He Was Pumped Up From Outset

I leave the Olympics with a greater appreciation for the work they do, the hours they put in and the sacrifices they make.

The athletes?

No, the truckers.

For 10 days of these Games, somewhere off Interstate 15, somewhere near Ogden, left without a rental car, I called home a truck-stop motel at the Flying J Travel Plaza.

While other reporters got stuck covering the “Big Rig” in ice skate judging down in Salt Lake, I got stuck with real big rigs--loud ones, smelly ones. Olympic tidbit you won’t find in David Wallechinsky’s book: They have to run the trucks all night to save fuel. It also helps keep the diesel engines from freezing up.

You can learn a lot living 50 feet from a giant propane tank, where, by the way, one dared not Light the Fire Within.

Some nights, 40 to 50 big rigs rumbled from dusk to dawn, churning diesel and dust outside my window, creating a white noise never to be confused with “The Sounds of Summer Rain.”

Don’t think for a second this is another reporter-whines-to-boss story about his lousy Olympic time.

That was Nagano.

I’m what they call in the business “a team player,” a guy who leaves his petty grievances at the press box gate.

Yet, I did hear others complain.

A New York Times photographer checked in to our motel and quickly checked out after he found his room was missing a door. Not a doorknob, a door!

It is true I ate truck-stop vittles every night and that one night a lady’s voice came over the intercom and announced, “Maintenance to propane, please, maintenance,” words I never fathomed hearing in an eating establishment.

Yet, the Flying J became home, a one-stop shopping plaza/gas house/ country kitchen/trucker’s lounge.

One night, a colleague mused, “Tomorrow night I think I’ll eat at the gas station across the street.”

We would come to know our Winter Olympics headquarters as the “chateau gas-and-go.”

During the day I took winding bus rides up to Snowbasin for the Alpine skiing; at night I manned a truck-stop diner booth and watched novellas play out as tuckered-out truckers stopped in for respites before getting back out on their asphalt arteries.

It was with increasing admiration that I watched these truckers refill their super-sized coffee mugs and rub their bloodshot eyes. I’ll never forget the guy who wandered in looking like the ghost of Roy Orbison--”Only the Lonely,” indeed.

A quick sweep of the medication aisle put in perspective what these guys go through. Among the stimulants that keep our truckers up all night include “Power Jack,” “Liquid Energy,” “Mood Fix,” “Up Time” and “Power Brain.”

This is not an easy life.

One night, a car pulled up to the motor lodge lobby and a woman got out in a wedding dress, asking if there were any honeymoon rooms available at our dive.

Sorry, no vacancy.

How pathetic was that?

I also felt for the dozens of international journalists who might have thought they were going to be spending two weeks in a quaint Winter Olympics setting.

You could hear the sarcasm dripping when a French journalist, loading up on pieces of hot-lamp chicken at the diner buffet, turned to his comrade and muttered, “Bon appetit.”

I would not have left anyone I cared for two nights at the plaza, let alone 10, yet the old haunt, like a David Lynch flick, sort of grew on me.

My Olympic memories are of the truck plaza, not the medal, yet I exit with a toothpick lodged and a yearning for wide-open spaces.

Somewhere beyond these Games, out there on that ribbon of highway, there’s a Slim Whitman tune calling my name.