When I tell other drivers I quit a six-figure office job for a life on the road, they look at me like I have a disease. Most truckers have a reason they’re on the interstate, but it usually involves deliberately avoiding a cushy white collar job. Every now and then, next to diesel pumps and rest stop washrooms, I’ll come across another driver who came into the job for a reason worth sharing.

“Did it on a dare,” one man told me while punching a code into a shoddy vending machine. I didn’t get another detail, but the man didn’t seem to carry any regret.
“Only job where I can take Louie along with me every day,” a friend of mine offered as his Black Lab hopped down the big rig steps.
One man, with a dark and particularly well-trimmed beard, explained to me his childhood obsession with ambulances. After failing an EMT course, the man told me, he realized that the root of his obsession was the vehicle, not the medicine. I suppose long haul delivery fulfilled the mechanical fascinations of that little boy.

Turnover is high in this industry. Long days, longer nights, and excruciating waits at delivery points make it an easy profession to quit. Trucking is not a dream job for most, if any. Trucking is not a dream job for me, either.

My routes begin at the Port of Seattle and wind their way through western mountain ranges, prairies and pastures, ending in the outskirts of Minneapolis. On occasion, when the money is right, I pick up shorter routes from Seattle to Vancouver, windshield wipers on most of the ride. I don’t mind the rain, but I much prefer barreling through the dry Montana hills.

When I first quit my desk job, I thought driving these roads would be an endless source of inspiration. Golden rolling plains above the tree line. I could drive, thoughtlessly, day and night. Before my first route, I purchased a small battery tape recorder, holding intentions of documenting everything I saw and felt.

I was bogged down. A cost-consultant for a healthcare analytics company, my head was filled with arbitrary acronyms, financial data, and office politics. Corporate America has a way of obscuring the big picture. This is how I felt, at least.

If I drove, I figured, I could watch my progress every moment of the day– each white stripe passing by a symbol of good work finished. No burnout possible with that constant positive reinforcement.

But while those first legs offered great views and rejuvenating novelty, it only took until the fourth trip to experience my first mental breakdown.

I was filling up my rig on the outskirts of Bismarck on June 14th, just before the last leg to Minneapolis, when a bright, white-and-red big top tent caught my eye. I thought the days of traveling circuses were over, but there it was, set up on the parking grounds of an abandoned water park. My feet carried me past the fairgrounds border in a trance.

Smells of fried dough and cotton candy hit me first, and hardest. I watched kids chase each other around vendor carts, vendors whose advertising cries cut the air in a delivery so well-rehearsed they felt of another time or place. And I suppose they were.

The tears came when an elderly couple asked me which game was my favorite.

They looked so eager for an answer, so excited for whatever rigged game they’d almost certainly end up losing. All I could think about were the past 6 years I’d spent trying to make things easy for myself. I lost sleep and weight and friends, fearing my life would be unbearable without a socially-acceptable level of stability. But these two, with messy white hair like a North Dakota snowstorm, they didn’t mind.

I’m 31 today, far from a mid-life crisis, still working my hardest not to grow up.

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