What would make a fifty-something, carefully brought-up mother all of a sudden opt to go trucking?

It was a first-rate question and, like the majority of good questions it had answers both easy and complex. From ‘it sounds like fun’ through ‘it’s a conventional immigrant job’ via ‘well, earn more dollars in a truck than I could by using a Master’s degree’ with a detour along ‘I’ve driven ambulances and stretch limos, if I would like to get bigger it’s either a truck or perhaps a plane and this course is cheaper’…none of these reasons quite encapsulated it all.

And these were merely the rationalisations for the much vaguer pull towards the massive beasties that I’d been observing while driving ever since emigrating from the UK to Canada. There was clearly no rationalisation of course for the other vague pull, a lifelong addiction to doing things merely because they’re a little peculiar.

Adding to my list of reasons that it appeared to be a great angle for a book on trucking assisted a tad when explaining to those with no imagination, however, not much.

Actually, I hadn’t predicted fear when I breezed into Tri-County Truck Driver Training one afternoon in 2008. I just desired to determine what it took to be a trucking lady. I wanted to see America, how hard would it be?

Not surprisingly there is a bit of a difference between finding out how to handle a 75-foot, slow-moving guided missile and dreaming of receiving payment to see the continent; and actually earning a living. Spending 14 hours daily smelling of diesel. My first job was taking trailers filled with mail from East to West. Team driving across Canada’s unending prairies and across The Rockies, and sometimes getting lucky enough to get home via Texas. That Lake Effect Winter Storm was just an example of our countless weather-related narrow squeaks. North American trucking can be quite the drama.

Ihave been almost arrested in Baltimore, sick as a dog in Tennessee, terrified in Chicago, Dallas and Detroit and dug from the snow twice in one night in Alberta. I’ve made buddies in Virginia and enemies here at home. And, given half a chance, I would probably forget about how impossibly tiring it is and go out again to drive 18 wheels over the horizon.