Word: trucks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nothing is very easy here at the American Truck Driving School of Texas, a boot camp for long-haul drivers. The school's aim is to take a driver who may never have driven a car with a stick shift and, in three weeks of nonstop instruction, turn the greenhorn into a licensed, road-ready trucker. That means endless hours of double-clutching around a 3.2-mile course of rutted concrete while dodging orange traffic cones and 50 other student truckers...
...Chicago run loses its luster after the 100th trip. Romance is worn down by long days and lousy food. The course books don't talk about maneuvering Manhattan in a snowstorm. "They'll % soon find out," smiles a young instructor. "Drove ten years, truckin' got both my wives." Truck-company reps, roaming the halls to recruit talent, mince no words about the tough life. "Glory goes out the window when you're pounding 5,000 miles a week," says an old-timer. "Trucking used to be an honorable profession too. Now a lady can't even...
...Bear out there on the highway," says a recruiter. The real road is tougher than the school, but at this point, who wants to tamper with romantic illusions? "At the jail, all I learned was about the bad people," recalls Hernandez. "In the truck, you get the chance to learn something about yourself...
...trailer driving and grins broadly. "I kept telling myself, 'You can do it. You can do it.' " He sallies into the Texas night, now a king of the road with a new measure of self-esteem: "I can't think of anything that hasn't been hauled in a truck," he says...
...Starr County, Texas, the U.S. Border Patrol truck sits, engine idling, on a dirt track near the Rio Grande. Its headlights have been off since it left the highway half an hour earlier and bumped across rough farm roads to within a few hundred yards of Mexico, just visible in the moonlight on the far bank of the river...