DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour  

It is no surprise that I’m an unabashed fan of trucks — big ones and small ones. Where I live, alongside Interstate 75 in Michigan that is the main freeway thoroughfare to Canada, watching trucks is the 18-wheeler version of reading Playboy, except in this case I don’t have to hold anything sideways and unfold a couple of pages to get to the “good stuff.”

Yesterday I had to go downtown for an automotive association board meeting and because of a slowdown over a couple of miles of construction I started noticing all the vehicles stuck in traffic with me, especially some of the trucks.

I like to see where they’re from; sort of like playing the license plate game in my little mind. It was during this forced reflection that I began to notice something that I hadn’t paid much attention to before; waste-hauling trailers.

When I say “waste haulers” I’m not talking about garbage trucks or even trucks that are transporting dumpsters to their various assigned places. On the contrary, I’m talking about those creepy-looking huge bins that seem to be sitting on about 28-36 wheels. And what makes them so creepy? It’s primarily how grimy and beaten up the rigs are.

There’s nothing better-looking than a shiny and clean 18-wheeler (or as is the case in Michigan occasionally, a 42-wheeler) tractor-trailer with a great paint scheme and DUAL, tandem tires (not those damned wide-assed single tires that are become so prevalent) careening down the road.

The symmetry is something to behold, whatever that means. But in the case of waste hauling trucks and trailers it’s like watching some of those “in the future” scenarios that are often shown in movies like The Terminator or Total Recall. You know what I’m talking about; those horrific-looking grey hunks of machinery that always seem to be driving through wreckage like that found in a junkyard. I don’t recall ever seeing one that looks like it has just arrived from the factory. Even a railroad car occasionally looks new before the various street gangs turn them into artists’ canvasses.

You’d think that at the very least the trucks themselves would have a chance to look halfway clean; but almost always not the case. And just how do those trailers get so beaten up. They look like the metal equivalent of Manuel Noriega’s face.

Are there convicts or just plain nut jobs that are issued ball peen- or sledge-hammers and attack the trucks like kids attack Christmas presents Christmas morning? Maybe they’re paid by the dump site to hurry the trucks along so more of them can be processed in the course of a day rather than give the driver a coffee or cannabis break.

Gravel haulers are bad enough to be around because of their obvious incontinence of leaking rocks and stones, but instead of a Depends or other fine example of adult diapers the “end product” seems to find a home in vehicle windshields. Everyone gives wide berth to them except the poor bastard who is penned in behind one and for the life of him is unable to switch lanes. Meantime, no matter how many woofers, tweeters and watts his$15,000 audio system has, the sound of pelting stones is louder than a hailstorm in Thule, Greenland. But, I digress.

I’m afraid to be in the next lane from a waste hauler because just looking at them would tell the average conspiracist that at the least I’m going to be subjected to leprosy. If you are what you eat then those trailers have had a lifetime of hauling entrails.

What makes it so bad around my neck of the woods is that we’re right over the river from Canada, and Canada has a contract with this area where they bring dozens, if not hundreds of truckloads daily of their waste and deposit them in dumpsites south of Detroit. (Full disclosure: before I learned of this I used to think any dumpsites south of Detroit’s was Ohio.)

Canada is a wonderful country and a good neighbor so maybe the thought on the part of the Michigan legislature is that imports from Canada might beautify the Detroit area. They’re probably right but that’s subject for future anthropologists to ponder.

The purpose of this week’s rant is to illustrate what sacrifices some of us make so that others will benefit from them. By that I mean living in a region that garners fresh topics I can write about every week that hopefully brings a smile to one’s day. I doubt there is one other locale that people can name that has the problems we have in Detroit: poverty, famine, high-unemployment, harsh winters, blistering summers, race riots where we once had state fairs, scurvy, rickets, boils, frogs and a host of others…waste haulers being the latest epidemic.

Call me crazy (and I am that alright) but I can’t help thinking that sometime in the future  cockroaches and trash-hauling trucks are going to be the only thing left after the nuclear holocaust.