I rolled into a truck stop outside Barstow, afternoon, 61 years old and feeling every mile of it. The place was full of Harleys. They had most of the space around the fuel pumps occupied, bikes lined up wherever there was room, chrome throwing the desert sun back at anybody who looked.
Twenty bikes, maybe more. Men and women with tattoos from neck to knuckles, skulls and eagles and flames. Leather vests, patches sewn onto their backs that meant something specific to somebody. The whole place seemed to belong to them.
My first thought: Keep your head down, get your fuel, get gone.
Then I watched them for a minute.
They moved like a crew. Nobody gave orders, but everybody seemed to know where to be. One guy walked the line checking tires on bikes that weren’t his.
A younger rider was fighting a loose mirror bracket, and two older men drifted over to help. One held the light. The other found the right wrench. Nobody made a production of it. Nobody stood around offering advice from ten feet away.
They just helped.
I’d seen that before.
Before trucking, I served in Air Force special operations. On a crew like that, you don’t always pick the men beside you, but you’d better learn to trust them. At night, low and dark over bad country, the man calling out the altitude might be the only thing keeping you off a mountainside.
You check each other’s gear. You pay attention. If something doesn’t look right, you say so. And nobody leaves until everybody’s ready.
You don’t have to like everybody. You don’t even have to understand them. But when it matters, you’d better be able to count on them.
Different uniform here. Same thing.
Before anybody worries, I had no thought of trading my truck for a Sportster, wouldn't get my first tattoo at 61, and I had no thought of taking up with some woman in a leather vest who could drink me under the table and outride me home. I know my lane.
But I can recognize a crew when I see one.
Illustration by Natasha Langer
Walking past them, I caught pieces of their conversation. Which stretch had construction. Whether the kid’s bike would make Kingman or ought to see a shop first. The same conversations we have at the fuel island, minus the freight rates.
Truckers do it every day: weather, traffic, a bad stretch of pavement, a scale house that’s been busy or a truck making a funny noise the driver can’t quite figure out. Sometimes we offer advice. Sometimes we lend a hand. Sometimes we just stand there drinking bad coffee, talking about nothing in particular, because we’ve been alone with our thoughts for ten hours and another human voice sounds pretty good.
We don’t all come from the same place. We don’t vote the same way, worship the same way, or see much of the world alike. Some of us have college degrees. Some of us quit school to go to work. Some have been married three times. Some have spent a lifetime with the same person.
You can look at two men standing beside their trucks and know almost nothing about what they’ve survived.
Still, there’s a language to the work that you learn to recognize.
I thought about all that as I fueled up. I’d spent enough years in the military and on the road to know better than to judge a man by the first thing I noticed about him. Yet there I’d been, pulling in and sizing up a parking lot full of strangers before I’d even shut off the engine.
Old habits, maybe human nature. We sort people into categories because it’s easier than paying attention. The tattoos. The clothes. The accent. The truck somebody drives. We see the outside and fill in the rest ourselves. It saves time, and sometimes keeps us safe.
But every now and then, if we’re honest, it also keeps us from seeing what’s right in front of us.
Those riders weren’t my people. Not in the usual sense. I didn’t know their names, where they’d come from, or where they were headed. I couldn’t tell you what their patches meant. I still wouldn’t know what to say if one of them asked me to join his motorcycle club.
But I finally knew what I was looking at.
People who watched out for one another, who didn’t need an invitation to help. A young fellow with a busted mirror who didn’t have to solve the problem alone because somebody with more miles under his belt had stopped to lend a hand.
I’d seen that in aircraft hangars and briefing rooms, and I’d seen it at truck stops, too, though we don’t always give it a name.
The world has plenty of people willing to tell you what kind of man somebody is by looking at him. It takes a little longer to find out what kind of man he actually is.
I finished fueling and climbed into the cab. The Harleys were still lined up in the afternoon sun. One of the older riders was leaning over that younger man’s bike, showing him something about the bracket. The kid watched closely.
I fired up the truck. I had a long way to go. So did they.
For all I knew, we’d never cross paths again. I wouldn’t recognize any of them in a grocery store, and they’d probably never remember the old trucker who pulled in for diesel that afternoon.
That was all right. I’d come in seeing a bunch of bikers. I left seeing a crew. There’s a difference.
[Related: When the Pete's cooling system pukes, no one gets home alone]
