So Nelson Roig would not have waited a second more than 15 minutes at the Wilco truck stop to pick up the “reporter lady,” as he called her on the CB radio, who was supposed to ride along with him to Newnan, Ga. But she was already there when he drove in a little before 5 a.m. on Valentine’s Day.

“You can’t smoke in my truck,” he says, “and you have to take your shoes off if you want to go back into the sleeper.” He mentions that the other drivers are curious about the reporter lady because any time you have a woman in the truck, it’s gossip.

Roig and the other drivers work for Braxton Barger Grain Co., mostly in the Southeast, hauling Stalite products, crushed glass, fertilizer, rock, even dog food. He drives a Kenworth W900-L sleeper with a 39-foot dump bucket trailer. Braxton Barger owns the truck, but Roig thinks of it as his and buys lights for the windows and jeweled chrome extensions for the toggle switches.

“Nobody drives it but me,” he says, “and I take care of it like my own.”

Barger has eight trucks, five of them sleepers, three day cabs. Roig says his Kenworth is top-of-the-line. With the trailer, it cost $160,000. It has 229,000 miles on it, Roig says, and Barger will trade it at 400,000 miles, in about a year.

Running nights and early morning suits Roig best because traffic is light and patroling is more relaxed.

Rolling down Interstate 85 in the dark, the truck gobbles miles, almost silently except for a rock station on the radio. A faint floral scent rises from the floor. The ride seems to float because of the truck’s air suspension and air seat.

Roig chats. He has three kids, the oldest 22. He doesn’t look much older than that himself but says he’s 40. He grew up in south Florida, son of a Jewish-Catholic marriage, and quit school after the ninth grade to support himself when his parents split up.

Watching sideways, he grins at the reporter lady’s reaction and says people always are surprised. Then he admits he actually got his GED later on. And he learned truck driving without going to a truck-driving school. Still, he tells his kids to get an education because times have changed, and they can’t count on getting along without one as well as he has.

His cell phone rings. His wife, Georgette. “Fine,”Roig says. “We’re getting along fine.” He’ll call back when we stop for fuel in a little while.

Weighing in

When the truck crosses from South Carolina into Georgia, weigh stations near the border in both states are still closed, although it’s daylight. That’s good. Roig knows he’s not over the 80,000-pound limit, but even pulling over and driving through takes time, and Roig has stories about being routed into the inspection lane, even when he wasn’t running over weight. Having his papers checked takes longer than just driving over the scales. Time lost.

Roig says he thinks sometimes he gets stopped because he has long hair and a beard — classic drug profile. One time, he says, police stopped him in South Carolina. He was over the speed limit. But lots of four wheelers — passenger cars — were passing him. Officers asked if he had any drugs in the truck. He told them no. Any weapons in the truck?He told them no. They searched the truck anyway, then made him assume the position, against the side of the truck, while they patted him down. They found nothing. Meanwhile, four wheelers going faster than he had been kept zipping by.

What bothers Roig isn’t the stereotype that goes with his appearance so much as the hour it cost him. “An hour, I could have been more than 60 miles up the road, closer to home,” he says.

So he resents anything that slows him down unnecessarily?“Exactly,” he says.

Wanting to be home is one reason Roig likes shorter distances, hauling rock and fertilizer and glass. Long distance drivers are on the road days at a time. One trucker Roig talked to said he hadn’t been home in six months.

“Rock is a whole different ball game,” he says. Braxton Barger is good to work for because he maintains his equipment so well Roig knows it won’t break down on him. And Barger is flexible if family things come up. The Bargers, the drivers, they’re all like family. So Roig plans to stay with Braxton, driving about 3,000 miles a week.

If he wants to, Roig can always try other kinds of driving, because his class Acommercial drivers license certifies him for everything except wiggle-wagons — two linked trailers pulled by a single cab. They make Roig nervous.

Time for a stop

At a truck stop, Roig stops for fuel and calls his wife while the reporter lady grabs something called a chicken-cheese biscuit, a truly nasty, spongy thing sealed in plastic to be heated in the truck stop microwave.“You really do want to try everything,”Roig says.

As he’s pulling out, he answers a radio question about where to get the best price on diesel fuel. Roig tells the driver it’s the same — $1.29 a gallon — in Georgia and the Carolinas. (By the end of February, it’s up to more than $1.49.) A truck like his gets 7 or 8 miles a gallon.

Later, he says that when Georgette asked what the reporter lady was like, he compared her to a mature woman they know and that settled it. But for the other drivers, he’s thinking a different description would be fun. “Short, short skirt,” he says.

“Big Dolly Parton hair,” she says.

“Exactly,” he says. Maybe add a description of pushing from behind to help her up into the cab.

Approaching Atlanta, Roig stops talking, tenses and focuses on the traffic clogging every lane, both hands firmly on the wheel. Morning rush is over, but cars dart from lane to lane, sometimes swerving to avoid stalled vehicles. Gray smog clouds the air and if you open the window you smell pollution.

A flatbed in front of Roig heads right, toward the exit, signals its way back, then swerves off into the right lane exit again at the last minute. Roig holds tight, keeps going and says the driver probably wasn’t sure which exit he was supposed to take. The reporter lady clutches the door handle with her right hand and jams her left hand into a coat pocket with a banana skin, put there to avoid messing up the truck.

By the time he gets to Newnan, traffic has thinned out and Roig relaxes again. He answers a cell phone call from Penny Barger, Braxton’s wife and dispatcher, and assures her everything is going fine.

And he talked on the radio for a minute with Lacey, another of Barger’s drivers, already on the way home with a load of dog food. “Be safe,” Roig says at the end of the conversation.

No waiting

At the yard where he’s to dump the Stalite, Roig sees nobody is ahead of him. Good, he won’t have to wait.

In less than 15 minutes he’s dumped the load, hosed out the truck bed and headed to a local quarry to pick up a load of rock.

An operator drops the load into the truck through a chute, timing the drop for weight. But, weighing out, Roig finds it’s too heavy and tells the operator he’s going to dump some. “I don’t know why that happened,”the operator says. “I did it exactly the same as I been doing all day. Maybe it’s holding a lot of water.”

Roig understands, but he’s still annoyed. Not only will this cost him time, but also driving back around is going to get his truck dirty.

He ends up dumping more than he meant to, but says that’s better than running over weight, paying a fine and losing precious time. And it’s better than times, like last week, when he had to wait half a day to get loaded with crushed glass. That wait messed up his schedule for the next day and created more waiting later. Drivers often use waiting time to grab a little sleep. Truckers don’t sleep a lot.

Legally, drivers have to stop for eight hours after every 10 on the road, but sometimes they stretch it to make a deadline or to get home when they’re only an hour or so out. These days, though, Roig says some trucking companies put computers in their trucks that will shut the truck down fifteen minutes after it’s run the 10 hours. And receipts with time printed on them can also reveal when a driver has been stretching his log.

Along with time and weight, speed complicates drivers’ work.

Some major companies put governors on their trucks to prevent them from going over 55 mph, a real nuisance in a 60- or 70-mph zone. Sometimes you’ll see two of these trucks side-by-side on a hill, so nobody can pass. “That’s because one fool thinks he can get it up to 57 and pass, then can’t. Sometimes you just have to get on the radio and tell them to move over.”

Charlotte and Atlanta that forbid trucks moving in the left lane present a similar problem. Trucks get stuck behind slower vehicles in the center lane. The slow ones ought to just move into the granny lane — the right — to give trucks clear passage, Roig says.

Back in South Carolina, Roig misses the truck stop he meant to use, makes another call to Georgette to remind her about picking up lobster and rib eye so he can cook Valentine’s dinner, then gets a call from Penny about fertilizer he dumped in the wrong place the day before.

“No offense, but I was given the directions,” he says.

Then lunch and more fuel at a Wilco with a Wendy’s franchise. Roig likes stops with real restaurants better, but there aren’t many left. He has fries and a burger. Probably should have ordered the burger without the bread, he says, because he’s on the high protein diet, hoping to get back down to 200 pounds. He’s weaning himself off fries by eating only a few.

Road food doesn’t help weight control, does it?“Exactly,” he says.

By late afternoon, close to the North Carolina border, he’s on the radio with ‘Tater — Matt Cline, a young driver in his 20s, who’s carrying crushed glass from Alapharetta, Ga. They compare mile-markers and figure Matt’s not that far behind.

Get out there in the hammer lane and catch up, Roig tells him, and pulls over into the granny lane. He radios Cline about a couple bears, one by the bridge and another near an exit.

Eventually Cline pulls even with Roig, who says go ahead and take the lead. When they drive together, which they like to do because it’s safer, Roig usually leads, but today he follows, giving Cline directions from time to time. Cline is signaling to change lanes. “Wait until the little white car behind you passes,”Roig radios. He knows Cline can’t see it. Trucks have many blind spots, including close to the front bumper, and they can’t stop as quickly as a four-wheeler when a vehicle pulls in front of them.

At Charlotte, they have a couple quick discussions about going into the illegal left lane to pass slow four-wheelers. They do it but not comfortably.

At the Highway 29 turnoff, Cline peels off to head home, craning his neck for a glimpse inside Roig’s cab. “Stay safe,” Roig radios him.

It’s dark, about 6:30 p.m., when he pulls into the Wilco truck stop below Salisbury, checking with Georgette as he drives in. She didn’t get white wine for the lobster and rib eye. That’s OK, he tells her. It would have been nice, but it will be good without it. Two cloves of garlic isn’t enough, though. She needs to get a whole lot more garlic. “Love you,” he says at the end.

A quick wave and Roig’s headeds on home to cook Valentine’s dinner.