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When Barbara and H.R. Burris got married in 1961, they wanted to go into trucking and drive together. The dream took it’s own sweet time coming true.
“First there were the kids,” Barbara said, “and then when the kids got gone, there were parents.” So, although H.R. (real name Hoyle Ruben Burris Jr., but nobody ever says all that) started driving a truck for Yadkin Brick Co. when he was 18, and has made his living driving trucks for one company or another ever since, he and Barbara didn’t start driving together until about six years ago. But when it happened, it happened fast.
Barbara heard about the N.C. Truck Driving School, which, at the time, had a school in Albemarle. She thought about it and decided to give it a try. H.R. didn’t even know what was going on until after she’d registered. “He was surprised, even though we’d talked about it for years,” she said.
She finished school in six weeks and moved immediately into a job driving a 53-foot van for Cardinal, all over the East Coast and from Colorado to Canada, with H.R. Even though they were away from home for long periods of time, they were together in the truck, with a sleeper and everything they needed.
Perfect, huh?
Not.
H.R. said to someone who thought it sounded great, “Could you live with your wife 24 hours a day?”
“We had some yelling, screaming times getting used to each other, me not knowing what I was doing and we’re together for a long time in that small space,” Barbara said.
Turns out this isn’t unusual. In many married driving teams, the husband has been driving for a long time and the wife has learned only recently. Moreover, they have different ways of doing things. For many of them, the difficulties settle down as the women gain experience and confidence.
It’s worked that way for Barbara. She remembers how hard it was for her to drive into a truck stop she’d never seen before and then get back out and onto the interstate when it was all unfamiliar.
“But now I can go from here to California, and I don’t think anything about it. I can find my way,”she said. “I used to write my road numbers down because I did so much of the night driving and I was afraid I’d miss one.”
The division of time that had Barbara driving at night is a good example of the benefits of a team. “H.R. would drive and I would look at street signs. I would shine a flashlight on the signs. He could handle the truck better and I could see the signs better. Then after the last pickup, I’d do the rest of the night driving.”
The first week on the job, Barbara drove up I-95, into New Jersey, across the George Washington Bridge. The trip from hell. It scared her then, but now she feels safer driving a truck than a car. “You can see up above traffic better,” she said.
The longer they travel together, the more stories they have to tell and the more snapshots they have to show. Barbara is always taking pictures on the road, partly to illustrate the stories and partly to keep a record of all the places they’ve been and everything they’ve seen. They’ve been to Canada, Mexico, Nova Scotia (on a ferry) every state in the country except North Dakota and Montana.
H.R. likes the story about getting snowbound in Colorado in April 1995. All the trucks were stopped, but somehow a Denver television crew made it to where they were stuck to do a story, and, as H.R. puts it, “She got herself on television.”
Then in 1997, at Chicago, the snow brought a whiteout that caused 100 highway wrecks. It took them from 3 a.m. to 5 p.m. to cover a distance they normally did in three hours.
Snow got them again in Salt Lake City when they were taking what was supposed to be a shortcut off the interstate and ended up pulling doubles (two trailers) on a single- lane road. “We knew we’d had it,” H.R. said. “The snow plow was behind us.” The snow got so deep their truck stopped on a hill, which at least let salt trucks go around them. It’s 10 p.m., they remember, and Barbara is holding the light while H.R. puts chains on the tires. She’s got a picture of that, too. With chains they drove about 10 feet more and the chains came off. At that point they got on the cell phone and called for a wrecker.
H.R. has a rule:“When it starts snowing, I start stopping.”
In normal weather, atypical trip for Cardinal was loading in North Carolina Monday morning, driving to Connecticuit or Massachusetts to drop a load, picking up another one Tuesday morning to be back in North Carolina by Wednesday. This involved driving 1,000 to 1,200 miles a day.
The routine changed when Barbara and H.R. started driving for Watkins, pulling doubles. Barbara estimates 90 percent of Watkins drivers are teams pulling doubles, and the company pays its teams 44.5 cents per mile. They get home about every eight or 10 days and the company guarantees them 48 hours off before they have to go out again.
This is LTL driving, less than a truck load, and drivers go from terminal to terminal, leaving off trailers and picking up new ones. Getting the goods in the trailers from the terminal to the customers is somebody else’s job. In some ways, LTL driving is simpler than delivering a load directly to a customer in an out-of-the-way warehouse, except for one thing. With doubles you can’t back up.
The Burrises found out what a problem that can be last trip, in May. They were coming across Texas. H.R. was in the sleeper. Barbara was driving. Typically they alternate, driving five hours, sleeping five hours. She took a wrong exit off the interstate, then turned the wrong way trying to get back on and ended up in a residential area in Fort Stockton, Texas, with no around-the-block street to head them back toward the interstate.
After a little straight-ahead driving, Barbara said, “We may have to break down (separate the two trailers) this time.” That takes a lot of time and work. But just then they saw a vacant lot with a path across it and following it turned them back the way they needed to go. They still wonder what anybody must have thought that night to see a tractor in the dark pulling doubles across a vacant lot in a residential area. But H.R. said it wouldn’t seem any stranger than seeing a tractor in the dark pulling doubles into a residential neighborhood in the first place.
The Burris team hasn’t had many accidents in all the miles they’ve driven. The one they talk about wasn’t their fault. They were above Roanoke, Va. H.R. was driving. It was raining. Barbara was standing back in the sleeper relieving herself in a jar. “You can’t be stopping all the time for that,” she said. And she wasn’t watching the road at all.
“Will you look at that!”H.R. said.
An older woman was driving her car on the wrong side of the road, heading toward the truck. She swerved, hit the tractor wheel, bounced, hit the trailer wheels and ended up on the side of the road, while H.R. tried to bring 4,500 pounds of loaded truck to a stop and Barbara tried to hold on to the back of the seat with a jar between her legs.
The good news is that nobody was hurt and a Department of Transportation worker moonlighting as a trucker witnessed the whole thing. Apparently the woman in the car had some sort of seizure or black-out.
Health has sometimes been an issue for the Burrises, too. They both remember Barbara’s heart attack. They met another couple for breakfast at Shoney’s in Concord, 1996, 10 a.m.
Both couples were bobtailing — driving tractors without trailers on the way to pick up a load. After breakfast they went their separate ways. H.R. and Barbara were on the way to Celanese for their load when Barbara felt like she had an elephant on her chest. She crawled into the back seat and said, “Get me to the hospital.”
“Are you kidding me?”H.R. said.
She wasn’t. She’d been popping Tums and her jaws had been hurting since Tuesday. These are heart attack indicators, she said.
“So, I bobtailed her right straight to the hospital in Concord,” H.R. said. If they’d already picked up their load, they’d already have been out on the road, not close to any hospital.
More recently, H.R. has had surgery on his shoulder for a damaged rotor cuff. He’s still wearing a sling and can’t lift his arm as high as his shoulder. Although doctors told him it could take three to six months to mend, H.R.’s figuring on three. And Barbara’s having a problem with her arm that may be because of a pinched nerve. Doctors are still testing to figure out how to treat that.
Their last trip out was in May, the trip that took them across a vacant lot. This time at home has had its advantages. Regular meals. Plenty of sleep. Baths. But now they’d like to get back on the road, because for all the places they’ve been and all the new things they’ve seen, they haven’t seen enough yet. They still want to get up in the morning and do it all over again.
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