According to Google, hospitality
is “the friendly and generous reception of guests, visitors and
strangers.”
I would add “good food, a comfortable bed, and lively
conversation.” By these criteria, my youngest brother Dave treated
me to fine hospitality, albeit in unusual surroundings. During a
recent five-day visit with him, I stayed in his home away from home,
the International Eagle 18-wheel semi that he drives for Erb
Trucking.
The
week before, Dave had driven out to British Columbia from Ontario with
my 89-year old mother on board for a visit with the western
contingent of our van Schaik family: brothers Rich and John in
Vancouver and the baby of the family, my sister Patricia in Powell
River. We all gathered in Vancouver on the weekend that Dave and my
mother arrived and celebrated Patricia's 50th birthday.
Then my mother flew back to Ontario and I hopped in the cab for the
drive back with Dave. It gave us a chance to spend long hours with
one another and rediscover the connection of siblings.
When
we were growing up on our farm near Mount Forest, Dave was on the
periphery of my attention: a thin young rascal with cow-licky sandy
hair, habitually dressed in a tan T-shirt, dark brown pants and white-toed running shoes. Richie, Dave and baby
Patricia made up the “little kids.” The older brothers John,
Steven along with me made up the “big kids.” Peter hung in the middle,
neither big nor little.
As
the oldest of the clan, and my working mother's stand-in housekeeper,
I was too busy sweeping floors and too immature
to appreciate my siblings' unique personalities. I thought my brothers were annoying nuisances. They used to call me
“The Boss”, and bossy I was. “Pick up your clothes! Clear the
table! Keep your dirty boots off my clean floor!” I
don't remember harbouring warm tender feelings towards them.
If
I was the Boss, then Dave was the Helper. He willingly pitched in with farm chores: milking cows, stooking hay bales, handing
tools to my father when the cultivator broke down. As a young man,
and then an adult with his own young family, he continued his helping
role, spending a good portion of his career leading L'Arche
communities, inspired by the example set by L'Arche founder Jean Vanier.
A
natural connector, Dave is the one to organize family reunions and
offer his home as the venue. He's the one who makes the regular phone
calls and stays in touch with family in Canada and abroad with an
annual Christmas letter. He's the one who is most likely to suggest
to my mother that they make the long trek from southern Ontario to
Ottawa to visit John and me in Wakefield, my mother's old friends in
Ottawa, and friends in Arnprior from the years that he and his family
lived there. And yet, I rarely spend time alone with Dave: our
phone calls usually center around family news, and during visits
there is always family present, children to play cards with, meals to
be prepared, and others to converse with.
So
here we were, youngest brother and oldest sister, five days captive
in the 6'x8' space of the semi's cab. If we didn't get along, it
would be the week from hell. It was anything but.
The
rig and its load
First,
I discovered life on the road, starting with the truck and its load.
You've
probably seen Erb trucks on the highway. The cab is fire-engine red,
the trailer white. The same bright red displays the company name and
its slogan 'Another Cool Move' on each side of the trailer. Even
though the lettering looks as if a high school student back in the
60s dreamed it up, Dave set me straight: the slogan refers to the
fact that Erb ships only refrigerated items. Hence the “cool move”.
In truck parlance, refrigerated trailers are called “reefers.”
Nothing to do with the marijuana that may or may not have influenced
the Erb company logo and slogan.
Dave's rig, like he himself, is middle-aged: it's seen roughly one and a
quarter million kilometers and lost its new vehicle smell ages ago.
Two tan upholstered bucket seats with fold-up naugahyde armrests and
serious lumbar support made for comfortable, if somewhat bumpy,
rides. The driver's console displayed enough switches and gauges to
rival a pilot's cockpit. Three extra-large cup holders were molded
into the lower half of the console, and three more hugged the inside
edge of the passenger seat. Truckers, who typically drive 11 to 13
hours a day, drink a lot of coffee.
The
rear of the cabin boasted two comfortable bunk beds, each with a
decent foam mattress and convenient bedtime reading lights. Thick
industry-grade plastic curtains in a dull brown separated the front
of the cab from the sleeping quarters. Similar curtains could be
pulled across the side windows and windshield, affording complete
privacy. Dave gave me the lower berth and levered himself onto the
top bunk by placing a foot on one of the several cupboards bumped out
from the walls. One cupboard contained books and CDs. Another,
fastened with a bunjee cord, held an accordian file folder and Dave's
backpack with his two changes of clothes. A toolbox with
screwdrivers, a drill, flashlight and other tools sat in the cupboard
right behind the driver's seat. A 5' x 2' piece of plywood, tucked
against the back wall served as Dave's yoga board. To ease the
inevitable stiffness that accrues from hour after hour of sitting, he
does yoga stretches morning and night. Dave's thoughtfulness as a
host extended to anticipating the female nightly pee. Hidden in one
cupboard was a white plastic portable toilet, complete with seat and
cover that he had bought at a garage sale. Inside, a removable green
plastic bowl. (I took responsibility for dumping the contents in the
morning.)
Various
cables crisscrossed the floor of the cab, supplying power to a
battered blue refrigerated picnic cooler -- another garage sale find
-- and to Dave's two computers. The first looked a bit like an
ancient Etch-a-Sketch toy. It connected Dave to Erb's dispatchers
back in the home office. From time to time it would beep urgently and
Dave would haul it onto his lap. At a break in traffic, he would
check whatever message the dispatcher had sent him. The second
computer, a heavy IBM Think Pad, displayed “Streets and Maps”
which gave him directions on how to get from point A to point B. Dave
admitted that he's too cheap to buy a GPS.
We
constantly checked Streets and Maps. Starting out from Vancouver,
our initial destination was Salem, Oregon. We were almost at the
bridge, ready to cross to the U.S. when the Erb computer barked
sharply. Dave pulled over to the side of the road. “Holy moly,”
he said as he read the message. A last minute change of plans meant
finding somewhere to do a U-Turn and head north to Pitt Meadows
(where was that?) to pick up 40,000 pounds of frozen organic
blueberries. I fired up Streets and Maps and acted as navigator.
Our route then took us through the Rockies and the northern border
States to Hartford, Michigan where we unloaded the blueberries.
There, a switch of trailers and we ferried 30,000 pounds of some
Campbell Soup product back to the Erb truck yard near Kitchener,
Ontario.
Except
for one pancake breakfast, we bypassed truck stop food, which is
probably why my brother is considerably slimmer than most of the
truckers we saw. He had prepared ahead of time all the meals for the
week. Our menu rarely varied. “That way, I don't have to spend a
lot of time planning meals,” Dave said. Breakfast consisted of
diced apple chunks in yogurt, sprinkled with walnuts. Lunch was
chicken salad on a soft baguette. Morning and afternoon, we snacked
on carrot sticks, green beans, snap peas, radishes and red grapes,
all neatly portioned and packaged in re-usable plastic bags. Our
dinners were chicken or beef stew topped with rice and then mixed
vegetables, all of which had been frozen in a serving-sized glass
containers before the trip and placed in the cooler, where they
gradually thawed out over the week. About mid-afternoon, we placed
one of the frozen containers inside a metal-lined lunch box, which
had a heating coil in its base, and plugged it into the cigarette
holder. Two to three hours later, the food was piping hot. I
spooned half the mixture into a small yellow plastic bowl for myself;
Dave slid the other half into a wooden maple bowl, then set that bowl
within a larger and flatter cherry bowl that acted as his tray. He
had turned both bowls himself on his home lathe. We drew forks and
knives from a black milk crate that carried odds and ends, including
cloth napkins that did for the week. Meals were always eaten while
rolling. Dave ate with one hand and drove with the other. During this
week, I served as waiter. When my brother is on his own, he sets the
cooler in between the front seats, right behind the gear shift, and
places the milk crate on the passenger seat. His right arm takes on
the swing and precision of a robotic instrument as he reaches across
the cab to retrieve food, utensils and computers.
We
spent an average of 22 hours out of every 24 in the truck,
eating, talking, reading, and sleeping. About every six hours or
so, we would locate a “Flying J” or “Pilot” truck stop and
allow a half-hour break to use the bathroom and make a quick call
home. Every couple of days, Dave filled the gas tank to the tune of
$800. The truck stops also served as our sleeping campground. At
the end of a long day, we nosed into the parking lot, already nearly
full with row upon row of trucks, many with engines constantly
running. Once I got used to the continuous drone, it made for a rough
but effective lullaby and I slept decently. A couple of mornings, we
treated ourselves to hot showers, $10 bucks each, with the second one
free if the driver had a Pilot loyalty card. Which of course Dave
had.
Waiting
and connecting
When
I told friends that I was going to be driving across the country in
an 18-wheeler, everyone, including me, thought it would be quite an
adventure. But Dave doesn't romanticize his work: much of the time
you're not doing anything but driving....or waiting. When
offloading, for example, you can spend two or three hours or even
half a day waiting. Waiting for someone at a loading dock to give you
the okay to back your truck into the dock. Waiting for the okay to
open the back doors and get ready to be offloaded. Waiting for the
forklift operators to remove the load. Waiting for the paperwork to
be completed at the front office. Now repeat the entire waiting game
for accepting a load.
“Truckers
have profound patience,” Dave told me.
We
were on the road from about 7:30 in the morning until 10 at night,
covering an average of 1100 kilometers per day. But we were never
bored. We dissected family dynamics, and shared our very different
memories of what it was like growing up in the same family. Dave
admired my parents for living their Christian faith so rigorously. We
both remembered the many different people who had stayed with us,
some for years. They were all disadvantaged to one degree or
another, from those who had Down's syndrome to lost souls looking for
a refuge, to a family of Vietnamese boat people. Not nearly so
generous in spirit, I recalled having mixed feelings: admiration,
yes, but also a yearning for times when siblings and parents might be
together just as family.
My
brother and I discovered that we both loved poetry, and our
conversations were often sprinkled with bits of poetry. Dave was
making his way through Leonard Cohen's Book of Mercy, and
I shared favourites of my own. We read letters and stories about our
family. We
mused about Dave's former
life as Executive Director of various L'Arche communities. After a
serious burn-out about seven years ago and tired of hiring and
firing, he decided to make a radical switch and turned to trucking.
“It has saved me,” he
grinned. “I no longer need
to help anyone and everyone whether
they want it or not,” he
said. “Most runs, I'm all
by myself. I have literally hours and hours in which to contemplate
life. Some days I almost feel like a monk.”
|
L to R, Annette, Dave, Luke, Cathy, Andy and Monica |
Don't
take that too literally. Happily married to Cathy, his wife of more
than 25 years and his beloved
'anchor', Dave
is definitely not a monk. He
and Cathy have raised four remarkable children. They adopted their
youngest child, Andy, a boy of Asian heritage who has Down's
syndrome. Growing up, Andy was never coddled and always encouraged
to take responsibility and stretch himself. Now a handsome young man
of 21, Andy
holds three part-time jobs, pays rent for the apartment that his
father carved out of their home (Dave and his renovation mania is
another story), shops and cooks for himself, and,
this fall, will enter Lambton College
to study community living.
Meanwhile, Luke is making his way around the world after teaching
English as a second language in Korea, Monica is working with people
with autism and plans to obtain her Relationship Development
Intervention (RDI) certificate, and Annette is a talented hair
stylist.
As
I recall the range and depth of our conversations during those five
days, it seems to me that my youngest brother has much to teach me
about what makes life so wondrously rich: as he himself noted in his
2012 Christmas letter, “good old-fashioned practical love”. The
kind of caring for others that doesn't boast, doesn't preach. The
kind of love that lifts the Scripture verse from the page and sets it
squarely in action in the world. The kind of love that is evident in
the small gestures of daily life: a smile to the clerk at the truck
stop's cash register; the cock of the head and careful listening to
the young forklift operator at the loading dock; the regular phone
calls to check in with family and
Mom.
Dave's
a guy who's comfortable with the non-conventional choices he's made,
comfortable to be around, and
who takes each day humbly and whole-heartedly. Not to mention, with
generous and friendly hospitality.
Can
you tell I'm proud of my little brother? I am. And today, April 10th, is his birthday.
So happy birthday, Dave, and keep on truckin'!