Day 42: Underlayment

Why am I here, anyway, in this life, this truck, this place? I believe some folks think I have lost all sense of reason in going on the road to live full-time in a 50-square-foot sleeper cab and attempt to hack out a living writing remotely.
But after several attempts to make it at newspapers, I was not making anything resembling a living wage, a fact driven home this summer as I skipped meals, put off travel and ate countless cans of beans. There is loving what you do, and then there is loving your life, or the kind of life you are living. 

There is no place to me, like the desert.
I was excited to move back to Arizona last February. But fast forward to the last few months of the year, when a poor decision compounded with a dental emergency found me facing the equivalent of two-thirds of my annual earnings in expenses.
I had to move out of my apartment.
I couldn’t afford my rent.
I had to leave my job. 
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A talented shipwright who studied at the Northwest School of Woodenboat Building, Daniel began driving trucks around three years ago in order to provide a more steady income to support his son. We’ve known each other for about five years and dated for a while before parting ways and reconnecting last fall. We’d toyed with the idea of me living on the road with him years ago, but both of us were not in the right place to do so.
This time, we made the decision to try it. 

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I spent about 20 days in the truck with Daniel in 2019, fresh off the Arizona Trail, so I had a limited picture into what living on the road doing long-haul trucking might entail.  Initially, I was curious about the stereotypes I had experienced surrounding trucker culture. My father had his CDL and a logging truck when I was a kid back in Minnesota, but he didn’t fit the caricature I'd formed of a cussing, smoking, womanizing, sleazeball. But I did not see any of this when I was on the road initially, and thus far, that’s been consistent. Where I gathered these impressions and judgements from I am still working to understand, but I still pick up the impression that truckers hover slightly below blue collar and are categorized as lower-class citizens by many folks. 
I'm here to look at why this is so.

Out of love, curiousity, necessity, I’m committing to exploring a whole new country.
An underlayment of networks, institutional knowledge, stereotypes, dedicated drivers and a transportation system critical to the way North America works. Regardless of what you’re wearing, eating, sitting in, reading, sipping or typing on, there's a good chance it came on a truck. The American Trucking Association states that more than 72% of the nation’s freight by weight is moved by trucks, and that in 2021, 3.49 million truck drivers — like Daniel —were self-employed, an increase of nearly 4 percent from 2020.
And yep, that's the rig below, from a vista at Wilson Arch in Utah.