After months of cajoling, I went with my husband on one of his runs. We took a load of coal from a mine in southwestern Pennsylvania to a commercial concrete plant northeast Pennsylvania. We then loaded at a small family coal mine in the area and returned home.

I really didn’t expect things to be much different from when I’d been driving on the big road, several years ago.

Damn, was I in for a shock. Morale is the lowest I’ve ever heard with very little of the camaraderie and care that used to bind the over the road drivers together in their shared experiences and miseries.

Now, it’s snark and snarls with occasional glimpses of civility and humor. Then there’s the four wheelers whose IQ’s seemed to have shrunk with the size of their cars.

I thought hubby was exaggerating when he complained how car drivers “messed” with big trucks until I witnessed for myself.

To get to the small family owned mines in northeast Pennsylvania where they load, we pass through many small, beautiful, historic towns with narrow roads and tight quarters. On a good day maneuvering 60 foot of tractor trailer is a challenge without any added extras.

It was just after dark when my heart leapt to my throat as a sub-compact car pulled onto the main thoroughfare from a side street without stopping, travelled about 300 feet and stopped. No traffic coming from the other direction, just us and them. The left turn signal came on, and still the car sat stopped, still no traffic coming the other way.

In the meantime, hubby is trying to go from 30 mph to 0 with 60 feet of empty coal bucket on a wet road without jackknifing or sliding into the car still not making his turn though the road is clear. Apparently this idiot has never seen the end results of a battle between 3,000 pounds vs 17,000 pounds.

We did get stopped without crumpling any metal or anyone bleeding. The driver of the car finally turns into the Dollar Store laughing and giving us the “finger”.

After adrenaline levels drop and I pried my fingers from the armrests, the indentations from my fingers still show in the cloth. I pondered on what happened. I can only conclude that some people don’t “get” what the trucking industry does for them. They’ve become so centered in their own little universes that they don’t understand how all the things they covet appear in their world.

If the coal trucks don’t haul coal from the mine, the mine closes and people don’t earn a paycheck to buy all their nifty gadgets. Not including all the things that don’t get made without coal, like electricity.

If trucks don’t come to the warehouses and retail stores, then there are no groceries, clothes, iPods, etc., to buy. No gas for your car. No car to buy from the dealer, no mail delivered to the post office, no food to restaurants, and on and on.

So before you pull some stunt or play chicken in front of an 80,000 truck, remember that not only could you get yourself killed, you could also kill others involved in the wreck. You cause another person to live with the fact that they killed or injured another person because of your stupidity, and that absolutely everything you own or use was delivered by a truck.