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Running boards and road beasts

TRUCKERS
By Mary Richardson
With photographs by Phil Andrews, Jenny Williamson, & Meshakai Wolf
123 pp. Mark Batty Publisher $32.95

Reviewed by Gary Presley

Truckers isn’t a coffee table book, not as we’ve come to understand the term—an oversized publication, filled with lush color photographs, captions rather than text. It is instead a pictorial essay on trucks, trucking, and truckers.

The book is illustrated with dozens of black-and-white photographs, and the first thing a reader notices leafing through the portraits of truckers is that only one or two of the men and women offer even a hint of a smile, and that expression is more likely to be the hint of a rueful and sardonic grin than an outright visage of joy.

Granted, there are few practical reasons for the average trucker to smile. True, it is a job in a period of economic uncertainty, but it is work that demands long hours, offers stressful working conditions, and results in seemingly interminable absences from home.

Richardson understands this—she was an editor for “a trucking industry trade magazine”—and she apparently decided to fill her palette with gray tones when she sent forth photographers to document the lives and circumstances of truckers.

Lean or pudgy, grizzled or unlined, young or old, the truckers photographed invariably seem weary. Some look resignedly into the camera; some stare obliquely; all reflect the road in their faces. And the expressions do not demand, Let me go. I have miles to run. No, nearly every line in every face reminds us that the road goes on forever.

So then a reviewer comes to the end of this interesting little volume and is left to wonder Why? and Who?

Why was Truckers written? I sense that Richardson’s time around people in the trucking industry left her both amazed and curious. Amazement might come naturally after finishing a detailed from-here-to-there essay listing the confluence of trucks, truckers, and trucking necessary to bring the raw ingredients together to manufacture and distribute the mayonnaise for a California woman’s potato salad. Albeit dressed in fantasy—who knows which particular Chinese trucker hauled the particular crushed bottle in a particular bale of recyclable plastic to the recycling plant “in a village near Guangzhou, China,” and how certain can that person be that the bottle’s atoms ended up in a sleeping bag?—the short essay reminds readers that trucks are the red corpuscles circulating through the arteries and veins of our nation’s economic system.

Trucks and truckers are vital, and it’s easy to infer that Richardson is bemused that so much rides on such a ragtag, underpaid, and overworked cast of characters. Many within Truckers are under-educated for today’s economy. Some have been driving for decades. Others have turned to trucking because, as a pertinent example of the mayonnaise, an international corporation believes it is more economical to ship a job recycling a plastic bottle emptied in the USA to China rather than undertake its conversion at the point it was used.

While most of the descriptions within Truckers are prosaic rather than poetic—much of it is commentary from individual truckers—the faces displayed in the book’s photographs convey that aura of souls being ground down by frustration by hard, and often thankless work, work that literally results in people spinning their wheels and getting nowhere beyond the next load. Driver/owners are pulled left to right, up and down by unstable and almost ever-increasing fuel and maintenance costs. Drivers employed by transportation companies are locked into per-mile rates and Big-Brothered by global positioning systems.

On page 40, we see a portrait identified as “Craig Worley washing laundry, I-80, Exit 4.” A big-bellied trucker in blue jeans or work pants, a sleeveless T-shirt, and flip-flops sits cornered alone in an anonymous laundry room, one foot casually extended, his head cocked to the side as if the washing machine might tell him an amusing story, his expression an odd mixture of patience and near-whimsy.

Nearly every portrait is the same, as if those behind the lens sought out faces with the most miles behind them. Perhaps that explains why most of the images are black-and-white. Color sings to us in the narrowest range of emotional notes; black-and-white illuminates the shadows. Here the gray tones tell the story of truckers in America, and the people who populate their world—prostitutes, preachers, and pet dogs.

It is the images of the trucks within the book’s pages that best answer the second question— Who will buy this book? Great beasts lined up, or singularly alone, on truck stop lots. Hoods and doors as backdrop to one face or another. Running boards and tire rims. Most beyond individuality into shades of near-anonymous gray. Nevertheless, the trucks in Richardson’s book are both scenery and characters in the life stories played out on the nation’s highways. Those who are intrigued by trucks, those who drive trucks, those who wait for a trucker to come home are the audience.

Truckers suggests nothing so much as the grand old photo essays that were done best by Life Magazine during the 1940s and 1950s. If that’s your cup of tea, or bottle of mayonnaise—if you find information through imagery, Truckers delivers.

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Gary Presley resides in Springfield, Missouri, retired after a career spent primarily in insurance customer service. Although he once had a job writing news and advertising copy for a radio station, his original work was published mostly in local newspapers. He only began serious study of the craft after entering and winning a regional essay contest. Since then, his essays have appeared in publications ranging from Salon.com to Notre Dame Magazine to The Ozark Mountaineer. His memoir, Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio, was published by the University of Iowa Press in October 2008. You can follow his journey through postings to his blog.

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