Garrett Whatley, we met, 1973, at the state hospital where we worked. Before he died, he was a mental health worker and a heroin addict. Late night, on the phone, he explained his emotional adjustment was arrested by drugs. I'm still fourteen, he said.

It's the same with truck drivers.

There's this adolescent dream of freedom. No one telling you what to do. Open road. Your own rules.

Trucks are immobilizers and enablers.

You get in, you slam the door, start vibrating along with the engine. Scenery fills your brain to overflowing with pictures, no sound, no plot. Drive eighty miles an hour to random spots then turn around and start over. There's huge pay checks and they're spent just as fast on quick pleasure, motel rooms, restaurants and two hundred dollar oil changes. Tires cost a fortune. Most guys last two years, full tilt going in circles.

Ask yourself what drives long-time, long-haul truck drivers.

There's something arrested in them, I can guarantee it, Garret Whatley says. Something dormant, they never dealt with. It lying there like a white worm. Those drivers are the worst at making person to person connection, he says. And once you're shooting up the drug or you slam that Freightliner door shut, making a connection with another human being is impossible. All of a sudden: it's not your fault. There's nothing you can do about it. You've got a line of drug in your veins or the whole interstate highway system. Garret Whatley has a great laugh. Late at night, I pick up the phone but it's dead.

Before my Mom died she told me to stop truck driving. It's an escape for you she said. You're getting out of the habit of dealing with the real world. My mother could divine the truth.

Truck drivers drive through scales every day. It's the place they are in direct connection with the real world and they hate it. Their hands tighten on the wheel. All sorts of filth spews from their foul smelling mouths. They can tell you stories about the scale operators hours on end. One story is that if the driver pulls over to sleep at the far end of a closed scale, in the morning the DOT will make them back up and weigh.

You can't back up over a scale.

Everyday truck drivers slow down to two miles per hour. One axle at a time over the scale. Sometimes there's even a safety inspection. No one is figuring out that each time it's their own options getting weighted along with the load.