at the margins,

sometimes at odds with mainstream society, as seen during the protests against COVID restrictions. Drivers are lonesome, kind of industrial cowboys. Quebecois author Marc Fortier. They like to be exposed to risk. They like this experience. It's not really surprising that this group in the society reacted so intensely to the confinement rules. Ideas producer Tom Howell had never been inside the cab of an 18-wheeler

until now. Back on the clock? Down again. Okay. Yeah, I don't understand. His documentary is called The Way of the Trucker. Go ahead. We make our money, we build our skill in town. Our tight corners, lots of traffic, lots of pedestrians, street lights. Once we're on the highway, I could teach my daughter how to drive. My 12 year old daughter, right? Cruise control on, steering wheel.

I like a manual transmission, I never use cruise. I find the automatics, people get lazy. They use cruise control, the truck does does everything and when something happens they're not ready for it right so they're doing their pre-trip they're going to get ready to get rolling and then we'll get you in the truck what's he doing what are you doing uh i'm doing pre-trip inspection with tractor and trailer so we can go on highway and be safe on the road. All right. Yeah. Is that supposed to be dangling down? Yeah. I'm facing like the frame of the trailer is good.

Like no shiny spot, no crack. And I'm looking for the wires. There's no leaking in the wires. Like I'm looking for the brake chambers. So there's no leaking. Have you ever been close to a truck before? Well, I mean, I've been in a car, I felt too close to a truck.

So our whole braking system is with air, right? So when he says checking the holes in the wires for leaking, he's looking for air leaks. Joke Picard is a trucking instructor in Timmins, Ontario, and this truck is a Navistar International, 23 meters long, including trailer. On the side of the trailer are pictures of a tractor, a digger, and a dump truck, along with a website address, collegeboreal.ca.

Do I have a seatbelt? This is a teaching vehicle, the first full-size tractor trailer jokes students encounter, en route to earning their AZ truck driving license. This channel traffic? No neutral, right? Watch that sign. Watch that sign. The sign. The sign. The sign. Stop. Stop. You're not going to hear that sign. The cut-out for real sign, the parking lot sign. This student, Gurvinder, or Gur, needs to turn sharply right and then sharply left out of the college parking lot.

I'm sitting behind him in the back seat of the cab. Jouk is riding shotgun. Gur is two weeks into his four-week training course, and this is the first time he's ever performed a right-hand turn in a tractor trailer. Keep going, we're gonna have to move out of the way, stick it right to the edge. That person should know better. The car pulls up rather close to where the trailer needs to swing. The challenge is, nope, stick it right to the side. Keep it stuck to the side, keep an eye on that back. You're good, you're good, you're good, you're good, you're good, you're good. Inches, right? There you go. Perfect.

Our biggest challenge? Our cars. They don't understand the room it takes for us to maneuver. But when we left the parking lot, we got pretty close to that sign, right? That's why I said, let's create distance. Right away, if we have the room, move over. Let's... We move over a couple feet to gain a couple inches on our trailer. So keep that in mind. Truckers need a DZ license if they want to drive a straight truck weighing over 11,000 kilograms loaded up. So that would be like a dump truck or a delivery truck where the cargo box is fixed to the back of the cab. You need the AZ license to drive an 18-wheel tractor trailer with air brakes like this one,

where the huge trailer swings independently, pinned on what's called the fifth wheel at the back of the tractor frame. No traffic, lane change, signal before, right? Always let people know ahead of time. Students pay about $6,000 for this training course at College Boreal, and at the end of four weeks, Jauch will become their examiner. He'll decide if they've earned their license. We did our corners, now we're going to go out to a quieter stretch of road. will become their examiner. He'll decide if they've earned their license.

We did our corners, now we're going to go out to a quieter stretch of road and we're going to put you in the driver's seat. Come on. Another car pulls out ahead of us. These kinds of guys make you crazy. Exactly. Yeah, he's slow and fast like... And we don't stop like a car, right? Yes, we can.

Well, what was he supposed to do differently? What do you think he should have did? Wait, wait, we don't do... a tractor trailer does not do a fender bender like two cars do. We kill people when something happens. So it's like, no, we pay attention at all times. How far is our wheel from the bit where the the asphalt starts crumbling at the edge there? Right now about a foot and a half. The truck's eight and a half feet wide, our lane's 12 feet. In a corner we use every inch of the lane so on a right-hand curve on a

road we'll move the truck to the left that way our trailer stays on on the road. Opposite, on a left-hand curve we'll move over to the right, keep it on the right so our trailer doesn't pass the center line. It's always inches And I've seen it too many times, driving on the roadways, that people have died because of inches, right? Last year, it came up on an accident on the 144. We were the second truck on the accident. One truck crossed six inches, took out two trucks.

One died in the truck, right? It's usually a fatality involved. It's nothing that we ever want to see, but it's part of life. It's part of life being on the highway, right? Our odds of getting into an accident are a lot higher than the regular driver. Just for the sheer fact of the amount of time we're on the highway, right? just for the sheer fact of the amount of time we're on the highway. Considering how scary trucks can be from the outside when you're in a car or on a bicycle,

it's a bit of a shock to find out how scary they also are from the inside. You do everything safe. That's like I tell a lot of my students, if someone's driving very badly, slow down. Eventually, it might not be today, but that guy will cause an accident, right? So let's get our distance away from him. You don't want to show up at his party. You want to try to split? Sure?

You want to try to split? Yep. Yep. Not quite clear what they're doing here. Push forward, off, there you go, back on. Gurr seem to be adjusting the handle of the gear stick. Very good, very good. What's a split? So where's... Yeah, high-low gear in every gear, right? So what we shift is an H pattern on an 18 speed right i'm just gonna make sure we're through this corner okay as soon as it starts to go get back into it push push get back in front of the balloon right on

so there's a high low on each each side so we literally move the shifter eight times but we could split each gear twice right there you go good job so and all that does it gives us a little bit higher speed lower p.m. right so we drive for fuel efficiency yeah like good now you could feel what your truck wants or doesn't want. You just get used to it. How are you feeling, girl? I'm feeling good.

I enjoy to drive big trucks. At this point, like they're on week two of driving with me. And, well he had a little bit of experience right but basically new drivers they're doing really well I would prefer a six-week course myself just to give them more experience but four weeks is what it is at the moment so you really notice how steep the ditches are a guardrail with your car you'll see the top of the guardrail well we see down at the bottom of what's going on Generally, when I think about truckers and courage, I think of my own. I've shown great courage driving my little car around a bend next to a huge truck

with its trailer wobbling in the wind swaying terrifyingly close to my lane. Some trucks even have sharp spikes attached to their front wheel hubs. What are those for? Those are accessories, bling, whatever you want to call it. Absolutely no function to it whatsoever. Well, that's just pointlessly scary then, isn't it? Of course, I know a truck may be transporting something I'm going to need later, but this never crosses my mind. What I'm thinking about in the moment is the insanity of needing to share my thin space of road with such a massive, unreasonable beast.

We'll carry around a few perspectives of this type, parochial, based in fear and ignorance. And it's our civic duty, whenever time permits, to tackle them and find out how the world appears from the other angle. Also, just like Gurvinder, I've always wanted to drive a great big truck, and Jauch kindly agreed to indulge me. So here we're going to pull over at the entrance of Mount Jamison and we're going to give Tom an attempt at shifting. This is the comedy hour for the students. It is, absolutely.

So you get a little bit of a taste of what they actually came into. You'll be able to compare how far we get them inside of a weed. We're good. Four ways are on. Low range please. He did good. How do you feel? I feel good. Now it's your turn. I think that's why he likes it so much. That was your turn. Alright.

I'll get you to sit down and put your seatbelt on. Okay. You hold that. How about that? One less thing I have to think about. Point it where you want it to record. Oh, we're going to record you. Point it at me. Point it where you want it to record. Oh, we're gonna record you. Point it at me. So, get yourself comfortable, seated. Get all the sounds, yeah?

Oh, sorry. There we go. There! I'm learning, I'm learning. I'm a truck driver, I'm not a radio guy. Guess what, I'm the opposite. Yes, exactly. So, we have typical clutch brake and fuel.

Our brake won't feel like a typical hydraulic brake because it's an air valve. It's basically turning on a faucet of water, right? So if you push on it, it will feel the same until it's wide open. Keep pushing all the way down. There you go. Yeah. So that's full brake pressure. We never use that much.

Our clutch. So you're used to a synchronized transmission. Now, we have unsynchronized transmission, which means you cannot just go from gear to gear without doing specific maneuvers if you're going up or down. You're going to go up to about 700 RPM. That's our RPM gauge. You're going to go about half clutch put it in neutral take your foot off the clutch put your foot back on the clutch go to second gear take your foot

off the clutch again all right it's like two gear changes in one yeah it's two two two clutches i'm assuming you're not following this because i was there and i wasn't so it becomes a dance that you play with the truck right one and two we're just going to concentrate on gearing up. So simple H pattern, like in your car. Difference that we have, when we want to go higher, this is our range selector. Consider it like a set of stairs. So we're on the bottom set of H's. After our fourth gear, we're going to climb the stairs.

We're going to go back to first, which is fifth now. Yeah, sort of with you, yeah, keep going. So five, six straight back, over, seven. I think part of the cause of my difficulty in absorbing these instructions was the knowledge that in about 30 seconds I would be driving an 80,000-pound missile along an undivided rural highway with steep ditches on either side. Well, if I tell you take your feet off, take your feet off everything, I'll find a gear. Concentrate on controlling the truck.

All right. That was a really quick lesson. It is. It's a very quick lesson because we have traffic. I've got a school bus behind me. Should I be concerned about that? No, no. We're going to get going here. Oh, okay. Okay, so foot on the clutch. I'll hold on to that. Okay. We're going to get going here. Oh, okay. Okay, so foot on the clutch. I'll hold on to that. Okay.

We're going to put down. Straightforward. It's going to be our H. It doesn't want to go in. Lift up the clutch a bit. Okay. Okay. Just keep some brake pressure on.

We're going to take our parking brake off. We're going to signal. Yeah. Okay. When it's clear, check your mirror. Gently come up off the clutch. Yeah. Okay. When it's clear, check your mirror. Gently come up off the clutch. Yeah. Whoops. You're good. You're good. You're good. Take your foot off. There you go. Join traffic. Okay. Am I accelerating now? Yeah. 800 RPM. And then down already? Yeah. Shift. Clutch. Neutral. Nope. Neutral. Okay. There you go. Off, off, off, off, nope. There you go off off off off. There you go drive. You're in second. I got you in

Okay, RPMs RPMs. Yeah, I'm ready to go. No 800 rpm is their target 800 not a thousand How about how about we drive? A little bit of everything. Yeah, yeah clutch Neutral yeah, put your hand on the shifter with me. Off the clutch. Off, off, off. Back on the clutch. Back on the clutch. Down again. Okay. And off. Off, off. Okay, we're in. Go. Yeah, I don't understand.

So, where you are now, that's where they were on Monday. Yeah. Right? Almost in the ditch is what we're talking about. Well, yeah, that happens too, right? Jacques aims to get his students from total beginner to safe truck driver within four weeks. Now, whether he's safe while trying to get them there is perhaps an open question. 80 kilometers an hour zone, so let's pick it up. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so you're in sixth gear. You're going to do a little bit of clutch. Put your hand on the shifter. Into neutral. Off, off the clutch. Off, back on. Okay, next one. Off, off, off.

There you go. Okay. You're almost at speed limit. It feels a lot faster than we're actually going though. Right? What's amazing about having this much size and power is how constraining your world becomes. The stakes are high, and the wiggle room in which you can get things wrong harmlessly is not much wiggle room at all.

Yeah. Keep it on the edge. How do you feel about this? I don't like the fact that it's about to be slopey and icy on this first. Turn, turn, turn, turn. There we go. It's not going to be icy. We're above zero. Get back on the on this version. Turn, turn, turn, turn. There we go. It's not gonna be icy, we're above zero. Get back on the fuel.

Push, push, push, push, push. There you go. Right? Did you feel the transition of the trailer to pushing us to when you felt it go, and we start to pull? Yeah, you don't want that. No, we always wanna be pulled. We never wanna let our trailer push as much as possible.

There you go. All right. You're getting comfort level. I just took my first breath since I started. That's often. You get stressed? Yeah. You get stressed?

Right? It's like, breathe. Just breathe. I've often cursed at trucks next to me on the highway when they appear to veer towards the very edge of their lane and almost threaten to come into mine. Once you're driving one yourself around a bend, it becomes clear why this has to happen. Okay, pay attention. Describe to me what your trailer is doing right now. Pushing me. Look out your mirror. It's wobbling. It's always offset to us us right? That's why we have to move the truck in our lane. So it was in the other lane there for a while. Is that such a

big deal? Yes it is. Let's keep it politely. Yes at no time can we ever leave our lane right? So I'm going out towards the yellow line here because I'm turning to the right, so I want to use every inch of the lane kind of thing. Correct. Once you get out there, look out your right-hand mirror. Can't see a thing. Oh, yeah, there's a trailer.

It didn't go off the road. That's something. Hey, improvements. Improved. Sharp-eared listeners will notice some smooth gear changes occurring under these next few comments. That's because my turn at the wheel has now ended. No truckers were harmed. A lot of people are surprised I can actually do this as a trainer because I have a control issue when I'm driving, right?

I want to be the one driving. I know what I could do. So how do you do that when you're a trainer? Lots of breaks for a day to start. I learned, yeah. I have no controls here to help i could shift pretty good and i always have the emergency brake right that's the final option i've only ever pulled it on the road once with a student and besides that i've taken two of them

out of out of the seat out of the driver's right for just being unsafe out of the driver's seat, right? For just being unsafe. Big problem. I don't know their driving experience, right? I think you, like I just met this afternoon, get in the seat. Let's go.

Let's go see it. You're going to be these guys' examiner? Absolutely, I am. Yeah. 190 examiner? I'm strict. This is what it is. These are the criterias. I'm not going to let anyone unsafe pass. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what they do. I've had people beg and stuff. I will offer extra training, and it's up to them if you want to continue their training.

And it's up to them if you want to continue their training. Turns out Jacques Picotte was not always so safety-focused. 20 years ago, you'd find him speeding and pushing the limits of his endurance on long journeys. But the culture of trekking has changed, and he's found himself changing with it. We actually put laws in now where we have to stop, right? So every 240 kilometers or three hours, whichever one comes first, we have to pull over, check our load. So it forces us to get out and walk around a little bit.

Before, I used to leave Timmins, I'd get out in Dryden. For people who aren't from this area, how long is that? 16 hours. Holy crap, you drive solid for 16 hours? Yeah I'd go solid 16 hours not really not eat. I'd leave here with a six pack of water and a bag of chips. I'd get to Edmonton two and a half days later with five and a half bottles and a bag of chips. I'd be out of cigarettes though. I'm going to cigarette store. Most of Joke's students arrived recently in Canada from overseas. Some are from India, like Gurd, others from Ukraine or Zimbabwe. Local trucking companies in Timmins will sometimes even pay their $6,000 tuition.

In exchange, students agree to fill a job vacancy at the company once they're qualified. We have a quality shortage of drivers, right? That's why they're importing them from other countries. And I believe we have enough people. We need schools that actually take pride in their training and put out a better driver. That's plain and simple. The college had a bad reputation before I came in. Cadege Boreal, you pay the a 6,000, you get a license.

That's what the reputation of the college was before, right? And then people started not to be happy when I started failing them. They're like, I paid my 6,000. And you paid for the knowledge, you got the practice. You're not safe, you're not qualified. And yeah, a little bit of blowback on that, companies are a lot happier. I've had some students that work right out of school, that go work for companies that need minimum three years of experience. They're like, no, you came out of training with a job, we'll give you a road test. You're good. Ready to work.

On Ideas, you're listening to a documentary called The Way of the Trucker. We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. Trucking unions and industry groups have long warned that Canada's shortage of qualified truckers is getting worse. We could be short some 30,000 truckers within five years. In 2023, the federal government put $46 million into training grants and wage incentives to develop new drivers. And would-be immigrants get their applications fast-tracked if they enroll in trucker training.

Good job. Not much else we could do on that one, right? Jacques Picot teaches novice truckers in Timmins, Ontario. And he recently took on a new assignment, instructing a non-trucker, a complete outsider on the trucking way of life. When did you first know you were going to be a trucker? I started to date a trucker's daughter. That's how it started. Went from there, then I needed my DSAT license for a job.

So that's how I got into trucking and then just fell in love with it. That outsider was Ideas producer Tom Howell. Started with the daughter and then the... Started with the daughter, then went to employment. Then that relationship didn't work, but the daughter kept the trucking. I was very tasking on the relationship, right? I was working almost two full-time jobs at the time. I was never home.

Being a young family and we had bills to pay, so I never second-guessed the fact that I had to be out on the road to make money. Didn't work out so well at the other end. And it's happened to many, many people in the line of work. In the long run, it just wore because I really enjoyed being on the highway by myself. Right? Music on and just drive. Tell me more about that.

Tell me, help someone see what's so great about being on the road. So when we're on the road, the only really stressful areas that we have to worry about are in cities. Once we're on the road, I wouldn't say we could shut off our brain, right? But we could really relax. You turn your favorite music on. I've learned to stay away from my really favorite music because that just makes me speed. Put a nice relaxing music and your brain doesn't have to go a million miles an hour like it does everywhere else, right? Your destination is the only thing that you're worried about.

And it's very relaxing and freeing. During the worst early days of pandemic confinement, where in our case we didn't even leave the house, I too found solace in driving trucks. They weren't real trucks. It was a video game simulation called Truck Simulator. This is what it sounds like. As you can hear, it sounds quite similar to a truck. It puts you into the cab of a tractor trailer and sets you free in a beautiful digital graphics world. You can drive there for hours, listening to the radio if you like, all through Europe and North America. Someone's even added a Northern Ontario extension, so if you're so inclined, you can spend your free time escaping into a simulated Timmins, where you can pick up

a load of logs or dry goods and drive them up the highway to another simulated town like Kapperskasing. Some say this is a very boring game, but in times of stress, I found the experience quite similar to what Joke is describing. Though of course he's talking about the real world. It gets addicting. It gets very addictive. That's what you're going to do. For Jacques Picotte, a truck cab can be the ultimate refuge. I love sleeping in a truck. The rumble, let it idle all night, the best sleep. You leave the truck going and you just go to sleep

in the back? Yeah, yeah. Truck idles all night and has a nice little rumble in there rocks you to sleep and part is this got to keep the heat going i guess yeah in the winter but a lot of them now have a bunk heater separate bunk heaters i still let the engine run all night okay it's just the noise and about vibration and the type of person at home tv stays on all night that's from years of sleeping in a truck if If it gets quiet, I wake up. Peace and mental calm are probably not the first things that come to mind for most Canadians these days when they think of trucks and truckers. In 2022, tractor trailers filled the streets of downtown Ottawa, blasting their horns at all hours. And journalists struggled to put

the proper name on what was happening. Was it a trucker protest or a freedom convoy? Groups representing the trucking industry criticized the demonstration, but they couldn't change what was most visible and most audible to everyone watching. It was the truck as machine of war. And what the truckers represented, of course that depended on your point of view, maybe they were soldiers of virtue rising up against oppression, or these were angry, dangerous and irrational people. And maybe,

though few would utter this word, they were low class. Either way, what the public thought about truckers, and not just about what they do, but what they mean, became sensitive ground at the edges of this particular rift in society. The Canadian writer who's probably done the most to get to know trucking culture in all its complexity, and to communicate it to the rest of us, is from Quebec. This is Serge Bouchard introducing his Governor General's Award winning book, The Sad Eyes of My Truck. And Serge is the only car driver that I know that slow down when he cross a truck. Because he found each truck beautiful and he always wanted to tell us,

look, look, Marc, look at this truck, look at the tire, look at, I don't know, the door, the color. This is Marc Fortier. I'm a publisher from Montreal, and I'm also a writer. I wrote a book with an anthropologist named Serge Bouchard, which is about truckers. That book came out in 2021, just one month before Serge Bouchard died. It was based on Serge's PhD research from the 1970s, studying truckers in Quebec. It's called Diesel in the Veins. Serge Bouchard is quite a character in Quebec.

He was an anthropologist, as I said, a well-known radio host. Also, he worked in Radio-Canada. And a storyteller, somebody who has maîtrisé, has the art of filling things, of understanding the poetics in the human experience. Serge presented trucking as the product of a great collaboration between human and machine. Ils ont charrié des maisons. Ils ont allé des charges

qui décrivent dans le détail l'ampleur de nos travaux et transports. What really moves a truck? Is it the engine? Is it the truck driver or is it something else? For sure, the engine has something to do with moving the truck, but then

you need a driver to domesticate the engine to drive the truck. But the driver alone doesn't really make the van and the truck move. The driver needs to understand the whole experience of trucking. He needs to learn the truck culture. This whole relation, Serge called it the true power. And it's very important for him. He often tells the story of there were a pilot strike, a plane pilot strike in the 70s.

And Serge told me the story that everybody was talking about the pilot as the human factor who causes plane crashes, who was like kind of a problem for flying. Serge taught to himself that that makes no sense because without pilot you know you need the human factor to make things move to give sense to thing so this human factor is not just the human force it's the human culture. What does that mean about the relationship between the human and the machine? The human is a part of the machine, but what is at stake? L'enjeu, the enjeu, it's to know who's going to master who. So you have to break in an engine, everybody knows that. The question is to know if human beings are going to become like a machine or kind of a robot,

or if we're going to make sense of all the machines and humanize them so there'll be a human culture. What do you think is the crucial insight Serge gave us into the trucker's relationship with danger? That's a difficult question because it's so important. It's everywhere. Danger is everywhere. It's a really risky métier.

Way of life or practice. Exactly, because there's many challenges. There's always the perspective of having an accident. The difficulty of the road itself, a hill, a slippery road, the storm. So truckers talk a lot about it, but not directly, you know. Serge observed many, many ways of dealing with the risk. Some drivers had really strict habits, for example,

drinking too much Coke before leaving a place, stopping every time at the same place, I don't know. Little superstitions. Yeah, superstition or habits. It's like a ritual, having a Mae West in the truck. Serge loved Mae West, by the way. Yeah, ways of dealing with fate. Because these are not men who are supposed to appear afraid.

No, but they have to know that it is dangerous. A driver that isn't conscious of the risk is almost dead. But they like some danger. They like it, yeah. They like to live on the edge. Truck drivers are always moving, so they have to live in this spirit and to deal with what it means as risk.

For the truckers that I spoke with in Timmins, risk is part of what makes the job worth doing. Jouk introduced me to a trucker he's already mentioned. I started to date a trucker's daughter. Here's that daughter's father. Doug Brandon. I met him along with a former colleague of Jouk from his days in the logging industry. Someone, by the way, that Jouk warned me not to tease. I'm gentle. You're going to meet Ben? He looks like a big grizzly giant, right? I wouldn't tease

him. I'm Ben Pizzola. I asked Doug and Ben to talk about some highlights from their long careers, which collectively spans six decades. Going down the 129 with a 12-foot wide load. Oh my god. That's an experience. That's an experience this in itself got to be a challenge to see how quick you could make it yeah what's the landscape very narrow some good hills lots of real sharp curves and you follow the right along the edge of the mississauga river there for i think it's 13 miles or something like this. Yes. And it's very interesting. And along that stretch, you have a sheer rock wall on one side and a river on the other side. And blind hills.

And no room for mistakes. No, no, no. Because you're either ending up in a rock or swimming. And you clearly made it. Clearly. Several times. With a scrape. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What's it like driving in the winter in a big truck? I know about driving in the winter in my little car, but what's the difference? Believe it or not, even with the weight, it still slips. And the thing is, with all that weight behind you, when it does start to slide, it slides for a long ways before it stops. Being in forestry, you're not on the highway per se,

so the road conditions are what they are some days, and be it freezing rain or wet snow or anything like that, there's many times where you get into a slide and you have to have your wits about you to get it back. I was sitting up in the Keno on a logging road there, 235 log loader on. A day like today, the road was still very icy and very warm. Truck sitting there, we were waiting,

a guy up ahead of me missed the hill. Truck sitting there, and then the whole thing, this slid sideways. Got to the snowbank and it stopped, but Mr. Mann, it was leaning pretty good and pretty interesting. And I'd been sitting there for probably an hour. I've had that experience as well,

but mine didn't go sideways. It went backwards down the hill while I was standing at the top watching it. Not a comfortable feeling. According to Serge Bouchard's research, facing down risky situations goes to the core of a trucker's personal narrative and sense of self. Risk and danger is everywhere, but Serge says it's really important in the culture of the truckers because they believe in the task of giving a good performance. They are performing.

So I don't know if the word has a double meaning in English, but in French it means that they are working hard, but it also means that they are acting, like giving a performance in theater. Both meanings belong together. For Serge Bouchard, the essential symbolic image of trucking, as he came to know it, was a single truck alone in the snow on a rural highway. He loved the picture of trucks alone in the snow

because he saw in that the loneliness of existence, and it was not something sad for him. It was something that belongs to the experience of the world. It has meaning. It was beautiful for him. That's a condition of thought and of creation, of words, of beauty, of poetics, of ideas. He thought the loneliness of a truck driver is something

precious for the truck drivers, but it's something precious for everybody. You have to understand that. Even though it's about solitude, it's of course a shared experience between all the truckers. Yeah, because what we found in it and ourself is not ourself. It's the relation to the world and to others. We found others. We found what is the links that we have with others, and we found the creativity to create new form of relations. So it's a condition of freedom. I should say, none of the truckers I met in Timmins spoke to me of their hours of solitude in quite these terms, as a space of creativity and a meditation and a doorway to experiencing

the Other, capital O. For instance, Doug and Ben kept their descriptions pretty down to earth. Have you ever had any interesting, weird thoughts while driving? Not that I can think of, yeah. Sometimes you just think all day about nothing specifically. It's just, yeah. No, you never rode a movie in your head? No, no, no.

No. No, that's a different class of people. What role does beauty play in the life of being a trucker? Like, do you have a preference between dawns and sunsets? Depends on the day. I'm not wild about sunsets there, just because it's hard on the eyes if you're heading west. Yeah, it depends on what time of day it is and which direction you're going. Yeah, yeah.

Coming into Timmins there from the south in the evening there can be hard on the eyes because the road runs right straight west and you're looking right into the sun. And it can also hide a lot of things too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. This isn't at all to say that Serge Bouchard was wrong about the symbolism of the lonely trucker, just a reminder that he brought something of himself into it, as of course we all do when analysing others.

I asked Mark about how co-writing and publishing this book about truckers in 2021 affected his experience in 2022, watching the, whatever we call it, Freedom Convoy Ottawa protests. Many people asked me this question. If we let aside the question of politic extremists and conspiracists, which is an important part of the event, but if we let this aside, I don't know exactly what Serge would have said. of the event, but if we let this aside, I don't know exactly what Serge would have said. Serge is dead, so I don't exactly know how he would have dealt with this event.

But I would say that since drivers are lonesome, marginal, kind of industrial cowboys, and since they are exposed to risk every day, and they like to be exposed to risk, they like this experience, it's not really surprising that this group in the society reacted so intensely to the confinement rules. That's the way I understood it. That's what I think we can hear from them that makes sense. It's not getting sick, not dying. It's not for them. It's not a way of living. It's not a goal for society. It's not a goal for a human being. Everybody's going to die.

So it's not really important. The question is how to live. And they call it freedom. I didn't grill any of my new trucker acquaintances about their historical views for or against vaccine mandates. But what Serge Bouchard saw in the old trucking culture of the 1970s, the constant moving, living at the edge, performing a type of dance between safety and danger. All this strongly echoes what Jacques Bicotte says, telling me about his life behind the wheel. It's the hazards I like. It's the excitement of what could happen, right? Who wants to live a boring life? I don't want to come into my grave all prestige. I'm going to be beat up and battered and we're sliding in sideways, man.

Why else would I sit with someone with no experience and put them in a transport? You just like the thrill of death. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's the excitement. It's the excitement. If you can't get your heart pumping, what's the point of doing anything in life? Okay.

I'm going to call you on this though, because you said earlier, I was like, what's the excitement. If you can't get your heart pumping, what's the point of doing anything in life? Okay, I'm going to call you on this, though, because you said earlier, I was like, what's the appeal of trucking? And you're like, you get out there, there's not a million things, put on relaxing music. It seemed like you were saying it was the opposite you were going for. And if you remember, I'm also not on the highway anymore. My taste has changed. The relaxing part, I don't want anymore.

I'm not young. I'm not old either, but yeah after living through certain things it's like no I don't want monotone life. I really like my brain to be going 100 miles an hour all the time. If I could only strictly drive on bush roads, I'd still be doing it, 100%. It's the highway part now that drives me nuts. The cars piss me off. They don't understand what we're dealing with. Like you noticed today, they just pull out in front of us.

Can you just drive forestry roads? Because you must have to get on the highway at some point, even when you're doing a logging run. That's the issue, right? So I'll do my forestry run, which I love on the bush road. I still got average 150 to 200 kilometers of highway that I have to do. Tell me what we four-wheelers do that's so bad. I know about the pulling out in front one, but there's got to be other stuff.

Staying in our blind spot on the side of our trailer. That's the reason why we have a mid light signal light to let idiots know that we want to change lanes there's a good 15 20 feet there that we can't always cover so i've got three kids two of them drive and i taught them if you can't see the driver's face he can't see you when you're passing a truck past the truck don't Don't lollygag in their blind spot. Get past him. If you're stopping behind him, don't pull up right tight to him. He doesn't know you're there. Pull off to the left a bit. Look at the driver's mirror. Anything else that drives

you mad about someone like me when I drive? Cars. Just pulling out in front of us. I almost smoked the family. I was hauling logs. They were pulled over. All four doors open. The single light was on. They were out of the vehicle. So I was fairly young in my driving career, so I never thought about slowing down or anything like that. Kept my foot into it, and at the last minute, they jumped in the car and pulled out right in front of me. It took everything I could to not hit them. I ended up in the opposite lane pastor car and they're lucky they're lucky that there was no oncoming traffic i got past their

car got myself slowed down they took off a little bit incident of road rage i slammed down the gears and i couldn't see their car i caught up to him stupid Stupidity, right? Absolute stupidity. Now, at that time, I was so mad that I almost killed him, that I almost killed him, right? So, yeah, don't cut people off. Don't cut people off. And like, you notice I keep gum in my truck. It's for people, it's stressed out and stuff like that, right? Can't smoke in the trucks anymore because of new laws, but before something like that would happen, light a cigarette and relax. Just breathe. Take a deep breath, breathe, and you'll be all right. I figured it's a good time to get off the highway before something happens.

All the years on the highway, I've never gone into an accident. So I was like, okay, eventually it's going to bite me. And that's the worst fear. I know quite a few drivers who've had fatality accidents, not at their fault. Some of them were never even able to drive a pickup truck again because it just destroyed them. It's their passion and it destroys them. So it's like, okay, before it destroys my passion, I'll get off the road.

That way they can still love it. What do you take pride in, in being a trucker? Then or now? It changes, right? Then was providing for my family, being safe, and being on time, right? A hundred percent. Now it's safety. I've changed my mentality when I started training.

They were looking for a trainer. I didn't even apply for it. I wasn't interested in it. Some of my good friends said, you keep complaining about the quality of driver, get in there and do something about it then. So I switched over and it's like, okay, what they have been learning is not suiting the industry

whatsoever. It's not suiting safety standards at all. A lot of lazy instructors. And when you say you don't like this bad driving, what are you talking about? You see people, their feet up on a dash when you're going down the road. You've got no control of your vehicle. The automatic truck was, I understand why they did it.

We're in terror, and you could almost put anyone in it. But the problem with that is everyone drives it like a car. It's not a car. You're still an 80,000-pound missile, right? That you have to take care of at all times. You heard today's like, are you sure we're good? Right? I keep them on track. Make sure you're safe at all times.

I rather be late than hurt anyone or damage my truck now. Now. Absolutely. Now. Now, before, I was telling you, we're going to make it there on time. It doesn't matter on the situation. And I used to get mad at other truckers. We'd get caught in a whiteout or something. No, we're not stopping on the road. Slow down, keep moving. Keep moving, put on all your lights,

keep moving. The only thing that stops me is freezing rain. Besides that, I will drive through anything. Got no fear, no brains, no fear. It often seems that in trying to get to the essence of something, one just runs into its contradictions. Is it the way of the trucker to love danger but hate the threats? To love freedom but choose to trap yourself in a cab for hours, even days. I've looked at trucks from both sides now, and maybe it is like Serge Bouchard said. The trucking is, not an illusion maybe, but a mystical force. What really moves the truck?

Serge, as an anthropologist, has this idea, this thesis, that what moves the truck is the force. Serge calls it the true power, the true force. What anthropologists call sometimes la mana, like the great Manitou, which is kind of something difficult to give a definition, a real definition. Give a definition, a real definition. You want to be hard, but you got to know your limit of how far you could push yourself. Once you get that figured out, I've ran 48 hours, not even blinking an eye. During spring breakup, we couldn't always get our wood

to the mill, right? So we'd take it out of our block and bring it up to high ground to a good road. We didn't have to follow hours of service there. So we just run back and forth between shovels, back and forth, back and forth. And that's all we did. And what we're done is like, oh, 48 hours. Was it because you wanted to make more money or was it you were just, why, why, why did you keep going? Part of it's pride. They gave me a task to complete. This is the task we're going to do. Not one to back down from a challenge or to disappoint an employer saying,

can you do this? Once I accept it, I'll get it done. No ifs, ands, or buts. It's going to get done. But I had a good employer. He came out four times, brought us coffee and keep us going, brought us cigarettes, brought us everything. He's like, don't stop, boys.

Okay, we'll keep going. Brought us cigarettes, brought us everything. He's like, don't stop, boys. Okay. We'll keep going. You are listening to The Way of the Trucker by Ideas producer Tom Howell. Thanks to all of the speakers and congratulations to Gurvinder Singh Grewal, who passed his tests with Jacques Picotte and now holds his AZ license so he can now live his dream and drive an 18-wheeler. Thanks also to Susan McKenzie, Kira Mahoney, Melanie Dufresne, and Maya Hoggett. Ideas is a broadcast and a podcast. If you like the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive, where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. Technical production, Danielle Duval.

Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the Executive Producer of Ideas And I'm Nala Ayyad For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts