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Truck Drivers Falter Under the Weight of High Fuel Prices

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"I'm about making enough money to go home and put enough gas in my car to come back the next day," Judy says. "This really is the worst I've seen it."

A couple drivers had entered the truck stop. David Williams, a company driver from Baytown, stood in the cafe and drank a glass of Dr Pepper.

Williams started driving in 1970. He learned from his dad, who let him ride along on grain-hauling trips from Texas to Oklahoma. He's had three of his own trucks in his career, but about a year ago, sold his last truck.

"I made more in 1985. It wasn't nothing for me to walk around with $2,000 in my back pocket," Williams says. "We pretty much go week to week now."

Williams stood at the window with his Dr Pepper and watched his company rig. At just about every truck stop, Williams had heard of truckers having fuel stolen while they slept, ate or showered. Williams spoke to one driver who shot a man in the foot after catching him at his fuel tank.

Mike Travers, a driver from Gulfport, Mississippi, says that some drivers carry an electric pump that can drain a truck of its diesel in about 30 minutes. Most diesel thieves target the big-name company trucks — like Werner and Swift — but if need be, some will steal from ­independents.

"I keep a loaded .44 in my cab," Travers says. "I can't afford not to. It's getting to that point."

A tanker driver, hauling 7,400 gallons of diesel, recently had his truck stolen at gunpoint in the parking lot of a gas station in southeast Houston. Tanker drivers are extremely on edge, Travers says, and he's heard some talk of a tanker strike during the second week of July.

Travers started driving a truck when he was 14, helping his father drive a dump truck around town. His dad later bought a big truck and started driving long-haul, working as an owner/operator. Travers's father was killed in a truck crash, but Travers was already driving a company truck, and decided to stay with the trade.

Travers has driven as a company driver for almost his whole career — 26 years — and his latest stint was three years with Knight Transportation. He quit working with Knight because he wants to buy his own truck. A friend in Mississippi is letting Travers drive one of his trucks for four months. If Travers can turn a profit with the truck, the man will sell.

So far, it's been tough. His plan was to haul refrigerated loads between south Texas and south Florida, but he wasn't able to scratch up enough freight to stay busy. He says he'll haul whatever pays.

Travers cut most expenses that aren't an absolute necessity at home — Internet, satellite television, pretty much all his leisure activities are gone, he says. On the road, he's cut back to eating only twice a day. A chicken-fried steak plate at the Key Restaurant was the first thing he had eaten that day.

"There's a lot of bad attitudes with the fuel prices," Travers says. "It used to be work that you enjoyed, like getting paid to travel, but you could actually make a living. Not anymore. Now it's just a job.

"If I'd known what I now do, I'd do something different. But I'm stuck. I don't have any other trade."

Williams has a driver friend, an owner/operator from Huntsville, who got behind on his truck payment, so he sold his personal truck to try and catch up. When that didn't work, the friend had to sell his house and move to a trailer across town.

"He lost a wife over that deal," Williams says.

Williams has never been married. He says the trucking life is too hard for it. It's common, Williams says, to drive 18-hour stretches. He'll risk a ticket, and fudge the log book a bit, by driving extended hours. Like most drivers, Williams says he never uses drugs to help with the drive, but he knows plenty of guys who do.

"I've personally never had to take pills, or done coke or crank, to keep on the road," Williams says. "There's a lot of guys having to run harder than hard to make any money, and they'll have to take whatever they have to take."
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John Bazzoon despises one thing more than high prices at the diesel pump: the government. The word encompasses plenty — cops, environmentalists, the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Department of Transportation. In his mind, they all want two things: To make it harder for him to haul freight, and to take plenty of the money he earns.

"Fuel could be $10 a gallon and they wouldn't give a shit," Bazzoon says. "It's all about money. My money."

Bazzoon works as an owner/operator out of Cleveland, Texas. He has satellite television in the sleeper cab of his cherry red Peterbilt, but spends much of his down time reading a copy of one of the Outdoor Life magazines he keeps in the door panel of his truck.

His Peterbilt is paid for, and Bazzoon has stayed profitable by hauling lumber for one company from Houston to Oklahoma City.

But on a recent sunny morning in Pasadena, Bazzoon was under government control. He had been pulled off the highway by two motorcycle cops and guided to a Hollywood Movie Theater parking lot. Officers from the Houston and Pasadena police departments, the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Harris County Sheriff's Office were on hand as part of a truck inspection day.

The officers were weighing trucks, inspecting loads, checking permits and logbooks, and writing tickets. As one truck passed through inspection, the officers on motorcycles would pull a new truck off the highway.

"They don't like it, but nobody wants a dangerous truck on the road," says Keith Bell, a "commercial enforcement" officer with the Pasadena Police Department. Since the trucks were being inspected in Pasadena jurisdiction, Bell was writing the tickets.

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