These are the oldest ones, from when I didn't know how to do anything on here but type. Newest at the top, like the rest of the pages. If you want to read it in order, start at the bottom of this page and climb.

Thurs. 12/25/97
Written at: truck stop, I-80, eastern Iowa. Snow on the fuel islands.

Merry Christmas from a booth with a phone jack and a paper placemat that says Season's Greetings in three colors.

We asked for Christmas off back in October and then gave it to a couple with little kids, because we'd just had all that time home for Mom's hip. So we're in Iowa with forty thousand pounds of frozen French fries going to Chicago tomorrow morning. The truck stop put on a turkey buffet for drivers, free, with a tree in the corner made out of green tinsel and a mud flap for a star. Twenty-some drivers ate together like a family that doesn't know each other's names. A man from Georgia said grace. Nobody laughed.

I called Mom from the pay phone. She walked to the phone without her walker, she says, and she wanted me to know it. Carol had the whole family over and Mom made her green chile stew sitting down.

Ray gave me a heated blanket that plugs into the cigarette lighter. I gave him a thermos that keeps coffee hot for twenty-four hours, which is a promise nobody in this truck will ever test.

Nine months on the truck. About 170,000 miles between us. I did the figures on the placemat.

Sun. 10/26/97
Written at: Mom's kitchen, Tucson. Last night home.

Mom has a new hip. It's metal and plastic and the surgeon showed us one in his office, and she held it like it was a piece of jewelry she wasn't sure she liked.

She did fine. The first two days were bad and I won't write about them. Then a physical therapist got her up with a walker and walked her to the end of the hall and back, and Mom said "Is that all?" Now she's home, with a raised toilet seat and a grabber for picking things up and a list taped to the refrigerator of everything she's not allowed to do. Bending is on it. She bent four times while I watched.

My sister Carol is going to stay with her for two weeks and then check on her every day after that. Carol lives ten minutes away and I live in a truck. I know who's the good daughter this year.

We go back out tomorrow. We have to. The house payment doesn't know about hips. Mom said, "Go. Gertrude, go. I'm not going anywhere, I can't." Then she laughed at her own joke for about a minute.

Mon. 10/13/97
Written at: truck stop, I-10, Van Horn, Texas. Heading home empty.

Mom fell Saturday. She went out to the garage to get a can of tomatoes off the shelf and caught her foot on the step and broke her hip.

Carol found her when she came by with groceries. Thank God it was Saturday and Carol comes Saturdays. Carol called the company and they sent it to the box on our dashboard, the one that gets messages from dispatch by satellite. All it said was CALL HOME URGENT. Ray was driving. I read it out loud and then neither of us said anything for a mile because we were both picturing the worst thing.

We were loaded for Orlando. Joel in dispatch, who I have complained about on this page and take back every word of, found another team in Dallas to take our load. We met them at a truck stop and swapped trailers in the dark, and now we're running home with an empty trailer, nine hundred miles. Running empty is called deadheading. It's the right word tonight.

Surgery is tomorrow morning. Mom is seventy-two. Carol says she's mad, mostly, about the tomatoes.

Thurs. 9/4/97
Written at: truck stop, I-70, Ohio. Ray in the shower.

We had our first real fight in the truck.

I won't tell you what it was about, partly because it's private and partly because it was about a map, and that's embarrassing for two people with a combined age of ninety. What I learned is that you can't slam a door in a truck. I tried. You can pull the sleeper curtain hard and it just kind of sighs shut. You can't go for a drive. You can't go to your sister's. You're in the same eight feet doing sixty-five miles an hour, and one of you has to sleep while the other one drives, and that means trusting somebody you're furious at with your life.

We drove from Indiana to the Kansas line not talking. Then Ray said "I'm sorry about the map," and I said "I'm sorry about what I said about your mother," and we both laughed so hard he had to pull over at a rest area.

Every TV in every truck stop since Sunday has been Princess Diana. Big men in caps standing there with their coffee, watching the flowers pile up outside that palace. Nobody says much. A waitress here in Ohio has the newspaper picture taped up by the register.

Mon. 7/14/97
Written at: home! My own kitchen table, Tucson. Air conditioning that doesn't belong to the company.

Three days home. I've done four loads of laundry, slept eleven hours in a bed that doesn't move, and stood in the backyard last night when the monsoon finally came, the first big storm of the summer, with the smell of wet creosote coming over the wall. If you're not from the desert I can't explain that smell. If you are, I don't have to.

Big news. Our daughter Melissa got engaged on the Fourth of July to Wes Vann, who she's been seeing for two years. He manages a tire store on the east side and he's polite to me and shakes Ray's hand like he means it. The wedding will be next June.

When she told us, Ray's first words were "Does he have a job?" and I kicked him under the table so hard he yelped. Then he got up and hugged her for a long time. That's Ray. Ask the wrong question, then do the right thing.

We go back out Wednesday. I'm already counting.

Sun. 6/22/97
Written at: truck stop, I-81, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. More trucks here than people in my old neighborhood.

We delivered to Hunts Point Friday. That's the big produce market in the Bronx, in New York City, where it seems like every truck in America with a vegetable in it ends up sooner or later. We had cantaloupes from the Imperial Valley.

We got there at four in the morning and waited nine hours to unload. You back in where they tell you, which in New York is a spot that would be tight for a station wagon, with fifty-three feet of trailer behind you and men yelling directions in two languages, both of them at you. Ray backed it in on the second try and a man selling socks out of a shopping cart applauded.

At most places you don't unload the truck yourself. You pay lumpers, men who unload for cash, and you get a receipt and the company pays you back. I keep the receipts in an envelope inside another envelope inside my purse. Nineteen years of payroll. I am going to get that money back if I die trying.

Ray kept the doors locked the whole time. I didn't tell him I loved it.

Wed. 5/28/97
Written at: parked at a shipper in Fresno, California, waiting to load grapes. Four hours so far.

Let me tell you about the logbook.

Every driver keeps one. Each day is a page with a grid across it, twenty-four hours, and four lines: off duty, sleeper berth, driving, and on duty not driving. You draw a line along the right row for every stretch of your day, and you write down where you were every time it changes. The scale house can ask to see it, and so can the police, and so can the company.

The rules, as best I can explain them: you can drive ten hours, then you need eight off. You can't drive after you've been on duty fifteen hours. And no more than seventy hours on duty in any eight days. Waiting here at the shipper counts as on duty, so these four hours are coming out of what we can drive later. That's the part that makes drivers crazy. Somebody else's slow forklift is your time.

Drivers call the logbook the comic book. I'll let you figure out why.

Ray hates his. I love mine. I did time cards for three hundred and forty people for nineteen years, and every one of them thought their hours were wrong. This is the first time card I've ever had to keep for myself. Mine is very neat. Ray says it looks like a payroll audit. That's the nicest thing he's said all week.

Fri. 5/9/97
Written at: truck stop, I-10, Ehrenberg, Arizona, right at the river. Hot already.

Some of you have written to ask about the CB radio. (Some of you = my son and my sister. Hi.)

Everybody on the CB has a handle, a nickname. You don't pick it, exactly. It sticks to you. Ray's is Saguaro, because he's tall and he's from Tucson and he doesn't bend. Mine is Payroll. At the driving school I figured everybody's pay per mile on a napkin at lunch, and one of the instructors started calling me that, and it stuck.

The truckers talk on channel 19. Mostly it's about where the police are and which scale house is open. At night it's company. Somebody tells a long story about his ex-wife. Somebody sings.

The first time I keyed the mike and talked, the whole channel went quiet, like when a woman walks into the wrong bar. Then about six men at once wanted to know where I was from. Most of the drivers are decent, I want to say that. A few are not, and I turn them down. Ray offered to talk to one of them. I said Saguaro, I've handled worse at a union meeting.

Sun. 4/20/97
Written at: the sleeper, I-44 in Missouri, typed on my knees. Ray is driving.

Nobody told me the hardest part of this job would be sleeping.

The sleeper is the little room behind the seats. Ours has a mattress about as wide as an ironing board and a half, a curtain, a reading light, a cabinet, and a net you hook up so if the driver stops short you don't end up in the dashboard. Ray calls it the hammock.

You're supposed to sleep back here while the other one drives. For the first three weeks I lay awake listening to every gear change. I knew when he was going up a hill. I knew every expansion joint on every bridge in Oklahoma. When he braked I slid, and when he swerved I sat up. I was also listening for the sound of my husband falling asleep at the wheel, which is a sound I invented and was sure I'd hear.

Then one night outside Amarillo I just went out. Woke up in Oklahoma City with my face on the cabinet. Ray says I snored over the engine. I say that was the engine.

The trick, the old drivers say, is you sleep when you can, not when you want.

Tues. 4/8/97
Written at: truck stop, I-40, Tucumcari, New Mexico. Booth by the window with a phone jack.

My son Greg set this up before we left. He made the page on GeoCities and showed me how to write in Notepad and send it from the laptop through the phone line, and he made me practice three times at his kitchen table in Phoenix. So, Greg, if you're reading this, it works. Call your grandmother.

For anybody else: I'm Gert Camarena. I'm forty-four. For nineteen years I did payroll at a plant on the south side of Tucson, and last summer they closed it and moved the work somewhere cheaper. My husband Ray has driven a cement mixer around Tucson for twenty years and always talked about going over the road, the long haul, coast to coast. Our kids are grown. So in January I went to truck driving school in Phoenix, four weeks, and got my Class A license on the first try. Ray already had his. On March 10 we went out as a team for a company that hauls refrigerated freight.

Team means the truck hardly ever stops. One of us drives while the other sleeps in the sleeper, and every ten hours or so we switch. In four weeks we've been to Atlanta, Laredo, New York City, Salinas, and Denver, and we've been awake at the same time about two hours a day. We've been married twenty-five years. This is the most and least I've ever seen of him.

This truck stop has a phone jack in the booth by the window, which is why I'm writing tonight. The waitress saw the laptop and asked if I was doing homework for college. She called me hon. I am forty-four years old. I gave her a big tip.