Lost Highway, by Emily Gogolak
“If you have to change friends, that’s what you gotta do,” our instructor, Johnny, told the twelve of us sitting in a makeshift classroom in a strip mall outside Austin. “They’re gonna be so jealous, because you’re gonna be bringing home so much money. Encourage them to get their CDL, too.”
A CDL is a commercial driver’s license, and if you pay attention, you’ll find variations on the phrase cdl drivers wanted everywhere: across interstate billboards, in small-town newspapers, on diner bulletin boards, on TV, and, most often, on the backs of semitrucks. Each of us had come to the Changing Lanes CDL School to answer that call.
Johnny’s rosy pep talk was built on the belief that trucking is still a lucrative career in America. And despite the devastating shortage of truckers observed by media outlets, politicians, and trucking associations, the classroom was full of people who seemed willing to buy in. The founder of Changing Lanes, a charismatic veteran named Delbert, asked for a show of hands: How many people definitely wanted to do long-haul trucking? Three hands. How many people were from Texas? Nearly all. Who had child support to pay? Four or five. How many people were here in a workforce training program? Five or six. How many people had been to prison before? At least four hands went up, fast.
Johnny and Delbert went over the school rules: no refunds, no talking back to your teachers, no name-calling, no drugs, no leaving trash inside the trucks. No phones, so give anyone who might need to contact you—“your children, your children’s school, your probation officer, your parole officer, your judge, your baby mama, your side chick, your wife, whoever”—your instructor’s number. And no being late: class starts at 7 am. But before we can get anywhere near a vehicle, we must pass a drug test and get our commercial learner’s permit. Doing so depends on how much we already know about trucks, or how well we can memorize the 178-page Texas Commercial Motor Vehicle Drivers Handbook in preparation for the written exam.
“If you show up at 7:01,” Delbert said, turning to me, “what’s gonna happen, Emily?”
“You’re going to be sent home,” I said.
We spent the day reading aloud from the handbook, starting with special requirements for Texas commercial motor vehicles. Each must carry flares, lanterns, or reflectors. Clearance lamps on the front of the truck should be amber, and
mud flaps must extend to no more than eight inches from the surface of the road. Vehicles hauling cotton get special license plates. Special rules exist for farm tractors and “implements of husbandry.”
I once tried to read Greek before fully understanding its alphabet. That’s what it felt like to study the rules of operating a big rig before ever having popped the hood or climbed behind the wheel. The parts of an air brake system felt impossible to understand—in my notes, I kept writing “spring breaks” instead of “spring brakes.” Eventually, we reached a section titled driving safely, which included subheads: “signal your intentions,” “communicating your presence,” “importance of seeing hazards,” and “always have a plan.” It struck me as advice for more than just driving. Truckers should avoid emotional conversations when behind the wheel, the handbook told us. Daydreaming, too, should be avoided.
A few days later, after stumbling through practice tests at home, I headed to a Department of Public Safety office and submitted my application. I smiled for a picture and made my way to a cluster of computers, alongside anxious truckers in training from other schools, one of whom failed halfway through and walked right out. I came within one wrong answer of failing the air brakes section, but I passed the remaining questions and got my permit, an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch sheet of paper that I would switch out with a laminated card that would soon arrive in the mail. A new pit materialized in my stomach on the way home: now I had to learn how to drive a truck.
The logistics industry has long sounded the alarm over the shortage of American truck drivers and the havoc it wreaks on supply chains, but just why that shortage exists gets less attention. Millions of Americans are trained to drive trucks and choose not to. Long-haulers, lauded as the backbone of our economy, live out of their trucks for weeks at a time, often working eighty-plus-hour weeks while earning little more than minimum wage. The economist Michael Belzer has equated commercial trucking to working in a “sweatshop on wheels.”
The shortage is, in fact, a retention problem: annual turnover at large fleets in recent years has exceeded 90 percent. “It’s a self-inflicted wound,” Steve Viscelli, the sociologist, former trucker, and author of
The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream, told me, “because the jobs are so bad. We don’t really have a shortage of drivers. We just have a shortage of people willing to live that lifestyle.”
I wanted to know who, amid these conditions, was still feeding the churn. To do so, I needed to not only get close to truckers, but to understand what becoming one entailed, and trucking school would be the best place to do it. I called my friend Ramona, a trucker of two decades based in the Mojave Desert. I wanted her opinion on whether this was a bad idea. First, she lamented that I didn’t get my license before February 2022, when the federal government rolled out new rules for truck-driving education. Now anyone getting a CDL had to attend a registered school that followed a freshly standardized curriculum, which some industry veterans like Ramona feared might make the process lengthier. But she saw no downside to having a CDL. She added, when I asked her about being a woman in the industry, that she doesn’t get the clichéd assumption that women can’t drive huge vehicles. “We give birth,” she said. “We can drive trucks.” I don’t have children, so I found little comfort in this logic.
I was living in Austin and wanted to find a school I could commute to. The ones run by the big trucking companies, such as Knight and C.R. England, interested me—they reimburse students for their training on the condition that they work for the fleet after graduation. A Facebook post for Changing Lanes, which had just won one hundred thousand dollars in an entrepreneurship competition, caught my eye: “Contact us today to start the process towards living a dream life!” The school had also posted a music video starring a woman trucker rapping outside a big rig: “Making moves, changing lanes / Let’s clock a few miles in the right direction.”
Though their classes were in Pflugerville, an erstwhile sleepy farm town now booming with Californians and priced-out Austinites, the Changing Lanes truck pad—where we would actually learn how to drive—was in a suburb slightly further east, in Hutto. Tuition for the four weeks was $3,950. I enrolled in a course that would start in September and spent the whole summer trying not to think about it. Still, I’ve always liked school, and the more skills you can have in this economy, the better. Also, I like truck drivers.
Over four weeks, we would learn how to inspect, maneuver, and drive trucks, and would pass a litany of corresponding tests at the Department of Public Safety. Only after mastering inspections would we be allowed to learn the three truck maneuvers we’d be tested on at DPS, and then how to drive on the road. Once it was evident that we had learned these skills, Changing Lanes would schedule our final DPS exam for our CDLs.
