short stories / By Heidi Walters

Trick our Trucker

(Nov. 8, 2007)  His 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.

Loretta Bradford and Mark David

GALLERY >

“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.”

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