Road Trip Memories - Hail to the Truck Driver!

For the July 4th weekend, I took a trip down to Oklahoma to see my friend and brother from another mother, Joel. I have known Joel over ten years when we were growing up together in Oklahoma and that is both a wonderful and frightening thing. He’s an amazing friend but I’m also pretty sure he has amassed a significant amount of blackmail material on me over the years.

Much of this blackmail material was probably gathered during church trips. Joel and I both went to the same school but didn’t actually meet until I joined our church youth group. Initially, we hated each other. Or rather, he hated me and I responded in kind. He hated me because I tore up a picture of a 99.9% germ free toilet. Really, that is how we met. We spent the next year disliking each other pretty intensely until we became friends during a church lock-in. We bonded over our love of rule breaking. The group had been given a list of contraband materials so Joel and I bonded over how many we actually had with us. He won by a landslide, but what do you expect from a guy with a gun rack on his truck?

One of the regular church trips Joel and I went on was a ski trip to Wolf Creek in Colorado over Christmas break. We would pass the long ride in the bus by playing games like poker and what-can-Kris-fit-into. (In high school I was barely 5’ 3” and weighed around a hundred pounds so we liked to see what I could squeeze into. For example, we discovered I can fit in most storage spaces on a bus, including the overhead bins.) Joel would also teach us raunchy songs to sing on the slopes.

One song Joel invented to commemorate our church bus run-in with a very angry trucker. Our bus was plodding along the road through a snowstorm, when we seem to have swiped the side mirror of a semi-truck. The trucker was not too happy with us, so he got some buddies to box us in on the side of the road. Suddenly, the bus came to a complete stop. There was a semi in front of us, a semi behind us, and a very angry trucker beside us. With a metal baseball bat, he started bashing the doors and side of the bus. He screamed obscenities and demanded the bus driver come out and face him like a man.

Chaperones began calling the police, some girls squeeled with terror, and a few guys pulled out their pocket knives (I think just in case the truck driver wanted to reenact a fight scene from “West Side Story.”) I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. Meanwhile, Joel wrote a song.

We eventually got on the road again when the other two semis took off, probably when they realized we had called the police. The angry truck driver followed us for a while until we all pulled over to a truck stop where a police officer told the trucker to get over it. Interestingly, we later spent the night in a Love’s truck stop because the snow had made the roads impassable. It crossed my mind several times during the night that our belligerent trucker could be sleeping in his rig somewhere in the same parking lot.

We never did see the angry trucker again, but we kept his memory alive on the slopes. Joel wrote a song we sang all the way down the snowy mountain that weekend. And a song we still sing after a few beers.

Hail to the Truck Driver! Lyrics
(sung to the tune of Hail to the Bus Driver)

Hail to the truck driver, truck driver, truck driver!
Hail to the truck driver, truck driver man!
He drinks and he cusses,
He threatens church buses,
Hail to the truck driver, truck driver man!
He beats on the door,
With a big two-by-four,
Hail to the truck driver, truck driver man!