March 28, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Home for the holidays

The lure of the wide, open road pales somewhat for truckers during the holidays.

Sure, you can turn up the carols on the radio, wish each other Merry Christmas over the CB. But a big rig is no substitute for eggnog by a fire, a tree with tinsel, and kids sitting on your lap. All you really want to do is get home. Yet even that presents a formidable task: The weather’s temperamental and drivers unpredictable, their minds on the latest Christmas party or the next gift on their shopping list.

But the truckers at Dysart’s truck stop in Hermon on a recent night had no doubt that home is where they would be come Christmas Eve.

“I’ve only missed one Christmas in my 10 years as a trucker,” says Brad Burrell, a driver for Land Transport out of Framingham, Mass., as he cups his hands around his coffee mug. “And that’s when I quit that company.

“If there’s no other day of the year to be home, Christmas is it,” the father of eight says unequivocally.

“Christmas — like Thanksgiving — is a `must-get-drivers-back-home’ situation,” agrees Lenny Peters, president of Carlen Transport in Bangor.

“These guys are on the road all year long,” he adds. “It’s critical that they’re home for Christmas.”

Other representatives for local trucking companies also say they’ll do whatever it takes to make sure that the driver in the family is out of his rig and into his armchair for the holidays. That includes “deadheading” — trucker lingo for driving the rig home empty — or bringing the truck back loaded, but postponing delivery of the goods until after Christmas.

“We’d probably fly the driver home if necessary,” says Irvin Smith, traffic manager of H.O. Bouchard in Hampden.

“Planning on close deliveries allows us to have drivers back by Christmas,” explains Curt Chandler, operations manager for Central Maine Transport in Bangor. “It takes some finagling, but we do it.”

Getting drivers home for Christmas isn’t easy, agrees Peters. “We have to walk a fine line to make it happen. … We’re usually on pins and needles.” Still, he adds, each of his drivers will have been home as of last night or today.

Truckers still out wend their way eagerly homeward, each state line in their rear-view mirror bringing them closer to Christmas. … New York becomes Pennsylvania, Ohio melts into West Virginia.

“We’ll make sure that anybody who wants to be home will be home,” says JoAnn Thomas, dispatcher for Hartt Transportation Systems in Bangor. “But determination and sheer will have a lot to do with it, too.” These drivers want to be home and they just forge onward, she says.

And because no one, least of all a trucker, wants to be called a Scrooge, and also because out there where the rubber meets the road is home for much of the year, now and again you’ll see a truck dressed up for Christmas.

Dave McCutcheon, a driver with Sunbury Transport of Fredricton, New Brunwick, finds that Christmas spirit on the road isn’t hard to come by. A banner in the front of his rig calls out “Merry Christmas,” and a lighted Santa Claus beams cherubically from the grill. Christmas music from the radio fills his cab as he pushes toward home.

The closer it gets to Christmas, he says, the more he cheers right up.

“I’ve never missed a Christmas at home yet,” he says.

“I’m not there to help prepare the house or get the tree up,” laments trucker Dennis Blanchard of Carquet, New Brunswick. “I show up just like Santa Claus.” But Blanchard’s rig will be no less festive than Santa’s sleigh: He’ll park it alongside his home and outline it with hundreds of colored lights.

Burrell, meanwhile, feels like Santa Claus. He already has done his Christmas shopping at L.L. Bean during one of his runs through Freeport.

Still, there are drivers for whom Christmas on the road is Christmas enough. Thomas of Hartt Transportation says some truckers without families or with grown children “don’t mind being out.”

And when Dysart’s Restaurant, part of the truck stop in Hermon, opens late Christmas Day, that’s where they’ll be, feasting on burgers and apple pie.

A sad Christmas? No way.

“We treat ’em like they’re at home anyway,” says Dysart’s waitresses Nancy Colbert and Lori Jandreau.


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