Truckers’ wisdom
Found this over at Bayou Peter’s joint, and it’s mighty intriguing.
Hopefully that’s not too small for older eyes to be able to read; if so, there’s a bigger version at BRM you might try. For his part, Peter modestly admits:
I don’t regularly drive on ice and snow (thank you, Texas weather!), but from my (very) limited exposure to it, I know I don’t do well under those driving conditions. I’d never considered the hazards of commercial vehicles, particularly 18-wheeler truck/trailer combinations, when their drivers have the same problem. Now that drivers can come in from Mexico (where snow isn’t exactly commonplace, to put it mildly) and drive all the way to the US/Canadian border or even further north, I can see that would make for…interesting times on the highway.
“Interesting” in the apocryphal Chinese curse sense, he means.
In my own case, me and several friends of mine took advantage of a snow-day school cancellation when we were teenagers to get out on our high school’s expansive, snow-and-ice-coated parking lot to spin donuts, lock up the brakes and slide, and just generally act like idjits all afternoon, intentionally teaching ourselves how to drive on the slippery stuff. Ever since then, I’ve had no problems driving on anything but actual black ice, which nobody can really drive on anyway, not even experienced, highly-skilled Hollywood stunt drivers.
Update! It occurs to me that some of y’all might be interested to hear more about the truck driver’s trials and tribulations on snow and/or ice, from the perspective of someone who’s been there and done that. When it comes to operating a standard-sized sleeper tractor/53’ trailer rig on snow and ice, it all boils down to one simple word: DON’T. Not if you can possibly avoid it, at any rate. No matter how skilled you are, how well-trained, how experienced, nothing good can ever come of it.
Regardless of how slow, attentive, and careful you are behind the wheel, maintaining control on the slick stuff is a matter not of ability but of sheer, unadulterated luck. That’s it, that really is all there is to it. Tap them gingerly, stomp them (NEVER a good idea, actually), gently press and release over and over again, I never could find a way to keep the brakes from locking up in snowy/icy road conditions. Whereupon the trailer would begin to slooooowly jackknife, and there was not one damned thing you could do to keep it straight and following behind the tractor where it’s supposed to be. Fully loaded or empty, didn’t matter: the trailer had a mind of its own, and did not respond to any of my increasingly-desperate inputs from the cab. I had always figured having some weight behind me would be helpful in such straits, but nope.
There is/was no horror quite as paralyzing as having almost the entire side of my trailer appear in the side-view mirror, freewheeling along willy-nilly without a care in the world. One time, creeping down the mountain-top from Hendersonville pulling a just-unloaded trailer, I looked on in helpless terror as my empty trailer hove into view in the right-side mirror, sweeping majestically around as if it intended to scrub the poor little old man in a mid-sized car I was passing right off the highway and into the deep valley below. Steering and counter-steering like a madman, mildly stab-braking trying to get my rogue trailer back into proper alignment, nothing I tried seemed to have any real effect.
Meanwhile, the old guy was completely unaware of the life-and-death drama unfolding all around him. Somehow, some way, the trailer DID straighten back out again without making contact with the other vehicle, and I continued on down the mountain switchbacks bathed in a flop-sweat as the huge flakes kept falling thickly, intensely grateful for the miraculous sparing of that poor oblivious geezer’s life…THIS time. A bona fide miracle with which I had nothing whatsoever to do, one way or the other.
I still have nightmares about that little misadventure. Which is just jake with me, honestly; coulda been a hell of a lot worse, I know that.
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