<bang bang>

I was roused out of my half-napping state.

I crawled to the front of the truck and pushed the button to lower the mud-spattered window.

“Gotta rope?”

“Oh geez, I’m sorry but I don’t.”

Not yet I didn’t have. In fact I didn’t even have a tow hook but I wouldn’t find that out until later.

The Kenworth W900, belonging to an acquaintance and retired from over-the-road, had a C15 motor pushing 635 hp, courtesy of a computer tweak. It didn’t get stuck very often, and could out-pull many of the trucks in the group that ran in the area I was in at that time.

It has resonators instead of mufflers on the stacks but it wasn’t obnoxiously loud. It just had a nice, throaty, low rumble. It was blasted fun as well. I would get occasional comments over the radio on the truck.

I idled by the gas station in Tioga where we’d stop and grab coffee and/or snacks, and sometimes even a nap depending on how busy and backed up the disposal site was.

<static> Then a drawl.

“WHAT is in that truhhk? It saunded lahk a freight train when you rolled by!”

After one load 3 of us had picked up in the Wheelock fields, we came to Highway 2. Smooth highway after miles of bouncing washboard gravel. I made a right turn onto the highway and took off, the other 2 trucks following behind me. I didn’t realize I could out-pull the other trucks. I didn’t think much of it until several minutes later…

<static> Then a drawl. It was somewhat faint and crackly, there were 2 different voices.

“Where did that bumblebee done go?”

“Ah don’t know! She hit thayut highway…and she was gone?!” The faint crackly voice rose in octaves of what-the-hell-incredulity as that last sentence was spoken. I looked in my mirrors and realized I couldn’t see them, they were that far behind. This was an anecdote that always made the (bumblebee) truck’s owner giggle when I’d tell it to him.

Bumblebee.

A considerable amount of power and careful momentum usually kept that truck unstuck in the copious muck and mire present many places. I gained a little bit of notoriety for not getting stuck.

When I first arrived to the oil fields, my first sight of the bumblebee and it’s owner was them neatly buried in the fuel stop’s gravel lot to his axles in the saturated mix. A loader had to come pull him out. I wondered what in the hell I was in for.

A couple of other trucks and myself pulled into an overflow ‘parking area’ (I use that term loosely) by the disposal site one night in the pitch black. We had ended up there, prepared for about an 8-10 wait. We pulled in there and sank to the gills. I knew for sure I was stuck and my good record was done for. The tires were buried halfway in mud. If you’ve ever seen the front tires of a tractor, that’s a lot of mud!

There wasn’t much we could do about it at that hour so we made the best of it and took a nap.

When we awoke, we had another driver on standby with a tow rope ready to pull us out. If we could get out of the ‘parking area’, there was a pretty good quagmire yet at the end of the driveway to also make it back through.

I blinked the last of the sleep out of my eyes and crawled into the driver’s seat. I pushed in the clutch and put it in reverse. To my shock, the truck moved! No way.

It inched backwards, it inched forwards, but it moved!

I got the truck maneuvered around inch by inch, so I was facing the exit. Jerry, a driver from NC, drawled, “Thayut *$&# truck has the power to plow through. Grab them gears as fast as you can when you hit the end, you should get through.”

I hit it and we hit the end of that driveway drifting though gumbo. Mud flew everywhere but the truck and I got out, no tow required. Completely invigorating! We chugged on down to the disposal to hook up and offload.

One night awhile later I was coming in again with a load. It was some ridiculous hour in the middle of the night. There was room in the disposal this time, so I headed for the second driveway into it.

<rumble><SQUISH><spin>

“Oh crap!”

Smack into an (unavoidable) hole in the driveway I fell, buried to the axles. The one time I got stuck and I had done it right.

Squish! Uh-oh.

Excitement! Other drivers who knew me crawled out of their trucks to waddle over through the mud in their sewer boots so we could gather round and take inventory.

“You done stuck now, Magicwolf!”

We shined a flashlight to assess things.

“Holy cow, I guess I certainly am.”

Stuck done right!

I got to call the truck’s owner at 2 am to ask him where on earth the tow hooks were stashed. This was fun because he had called me not too many days before at some crazy hour to ramble when he was 3 sheets to the wind, waking me up and fixing it so I couldn’t go back to sleep easily. Paybacks!

I gleefully pulled out the phone.

<RING> I knew how jarring the phone sounded at that hour.

<muffled> “mmph ‘lo?”

I was irritatingly cheerful.

“Hidee ho! I’m buried in mud to the axles! Where ARE your tow hooks?”

“Whaa, shou’ be ‘tached in the front.” <yawns, coughs>

“Well they’re not.”

“What?! $(#@&&$!! Jeeeezus fuuuu$&^#  ch$(*#&”

Someone had stolen his tow hooks. Woke him right up. After I got him going, I cheerfully told him we’d figure it out and have a good night! <click>

Eventually we got the tractor free with a gentle yank from another truck and back properly in queue. It was the only and only time I buried the bumblebee.

I didn’t shoot the video below, but here’s Jerry providing an example of what swimming the trucks around on narrow soupy roads entailed. I’m not sure this wasn’t the ‘overflow’ area driveway, which was pretty tight to get out of.

[fvplayer src=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JnFLJvY03w”]