Too Local: The Iowa 80 Trucker Jamboree

This is an article I talked so in depth about writing that Swiss had a Mandela Effect moment when I told him I didn’t write it because my little brother never sent me the pictures. And it is kind of painful yet joyous, so I avoided it. So, why not write it a year and a half too late sans pictures?

My dad was an over the road truck driver. He lived it, he loved it. His dad was a driver, one of his brothers was a driver. It was in his blood. In the mid 90s, after driving for almost 20 years he convinced my mother that being an owner operator (owning your own truck and leasing your services out) was a better option. His first truck he bought used from his boss at the time on a friends and family type of deal. That was the birth of 7K ent. My dad’s own trucking company.

As kids, my dad scheduled his loads (get your mind out of the gutter) so he could be home on weekends. Once a year each of us 5 kids would get a chance to spend a week on the road with dad. The business worked well enough that my parents felt confident to move on from the used truck they bought to trade it in and buy a brand new truck. After signing the loan my mom had to vomit; but they did it. My siblings and I continued to get our chance to travel with my dad. This was our life.

But, simmering underneath all of this was a time bomb. In 1988, before my dad had ever bought that first truck, he had been diagnosed with something we had never even heard of, Multiple Sclerosis. My parents understood their children were intelligent, and sat us down and talked us through it. We all accused each other that they would become the official ass wiper one day.

My dad was a truck driver, through and through. For depreciation reasons the family business traded in that first new truck for another and he kept driving. Then, on a run to the west coast (from Wisconsin), the left side of his body just stopped working. He was able to drive back, because he was good at what he did. But with stakes like that, it was decided he wouldn’t do long runs anymore. He started doing in-state local routes. When he couldn’t do that anymore he taught driving (and how to fake your log books). Then, when I was in Las Vegas for college he slipped and fell on ice at work. There was a blood clot, he was stuck in the hospital, immobile. Couple that with the MS, he declined quickly.

One thing I never realized until I grew up is, my dad was a nerd. He was always the Americana cowboy boot wearing former high school football player truck driver with a bald eagle screaming in the background. He was man’s man. When my older brother came home drunk without telling my parents where he had been my dad woke him up at 6am and made him chop wood (my parents were cool with underage drinking, they just wanted to know where you were, this is Wisconsin after all). When that same brother got pulled over in the family Suburban doing 100mph in a 65mph zone and my mom expected my dad to come in and help scold him he said ‘I didn’t think it could go that fast.’

But, my dad loved Star Trek. Growing up I didn’t realize that was a ‘nerdy’ thing until other kids started calling me a nerd for liking it to. We went as a family to two Star Trek conventions in our area in the 90s. The only movie my entire family went to see in the theater was Star Trek VI. The only movie my dad ever took me to, along with my little brother, was Star Gate. NERD!

My dad declined quickly after the blood clot. He couldn’t work and was mostly immobile. I dropped out of college to move home and help care for him. Once home I commuted 70 miles each way to complete my degree while caring for him. He died in 2014 due to an infection from his superpubic catheter. He survived a car crash with a train in his 20s to die from his own piss at 59.

My dad had always wanted to move to Montana for retirement. If he couldn’t retire there, he wanted his ashes spread there. So, with some of the life insurance money we bought an RV and we took the sons and daughters, now grandkids and packed in to the RV and drove to Montana to spread his ashes.

By 2024, that had been a decade ago. At the time of the first trip most of the grandkids were under 10. By 2024 they barely fondly remembered that trip. So, I devised a plan. It just so happened that the Iowa 80 Truck Stop, the self proclaimed Biggest Truck Stop in the World, was having their annual Trucker Jamboree the weekend of 10th anniversary of my dad’s passing. It’s like a car show for trucks. I also realized Riverside Iowa, the real town where the ‘fictional’ Captain James Tiberius Kirk will be born in 2233 was near by. The perfect fusion of my dad’s diametric reality. So we took the RV down to the local shop for repairs and started planning our trip a month in advance.

A few days before the trip we contacted the shop where we left RV because we hadn’t heard any progress reports. “Yeah, about that…we didn’t, um do that. We think it’s irreparable.” Thanks for letting us know in a timely fashion, jackass. But we soldiered on, and re-planned the trip with cars and hotels. Everyone had a grand time. One last hurrah for my dad. Two years later the Iowa 80 t-shirt my nephew owns is one of his favorite and his sister has an Iowa 80 bumper sticker on her car.

I don’t know if anyone will find this piece entertaining. But I found it cathartic. It’s not the entertaining travel piece I intended to write in 2024, but hopefully it makes you think about how you connect with the ones you love and how you live your life.

P.S. Swiss Servator adds; I really did think we had this piece before. While editing it, I realized that when CPRM and I were on the Zoom, we had looked up maps, and I have been to Iowa 80 many a time (my son went to U of Iowa). Hence my vivid recall of this story.