During college, as I was planning to change the world with my writing and dreamt of seeing it all during my successful, world-spanning lecture tour, a semi-truck was not the exact method of travel I pictured. None of my ambitions or dreams for my life included peeing in a used McDonald’s coffee cup on a regular basis.
Ken, my driving partner and boyfriend (and the one responsible for this undertaking), probably never imagined, while studying under some of the country’s most famous chefs, everyday sharing “number two” morning ritual in a public bathroom with several other men. Most of these men also have way less shame and privacy concerns than Ken does. These were only a few of the unforeseen life changes and discomforts faced on the road our first year.
Out here in a “big truck”, as we dirty, old truck drivers call it, the choice was to laugh or cry at the daily life. Either the humor of the tears were relentless. I chose to laugh at it all. Maybe the following details of the demise of modern excretion processes (also known as peeing in a cup) were not necessary, but I could not deny the post-traumatic stress. Despite my less-than-luxurious upbringing, which included grandparents with no running water, thus only an outhouse for toilets I thought I had escaped further experiences of this type. So, the first day of truck driver training, as I was staring at the “white bucket” in my trainer’s truck, I told myself this reversion was probably going to be the least of the things to come worthy of a panic attack.
Almost a year later, I still recall the details of this graceful introduction to driving a truck over the road. I was put on a truck for a month with an experienced driver to learn my new trade. She had a white bucket with a lid, lined with a trash bag. This was her trashcan, but, also, to my horror, it was her urinal. When she had to go, she peed right in it, and put a new trash bag in over it. There was a curtain that separated the sleeper part of the cab from the front seat, but she would go even when I was in the top bunk.
During my month with her, I would not use it. I would get out and go inside the truck stop or customer to use the restroom. Sometimes there was no restroom, or we weren’t allowed to use it, at a customer. I, then, would go on the side of the road or behind the truck tire, which I felt, for some reason, to be more acceptable.
My next realization was that she felt no need to take the trash out every day. She was aggressive and short-tempered, and the cab of this truck was her home. I had no right to question her standards, and I did not, but I would lie on the top bunk at night, just guessing how long she would go with her piss sitting in that white bucket. It didn’t help that she seemed to be lazy. She never set foot outside the truck the whole first day I was with her.
The next day my question was answered. She pulled the multiple bags out of the white bucket. She tied it off and set it in the floorboard of the passenger seat. I was only able to stare. I don’t remember why I started doing it—probably because she would let it set too long—but I was holding my breath as I carried the “trash” to the receptacle. I could barely carry the bag with what must have been gallons of this stranger’s urine.
There were so many things I was graciously and eagerly willing to do and learn during my training, but disposing of a stranger’s five-gallon catheter bag was not one of the things for which I prepared. I continued doing this chore every few days until my training was over. Except for once.
The only time I let the bag set and refused to do to the chore was a time when the smell, sound, and time it took her to go were unusual. I was afraid she had actually shit in the bucket. I was not taking the chance of touching what possibly could have been her bag of shit. I didn’t say a word, but I was not handling that bag. She finally took it out without questioning my refusal. Otherwise, I continued to carry out the disposal duty.
She and I did discuss the restroom situation. She said that pretty much all drivers peed in their trucks. I asked why they don’t use small port-a-potties than can be dumped into a toilet. She said that it was actually illegal to have a port-a-potty in a commercial vehicle. Instead, it has to be hidden and thrown in a trashcan for someone to handle. This seems so much more sanitary. I started noticing all the plastic milk jugs and other such containers all around the outskirts of the truck stops, where drivers just throw them in the cover of night. So instead of sanitarily disposing of waste in a port-a-potty, our already lovely truck stops are also decorated with pretty, yellow, disease-ridden bottles of piss.
Ken and I received our own truck, and I rambled about my previous living conditions in disgust, until, one day, clinging to my preferred sanitation requirements was no longer possible. It was a nasty, cold night in late November. Wyoming. The road was barely visible as the wind over the Continental Divide blew the snow in gravity-defying angles. This caused the dangerous optical illusion that the truck wasn’t moving. Pulling off to use the restroom at a truck stop or rest area was to risk running off in the ditch. The exit ramps may not have been clear of snow and were probably icy, so the less we stopped, the safer we were.
But, I had to go.
It was this night I first peed in the truck. A grabbed a used plastic coffee cup, peed in it, put the lid on, wrapped it in a Wal-Mart sack, and put it in our trash. I disposed of it the next day in shame, wondering if the other drivers at the truck stop knew what I was doing.
When Ken began peeing in the truck, he also went in a used coffee cup, but he dumps his directly out the window, sometimes while going down the highway. Then we drive off into the sunset with dried piss on the side of our truck.
Ken and I joke for a while every time we would go in the truck, but the humor wore off after a while. We just had to accept this as an unavoidable part of our new daily lives.
Ken has a much better excuse for avoiding using the restroom at the truck stops. Imagine there is a truck stop that has 100 parking spots for trucks. Imagine that so many of these trucks are driven by men, some of them with two men driving as a team. Then picture a bathroom with three sit-down stalls, if he’s lucky. Between eight and nine in the morning, as all of these men are trying to use the restroom at once, they all have to poop, as for some reason seems to be typical.
Many people think that restrooms at bars are the gateway to Hell. I imagine, as Ken is sure, that it’s really a men’s truck stop bathroom during the A.M. hours. You will see, or at least smell, the devil. And when there are no more seat covers in the dispenser (or “truck-stop cowboy hats”, as we now know they are affectionately called), you will know there is no God.
Well, that is just part of the story. It’s humiliating, humbling, embarrassing, and all those other shame-describing words. But we are still on our truck-driving journey, so I must not be so terrible.
We’ve been in all the states except Main, Vermont, South Dakota, and Alaska, though we were very close to Alaska on a trip to Northern Alberta, Canada. Despite the rough conditions faced, the freedom that comes with this job is something I’ve never felt before. It’s this freedom that reminds me to laugh.
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