Navina’s adventures and misadventures while driving trucks in Oregon and beyond
I spent a couple of years (at least) driving trucks on and off the Ranch. Here are a few of my more memorable moments – some of them a bit embarrassing!
At the weigh station
One time coming back toward the Ranch, I almost missed a weigh station. I had been by the weigh station many times and it had never before been open. Sailing along, suddenly I realized it was open and saw the weighmaster running out to look at my truck.
Not stopping could result in a very large fine. So I stopped at the exit and backed onto the scales – not an elegant or easy thing to do.
The weighmaster was pretty pissed that I had almost driven past him, but after a bit I got him to laugh about my load. It was huge – full of insulation, so didn’t weigh much. It was piled as high and wide as possible – it looked like a giant mushroom.
Replacing the xyz part
Driving down I-84 toward Portland, a red engine light came on with a bit of a weird noise from the motor. Fortunately a truck stop was less than 2 miles ahead. I pulled in and decided to open the hood to look inside before using their pay phone to call Ganesh, the awesome truck mechanic, back at RBG*.
As soon as the hood was open, another trucker quickly came over and asked about the problem. Before long there were 5 or 6 guys all huddled around – ostensibly to help me, but mostly curious about a women in red from that weird commune driving a truck.
One of them actually knew what to do and clanged around in the engine for awhile. He came up and told me to start it. It started alright and he told me that he had fixed it enough for me to get into Portland, but not to turn it off again until at a shop with a mechanic, where they would need to replace the XYZ part (don’t remember exactly what it was).
So I drive to the warehouse in Portland and call the Ranch. Ganesh says, “No problem, I’ll get the part and you can put it in.” Yeah right! An hour later a driver from the Hotel arrives with the part. Ganesh explained where the part went in the motor and told me what to do. “Oh, by the way, you may have to turn one of the bolts from both the top and the bottom.”
Sure enough, the part goes way down in an awkward place to access. I get to it by diving headfirst under the hood with just my feet sticking out. I can only turn that bolt about ½ turn from the top. Then have to climb out and clamber underneath the truck to turn it about the same amount – and so back and forth about 10 times to get it removed.
Then about 10 times to get the new one in!
I was covered in grease, but proud when it actually worked. It was too late to complete the run back to the Ranch, so spent the night in the Hotel. My one and only foray into being a mechanic!
PS: In general, my interactions with people off the Ranch were never a problem. They were curious but always courteous and respectful. For the most part they also thought it great that a young woman was actually driving semis. At that time there weren’t that many women truck drivers.
‘Ma Negative’
After I’d been driving off-ranch for at least six months, our team coordinator showed up one morning and said (rolling his eyes) that word had come down from above that I was too negative to drive off-ranch so they were sending someone for me to teach. My crew thought it totally hilarious and started calling me ‘Ma Negative’ since I was probably the least negative person on the crew.
They sent a very nice swami for me to teach. Unfortunately he had only ever driven a small automatic car. Here we had a large truck with 22 gears (even though we mostly only used about 6 of them) and you had to double-clutch to change gears.
For about a week we drove around the Ranch with him crunching and grinding the gears mercilessly. I was very patient and explained repeatedly, and demonstrated repeatedly, but he was ultimately totally frustrated. One day he just threw up his hands and said he was going back to Jesus Grove to ask for a job change.
A few days later, word came down that they’d made a mistake and I wasn’t too negative to drive off-ranch after all…
Frostbites
One time driving back to the Ranch in an ice storm, the highway looked like a war zone. Lots of cars piled up in ditches and crashed into each other. I saw a bus from the Ranch in a ditch but couldn’t stop because I wouldn’t have been able to start up again. Going by the Multnomah Falls, which were totally frozen over, was a most beautiful sight.
Then… driving into Antelope/Rajneesh** my brakes start to freeze up, so I stop at Zorbas Café and with some help start to carrying out hot water to pour over them. It gets them working enough to drive into the Ranch.
What I hadn’t noticed, though, was that one finger of my glove had a hole in it. I ended up with frostbite on that finger!
It took a couple of weeks before I got the feeling back in that finger.
A bit of adrenaline…
I was pulling an oversize load up the hill out of the Ranch. My lead car driver was new and he hadn’t managed to get an older couple to pull over to let me pass.
So here I come around the corner and there they are right in the middle of the road!
I keep going as slowly as possible, hoping the guy would figure out how to put his car in reverse and pull over, but no, they just sit there looking scared as the big truck bears down on them… I stopped about a foot from their front bumper!
The big problem was that we were on the steepest part of the road and there was no way to re-start that big of a load on that steep of an incline, on a gravel road.
So I got to back that baby up, about a mile down the road, until we got to a flat enough spot to drive forward again. The load was too wide for me to see around it in the rearview mirrors, so my lead car and tail car drivers had teamed up to relay to me which direction I needed to go, and about how much of a curve we were going around so that I could get the angle approximately right.
We only came close to going over the edge once, but there was quite a bit of adrenaline going in that maneuver…
How to save 100 miles off a trip
Between trips I often worked a day or two on an RBG crew. One day I was working on Samir’s crew in Antelope/Rajneesh when he came up to me and told me to park the machine I was operating, because I was needed back at the Ranch. Neither of us knew what it was about.
When we got to RBG, the Blue Goose had been fueled up and attached to the trailers we used to move modular housing. I was given a map to a place in Idaho and told to get there as soon as possible. It was going to be a long trip – about a 10-hour drive each way.
We had purchased all the buildings at a mining camp. A sannyasin crew was already there, preparing the units for us to move. Backing our trailer under the modules was tricky as the balance had to be just right, which meant there wasn’t a lot of room for error.
We had decided that even for the return journey we would take the ‘shortcut’. It would cut about 100 miles off the trip. The tricky part, though, was that it had an overpass too low for us to go under it with the modules the way they were normally loaded. Fortunately it was not a real busy highway.
This is how we did it: the lead car driver went to the other side of the overpass and stopped any traffic. The modules were several feet higher on one side than the other, so I would aim for the high part to go right under the middle of the overpass. I would then creep drive slowly up to it and tip the load, which means: we lowered the high part right down onto the tires while lifting the other side as high as possible – then creep through. It just gave us inches to spare.
I don’t remember how many units we moved that way but I seemed to be doing it for weeks on end.
Satori on Santiam Pass
Driving a big flatbed truck over the Santiam Pass with snow pelting down and visibility limited to just a few feet in front of the truck, playing George Winston’s Autumn, ‘it’ just happened – what I call a satori – where time stands still, the mind is blank, and a feeling of oneness with all that is.
Once over the pass I pulled over and just savored that time with tears of gratefulness.
These stories were previously posted by the author in the Rancho Rajneesh group on Facebook, here re-published and edited with the author’s consent
* Rajneesh Buddhafield Garage
** Antelope was renamed ‘City of Rajneesh’
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