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Women make up just 7% of truckers in the United States—a number that shows no sign of increasing, even while the industry suffers from a huge shortage of workers. We hear from trucker Desiree Wood, whose job has taken her to 48 states, about the freedom of life on the road, the dangers that herself and women colleagues face, and the joys that come with the occasional return trip home.
Lale Arikoglu: Hi there, I'm Lale Arikoglu, and today on Women Who Travel, we have a dispatch from a truck driver.
She talks about the freedom of the open road, as well as the risks that she takes along the way. Desiree has been delivering loads on long-haul routes since 2007. Her routes have taken her to 48 states.
Desiree Wood: My name is Desiree Wood, and I am a long-haul truck driver.
What led me to this profession was as a child, we took a lot of road trips. My mother was always taking us somewhere and she would not talk a lot, so I started looking out the window and counting the mileposts. It was like my time for daydreaming and thinking about all kinds of big ideas on those road trips. I also kind of memorized the roads. I love maps, all the junctions and all the legends on the map, and so I always had a love of the road, and when I moved out on my own, I traveled across the country many times in a CJ7 Jeep, in a Hyundai Excel, with the dogs, with the kids, and just going on a road trip, we're going somewhere. I loved it.
So when the kids were growing up, I was like, "What am I going to do now? With them gone, I don't have a reason to come home." And I was having a lot of changes, the empty nest syndrome, the mid-life depression, all of that. And I actually did become homeless. During that time, one of the things that was really bugging me was where do I fit in the world? Where do I belong? What should I do with myself to use my skills the best possible? And that's how I found trucking.
I always found the road to be very therapeutic for me. Driving just makes all my thoughts that are scattered all over the place get in order. So it's just always been very healing to me. I have a Spotify of Desiree's Faves, and it has everything on there from the Sex Pistols to James Taylor, Todd Rundgren to Elton John. So I go from one era to the next and I sing my songs, sing along, but a lot of times I'll drive for days without listening to any music just because I have a lot of things on my mind. And like I said, the road helps me sort that stuff out. It's almost like organizing my files.
My mom, her first language is Spanish. My great-grandmother and great-grandfather came to the United States around 1919 through the El Paso border, and they were migrant field workers. Growing up in Southern California, we lived at Venice Beach when we were little kids. At that time it was not the way it is now. It was all welfare mothers. We lived one block from the beach, a lot of single moms, and there was a lot going on during that time. My mom was going to some Chicano power movement. She was getting involved in some activism and then the American Indian movement. My mother actually took me out of school when I was 12 to travel around to Indian reservations.
I was really swept up, especially with the American Southwest, the reservations and thinking about what life was like before people came there and put roads and railroads. I love driving over Interstate 70 from Colorado to Utah, which is an absolutely beautiful highway, but it is treacherous in the winter and can have surprise winter storms anytime of the year. Interstate 80 going over Donner Pass is beautiful, but probably one of the really most beautiful highways is Highway 84 when you go into Oregon from Idaho and you drive along the Columbia River. When there's a little fog, it almost looks like you're in Ireland or something because the fog hangs over these... Never been to Ireland, but in my mind I think this would be, with these big grassy mountains and the fog hanging in the water below. Yeah, it's really beautiful.
Arizona and New Mexico are my favorite. It is the land of enchantment. It's magical to see it. The colors of the stone, the orange and the yellow, and when the sun is coming up or going down, the colors change and the sky is just so bright. The spaces are so big, and I think that's something that I just really have always been attracted to, either if I'm by the ocean or in the desert, I like wide open spaces. And I love to blow my horn, just like the freight train. And when I see the engineer of the train, I wave at them, and they wave at me, and their train horn is a lot louder than mine. Love when the kids ask me with the hand signal to pull my horn.
From the inside of a tractor trailer, you can see a lot. You can see what people are doing in their car, and sometimes they're doing things they're not supposed to be doing, especially men. The top of the trailer is 13-6, so you're pretty high up from the road, but you can see a lot over the sides of the highway. There's a lot of responsibility. If you even bump somebody, you're going to hurt them, bad.
The truck is a tractor and a trailer, a tractor trailer combination. The cab is what we call the power unit, or the tractor. Mine was called a sleeper cab. And you make it kind of cozy. You fix it up the way that you want it. You make your little, for me like a little hippie den, and you have your little things like you would have in your own personal bedroom. I like to have carpets on the floor. When I get up in the morning, I like my feet to feel a carpet, no shoes, soft, cozy, and change your environment within just a few feet or inches.
I didn't ever do the microwave thing, but I did have a toaster, a coffee pot, and this thing, it's called a lunch box that they sell for truck drivers. They sell it at truck stops and it looks like the old black lunch box that probably your dad took to work a long time ago. But what it is is a little oven that you can put these metal trays in there and cook something, and it gets up to like 350 degrees. So I actually cooked a little Thanksgiving dinner in there one time with mashed potato, stuffing and turkey, and then heated up some spiced apple cider, and it just plugs right into the cigarette lighter.
When I go to the truck stop, it's kind of like going to the general store. I got to do everything there. I got to take a shower, I got to get food. I need to make sure the dog is walked. I've got to get fuel. I've got to make sure I've got everything that I could possibly need. Go to the bathroom. There's no bathroom in these trucks, you should always keep peanut butter and jelly and some emergency way to go to the bathroom in the truck because you could get shut down in a winter storm for a few days. We really do not socialize at the truck stop. And for women, it's not a good idea. You don't want to let people know I'm parked right here for the rest of the night. There's a few times I will walk to a restaurant, Mexican restaurant and have dinner. Maybe I'll talk to somebody there, but I'm certainly not going to say, "I'm a truck driver and I'm parked over in the next parking lot."
LA: Coming up, Desiree's outspoken about the dangers women face, and a passionate advocate for safer conditions.
You're back with Women Who Travel.
DW: Sexual harassment and sexual assault in the trucking workplace has been a big problem for a very long time in that I was motivated to talk about it quite actively on the internet. I was pretty disturbed that the industry, which is, when I say industry, I mean the big corporate lobby groups were actively encouraging women to enter trucking, without preparing them for the conditions, which are that you have to cohabitate with somebody that you do not know for weeks and months at a time unsupervised in order to learn how to do it. And that is dangerous, because you don't know where these people come from, and they're doing it for all kinds of different reasons, and it's not to teach you how to be a good, safe driver. I haven't been able to get a lot of support outside the industry because a lot of people don't understand trucking.
It's starting to get some attention, but a lot of people have been hurt. People have been beat, they have been raped, they have been murdered in truck driver training fleet. They have been choked out and left for dead. These violent acts have occurred between coworkers. The trucking company hired them to be a driver, but then they made them into a trainer. The only types of people that want to be trainers are people that mostly have another agenda, and that is to get you somewhere far away, where you can't call for help, and try to have sex with you. Some will force you to have sex. Some get very, very violent.
LA: Women make up just 7% of truckers. Yet it's an industry with huge shortages of personnel. But the numbers of women drivers aren't increasing.
DW: Women want to be truck drivers because for a lot of them, there's the cool factor. They want to see the country, they want to go somewhere. They have a lot of life skills that they bring to the industry. They're safe drivers, they're very conscientious. They make good truck drivers, but it's starting to get to be even harder. A lot of companies are saying, "We're not hiring women." And when you ask them why, they say, "We have a waiting list because we don't have anybody that will train them. It's safer for you to not be trained with a man." It's like they know they have a problem, but they're not willing to go find out who the rapists are, and get them out of trucking. So they're punishing the women. So a lot were coming in, but not making it, because of these reasons of being abused, hurt, sexually assaulted, bad training, unsafe training. The money wasn't what they thought it was going to be. There's a lot of lies in the truck driving recruiting.
LA: Desiree on the joys of coming home to South Florida after her long, long trips, after this short break.
DW: In Florida, the first thing I would do would be to put on a dress and ride my bike to the beach and go swimming and go have a drink at the beach and just be a normal person and get so far away from the truck. Now I live in Las Vegas, and I have a horse, and I go see him and I do something fancy. I might go to a nice place for dinner, and just completely change my personality to a different person. It's very needed to decompress from the road. And it takes a few days, because when you're on the truck, you have a logbook. You have to account for every 15 minutes of your time on a logbook. When you get away from the truck, you're like, just... Do I need to write down what I did? You're just completely still shaking. Your body's still... So it takes at least a couple days to decompress.
What is the future for women truck drivers? Because we have autonomous trucks on the horizon, and the whole nature of trucking is going to change now. Drivers are working about a hundred hours a week, but they only get paid 70 hours when they're driving because they're paid by the mile. And now you want to put this robot truck and have a human that babysits it. And those are the times when we don't get paid right now, we only get paid to drive. So if the robot's driving, and we're expected to do all of the manual labor that we currently do not get paid for, it's not going to be that attractive or fun anymore. So I don't really know how sustainable it is for women as a long-term career. It's more of an experience I see right now. I'm seeing a lot of people that do actually make it through that first year that are just like after four years they're like, "Okay, I did this."
Years ago, probably 2013, a lady by the name of Anna Gutto said she had an idea for a screenplay about women truckers and wrote this script that became Paradise Highway. Eventually Juliette Binoche signed on to do it, and I took her on a ride-along. Her and I went on the road for about a week. We went to Monument Valley. And I drove in the beginning, and just so she could see what living on the truck felt like and sleeping in a truck stop. Then we filmed the movie in Mississippi during the summer, and I taught her how to drive the truck. So her and I would go down to a parking lot and drive, and she picked it up really well. She's got it. But in the film, I am in the truck behind the curtain. She felt more comfortable having me there.
I didn't expect to be part of Hollywood being a truck driver. And by the way, right now there's a film about me that's on a film festival tour. It's a 90-minute feature-length documentary called Driver, and it premiered at Tribeca in June. It is a completely different storyline of being a truck driver and the danger that women can experience.
LA: Thank you for listening to Women Who Travel. I'm Lale Arikoglu, and you can find me on Instagram @lalehannah. Our engineers are Jake Lummus, James Yost, Vince Fairchild, and Pran Bandi. The show is mixed by Amar Lal at Macrosound. Jude Kampfner of Corporation for Independent Media is our producer. Stephanie Kariuki is our executive producer, and Chris Bannon is Conde Nast's head of Global Audio.