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Just give him a road where the buffalo (and mule deer) roam and this truck driver will be just fine

Professional trucker Roger Price may not be the original eternal optimist, but his outlook on life in general and his career in particular reflect an uplifting attitude that puts him somewhere near the top of the list of all-time positive thinkers.

During an interview at a Central Arkansas truck stop recently, Price told The Trucker that he was in between jobs and had been for several days.

He didn’t elaborate about why he was unemployed at the time, but he spoke with confidence about his future.

“Oh, I’ll have a job by the end of the day,” Price predicted. “In fact, I should be getting a call-back any minute now.”

While he waited, he talked about his life and career.

He smiled and said he has lived his entire life in “Texarkana, the good one … the one in Arkansas, not the one in Texas. There’s a lot of rivalry, especially when it comes to high school sports, between the two high schools.

“It’s a somewhat heated rivalry, too, especially when you’re talking about football, but it’s  a healthy rivalry and it’ll probably continue long after I’ve left this planet,” he said, still smiling.

Price said he’s been a trucker “for at least 20 years.” He said he had wanted to be a professional driver “for as long as I can remember. My dad was a trucker and so was my older brother. I guess it just sort of rubbed off on me.”

His father never had to ask Price twice when he invited him to accompany him on a ride-along.

“I was always ready to go,” Price recalled. “I remember one trip when I was about four or five years old. We were up in the mountains of Colorado. Dad, of course, was behind the wheel and I was in the sleeper berth, when, all of a sudden this humongous mule deer came crashing through the windshield of the truck. Let me tell you, you never forget something like that.

“Fortunately, neither my dad nor I was hurt, but, needless to say, the deer didn’t survive,” he said. “As a matter of fact, we still have that old buck’s head hanging up in the house.”

Price continued, pointing out that “it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch if you were to say that it was the mule deer that was killed by a buffalo. How’s that? Well, dad was driving an old Buffalo truck at the time.”

“They didn’t make very many of them,” he added, “but they sure were one tough truck.”

Price’s appreciation of the world around him, no matter where he may be at any given moment, no doubt was fostered by the experiences he had during those early days of riding along with his father.

“Trucking,” he said, “opens up all kinds of doors. It allows you to see all kinds of things you probably wouldn’t get to see otherwise. I’ve seen thousands of things and places that I know I wouldn’t have gotten to see had I not become a truck driver.

“It also puts you in contact with a lot of interesting people all over the country,” he said. “There aren’t very many other professions that offer as much as trucking does.”

But make no mistake; there are a couple of things that Price wishes weren’t part and parcel with the job.

“For one,” he said, “I think we have too darn many weigh stations. We have them going into and out of every state in the Union and there’s a lot more of them in between, too.

“Having them where you enter and where you leave a state might be OK,” he added, “but to have one pop up every 20 or 30 minutes is a bit too much, in my opinion.”

Something else he dislikes is “the Hours of Service regulations. I remember when you could drive until you got tired, pull over, get some sleep, wake up and get back on the road without someone telling you when you could and when you couldn’t do your job. But that’s the way it is nowadays. It’s something you have to do. You either run legal or you’ll not run at all today.”

Price said he would “definitely” recommend trucking to someone looking for a rewarding career in today’s job market. And he qualified that statement by adding, “but I would tell them to make absolutely sure that they have a good foundation at home, first and foremost. And, if at all possible, talk your spouse into getting his or her CDL and becoming a co-driver with you.”

He said he would also encourage a prospective newcomer to “enroll in a good driver’s training school, keeping in mind at all times that you never get to the point where you can stop learning.”

“When you get to that stage in your career that you think you know it all, you’re treading on dangerous ground,” said Price. “When that happens, you could be setting yourself up for a major accident and you could kill yourself or someone else. I’ve been at if for a lot of years and I learn something new everyday.”

Now a company driver exclusively, Price at one time was an owner-operator. But that, he said, changed dramatically “when the cost of diesel started going up faster than my profit margin. When I first started, fuel was about 65 cents a gallon; today I noticed that it’s at $3.55 and climbing. It’s a crying shame, too, because, in the end, it has to be the customer who winds up paying for it.”

Price is a divorced father of two and has six grandchildren. When he isn’t on the road, he enjoys spending time with his kids and grandkids.

“I also like to fish and hunt,” he said. “And I make Indian jewelry and do beadwork. Plus, I like doing nature photography. I carry my camera with me everywhere I go.

“You never know when that picture of a lifetime might present itself and I, for one, want to be ready,” Price said.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have one with him the day that monster of a mule deer decided to challenge his dad’s old Buffalo. 

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