Soaring fuel prices push Lincoln trucker to brink of ruin

LINCOLN – Ask Jeff Whiting about his life and you’ll hear how hard his 15-year-old son, Jordan, worked to make the Mattanawcook Academy football team.

“He’s somewhere between a beanstalk and a broom handle, but he’s lifting weights, and, boy, he can run,” Whiting said Friday. “He’ll run right up and grab you and you could probably carry him the length of the field, but he’d never let go of you. He’d be right on you.”

He’ll speak of 19-year-old daughter Laura-Beth attending the University of Maine at Fort Kent to study nursing and 17-year-old daughter Jeffri-Lynn’s college plans with all the relish of a man who quit school at age 15 to work.

But Whiting’s children occasionally have had to tiptoe around the burly 40-year-old lately. When Laura-Beth needs schoolbooks or Jordan needs a football jersey, they calculate the cost and the more difficult decision – figuring whether asking for the money might set off their father’s temper.

“They know by his mood whether they should ask or wait a week,” said Whiting’s wife, Kattie.

And he has had many moments, Kattie said, of sitting at the kitchen table wondering how to economize more, or staring at the television, surly or oblivious to any efforts to rescue him from his torpor.

“Some days we walk on pins and needles,” said Kattie, a personal care attendant. “It makes our whole home tense. It’s like, do you dare ask how his day was. Do we want to know if we have enough money to pay the bills?”

“It’s stress, all the time,” Whiting said quietly, “especially with Christmas coming.”

Whiting might be Maine’s first independent truck driver driven out of business by diesel fuel prices that have skyrocketed since summer. He has been driving a Yates Lumber Co. truck all week while his own 18-wheeler has sat idle outside his Main Street home. The for-sale sign is ready to go, he said.

“It’s been on the truck three or four times since the summer,” Laura-Beth said, “but we always take it off.”

Whiting has loved being an independent trucker all his life, Kattie explained. “We don’t want him to lose that,” she said.

But because of soaring diesel fuel prices, Whiting figures he’s one blown tire, about $250, from losing almost all of his weekly profits.

In a typical week, he’ll earn about $4,100 hauling about nine loads of wood chips, pulp or logs – the load varies according to whom he’s working for. He’s on the road five days a week, traveling as much as 624 miles a day and working up to 17-hour days, including breaks. Then on the weekend, he’s doing truck maintenance.

With diesel fuel averaging about $3.63 a gallon, his weekly fuel costs are about $2,548. His truck payments run $250 a week, which is low because in an industry where a new rig costs $150,000, he bought his Peterbilt used for about $20,000, Whiting said.

Another $180 a week goes for insurance, and $650 a week on average covers his house and family expenses. Subtract income and business taxes of about $125 a week and Whiting said he is left with about $347 of profit for a 75-hour workweek, if nothing goes wrong.

“He works his tail off, he truly does,” Kattie said, “and for him to come home and to see that he has nothing is truly frustrating.”

Whiting’s love for his Peterbilt truck is a source of humor for the whole family. He washes and vacuums the truck with monotonous regularity, and woe is the poor fool who dares mess it up.

“There are times when I am jealous of that truck,” Kattie said.

Whiting assured his wife that she comes first.

While the Whitings were flirting Friday, Gov. John Baldacci was meeting in Augusta with state energy department officials; leaders of the Coalition to Lower Fuel Prices in Maine, which Whiting belongs to; and other trucking and forest industry leaders.

After the meeting, Baldacci declared a civil emergency in response to the diesel fuel crisis.

Upon hearing of the declaration Friday afternoon, Whiting called it a good start.

“If he can get it done, it should all work, and help. There’s no doubt about it,” Whiting said of the governor’s efforts.

So the for-sale sign, Whiting said, will stay off his truck a little longer.

Nick Sambides Jr. may be reached at nsambides@bangordailynews.net or 794-8215.