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 Backwoods Brawling |
 Trick our Trucker Bottled and Blessed |
Loretta Bradford and Mark David.
Trick our Trucker
is friends, until recently, called him ZZ Top. He had a dark bushy beard down to his chest. He had a belly, too. Mark David loves his drink. And tobacco, and chocolate. And he and Loretta Bradford, his life-love and full-time co-pilot, would be out there on the open road, trucking lumber and pipe and tractors and whatever else hither and yon in their flatbed Peterbilt 387. They would drive (and still do) wherever Mark’s company, Central Oregon Trucking, would dispatch him: to Reno’s burbs or to New Mexico’s deserts or to the hubbub of New York City, putting in 14-hour days with 11 of them at the wheel, 30 days on straight and then four to five days off.
The couple, who park their 72-foot-long truck in Redding on those days off and drive a rental car to Eureka where their son Paul and a grandson live, love this lifestyle, actually. They’ve been living it for 15 years. “I see a different sunrise and a different sunset every day of the week,” said Mark, sitting with Loretta this past Monday inside the Eureka Los Bagels, one of their favorite hangouts. They’re both 44, and they’ve raised five children together.
“We have seen some beautiful places,” added Loretta. “I’ve seen the Statue of Liberty. I’ve seen the Painted Desert.” One of her favorite sights was Fork, Wash.
“It’s right out on Highway 101,” said Mark.
“It’s small, it’s beautiful, it’s mellow,” said Loretta. “You want to live there.”
“We spent the night on a little bluff there, overlooking the ocean,” said Mark. “We are definitely paid tourists.”
But even so, a man can get scroungy on a long-haul schedule like theirs, and it doesn’t help that truck stops have every kind of sugar-fat-salt confection to tempt a weary driver. As for exercise — you think it’s hard to go to the gym after an eight-hour work day, just try getting motivated after a 14.
Well, one day, Mark and Loretta, while under a load in Hesperia, decided to take a break inside the Wendy’s at the Pilot truck stop. And there was a guy in there with a camera, interviewing truckers. The guy was from CMT, and turns out he was doing a casting call for competitors on a new series called Trick My Trucker — a sort of “queer eye for the trucker guy” thing, which according to the blurb on the CMT website challenges the truckers to “break bad habits and get their butts back on the road to a better lifestyle [by] finding healthy alternatives to the junk food highway.”
So Mark and Loretta got themselves interviewed — and Mark ended up being one of 12 truck drivers chosen to be on the show.
“Thousands applied,” said Loretta.
“And I’m never the kind of guy who gets that kind of thing,” said Mark.
But he did, and for six weeks earlier this year, in that very same truck stop in Hesperia, a CMT film crew recorded the transformation of Mark David and his fellow chosen trucker guinea pigs.
“It was two truck drivers competing head to head” for each episode, of which there are six, said Mark. The truckers worked with a personal trainer and nutrition coach to get on an exercise and better eating program, and Mark says he went down two pants sizes and packed on some muscle. They took scissors to everyone — big hair, said Loretta, is “a trucker thing. They were all manly men.” Mark had extra reason for it, though.
“I had grown that beard for about two years,” Mark said. “I grew it because I had just gotten over chemotherapy.”
They also put the drivers in new duds. Now, that’s a tricky one, indeed. Loretta said some drivers might drive in a suit and tie — she’s seen it. “But when we drive, we drive comfortable,” she said.
Overall, the physical makeover didn’t change Mark too drastically said Loretta, not regretfully. Mark said it took some years off his looks. “My competition, though, Don Crawford: He came out looking like Rock Hudson. A dead ringer for him.” They learned some better food habits, which they appreciate — but then, Loretta said, ever since Mark’s cancer they’ve been more conscious about eating healthfully, anyway. Well, except for the fries. “When I was on chemo, I craved fries,” said Mark. But, he added, “you can always find something healthy to eat.”
“And I don’t want Mark to be a 400-pound truck driver,” said Loretta. “We get out and walk when we stop. Even though we live in the truck, we make a point of getting out of the truck. A lot of people become their truck.”
So who won, in the Mark-Don heat? They’re not allowed to say. Except, well, his competition, Don — who’s good buddies with Mark and Loretta now —quit smoking. And Mark didn’t. But he did cut back, said Loretta proudly.
“Mark went from a pack a day to 10 cigarettes a day,” she said.
Trick My Trucker premieres this Saturday, Nov. 10, on CMT. The episode Mark and Loretta appear in is Saturday, Nov. 17.
— story & photo by Heidi Walters
Yes, yes, from Oakland to Baltimore they’re booting the bottle from city government offices and fancy restaurants. The bottle of water, that is, which activists have taken on as yet another villain in the fight to save the planet from choking on plastic or drowning in deep-puddling carbon footprints. Bottled water, critics say, creates mountains of plastic bottles — which take energy to create, from petroleum no less — only 23 percent of which, nationwide, get recycled — which takes more energy to do — leaving the majority to pile up in landfills where they don’t start decomposing until after 700 years have passed, according to stats on the Humboldt Waste Management Authority’s website.
Well, hold that thought in your mind — but gently, with an open heart. Because here in California, where we have the California Redemption Value incentive (that deposit you get back when you recycle a bottle) and a robust environmental ethic, we lead the country in the recycling of plastic bottles. And, even closer to home, a small group of entrepreneurs has developed a bottled water business that could, if successful, create a bundle of cash to help conserve a particularly large, wild and important body of water: the Klamath River.
Allen McCloskey, a member of the Yurok Tribe whose reservation flanks the lower Klamath, and several other tribal members have begun selling bottled spring water from McClellan Mountain, off Highway 36. They’ve recently placed 10,000 bottles of their new label, Native Springs, in local stores, including Wildberries, Murphy’s markets and the co-ops in Arcata and Eureka. And, they plan to donate 5 percent of their profits from sales to the Yurok Tribe to use in its efforts to restore the Klamath River.
Native Springs water is bottled by a small, local company, McClellan Mountain Spring Water, which produces a number of such specialty labels as well as bottled water under its own name. “It’s an all-natural, energized spring water,” said McCloskey. It’s bottled at a plant on Samoa, and it does, indeed, come from a real spring on McClellan Mountain — it’s not glorified tap water, as some so-called “natural” bottled water produced by major companies, such as Coca Cola and Pepsi, has been exposed to be. But the kicker — the thing that McCloskey and his co-entrepreneurs think will grab the consumer as she stands in the market, staring at the cold drinks case, dithering between, say, a 99-cent bottle of McClellan’s own label and the Native Springs label — is that the $1.79 Native Springs water is blessed by Yurok elders.
“The blessing is done in such a way, our people believe it’ll bring emotional, spiritual and mental balance to all who drink it,” McCloskey said. And that, they hope, in turn will foster an urgency in the drinker to understand the Klamath River’s dilemma and become active in saving it.
McCloskey said the bottled-water idea came to him one day after he and his friends had met in his house to talk about the river. “We were discussing how it is that tourists, a lot of them, have no idea that the river has turned into a graveyard for salmon,” he said. “And I was left with the challenge of how to put the message out there. What I did was, I sat down in my chair. And I sat and sat and sat, and while I was thinking and thinking, I got up and got a glass of water from the sink. And I thought: ‘Water. These days, everyone has bottled water.’”
McCloskey balks at the idea that some people might find his idea un-environmental. “As native people, we are the original stewards of the land. And, looking at the California CRV, and the effort for recycling, we didn’t think it would be a problem. Our goal here is that everyone sees our label, [and buys it] and tries to save our salmon. We are not marketing a corporation. We are marketing to save our people. As one Yurok elder, Evelyn Natt, put it, the Klamath River is the lifeline for the Yurok people, and without the river the people will starve.”
— Heidi Walters
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