Oh Canada! The Canadians!
#2 May 2025
Dear friends and fellow WildCats.
Good day to you all. Quit focusing on the Tariffs for just a few minutes! If you didn’t read WildCats #1, look it up because you’ll need it to follow along. Find the stories on our website or just ask us for them. (Currently in the About Us section, WildCats stories will soon have their own spot.)
Traveling back in time to the starting point once again, it’s July 1985. I was so proud to stake that first dollar we collected up on the wall, yes it was a US dollar of course. And so, it begins. Remember, that first guy in the #1 story from that part of the US up there. It seemed like way up there. Remember I was a 25-year-old that knows and understands almost nothing. I’d also had my eye on these mostly yellow and red fancy trucks with the company name stretched across most of the side of each trailer as I was preparing this building across from the Truckstop to become a truck wash. I soon read in small letters across the bottom of a trailer some Canadian stuff. You guessed it, here one comes. I now had a Canadian dollar on the wall. Another great learning experience is about to be underway! These guys turn out to be a mixed bag of characters and personalities. This group of northern “Wildcats” turned out to have regular runs down to FL and back. There was a group of Sunday shiners and another group of Tuesday – Wednesday shiners. There was this one that stood out in the crowd to me. I’m going to just call him “Guy” for short in the interest of protecting everyone’s integrity so to speak. He had that accent he couldn’t help but overall spoke very clearly. Everything is relative. We befriended each other right away. He was a little short guy like me so there was an immediate unannounced connection. Comparatively he was much more mature in age than me. Relatively. I just recently met some guys from his neighborhood, in a parking lot, and learned that “Guy” passed away just a couple years ago. That meeting I have just mentioned, I will reveal it in another story to come later. Guy had the nicest way of helping us realize every spot that we missed washing his truck, and we fixed them all. As our relationship grew, we would ask each other some questions about life with the trucks and away from trucking. His team members, in his absence, would often carry on in great detailed descriptions about him in all kinds of ways but mostly all of them with smiles and laughter. I began asking about girlfriends and such, what he did over the weekends along with all that man talk stuff. As the answers to the questions were revealed, the tales about him started making sense. Guy would tell me emphatically, NO girlfriends not even visitors. Much later in life one young lady finally convinced him otherwise. I understand that in reflection he wished he had stuck to his earlier ways. His response finally opened a bit, and he revealed that if the businesses were open at Exit 93, he could get a multitude of his needs handled and not have anything else that went with the girlfriend scenario. I am relatively certain that any of you east coast runners know of Exit 93. These dudes were without question members of the Wildcats group.
As it came to pass, Guy and I remained friends for many years. This is the start of the Mid Eastern story. There was often a vast menagerie of men and women to gather here and wait sometime long periods to get a truck wash. The tails and tales and stories of the trails were beginning to get shared in conversations. This was amazing for me and often for most involved in this chatter. Some folks raced in because they were some kind of racing to something, or maybe they themselves were just racing. Some threw the Frisbee in the back yard. Some went over to the truck stop professing to be right back, for hours. Some went to eat and others to play those games of skill that backed up to the wall, plugged in and challenged the world. I don’t think the world ever exactly won but I’m thinking the Truckstop did.
Oh, Canada and the Canadians and all the rest. You relating to any of these? Be careful, don’t think about this and laugh out loud in the presence of others, you’ll be judged for it.
Stay cool and be safe. Be kind to your neighbors!
On the United States side, Happy Memorial Day! Remember!
On the Canadian side, your November Remembrance day is coming, but it will likely be Cold, too cold to cook out!