Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

Put 5,000 miles on our Toyota pickup this past month, back and forth to northern Michigan for family funerals. Got back home to Denver last Saturday night, safe and sound, thanks to Jimmy Schitsu.

Our last trip up there we went through Minneapolis to Duluth and then along the southern shore of Lake Superior across northern Wisconsin on U.S. 2. Just east of Odanna, passing through endless forests, we saw a sign announcing that we were heading into the Indian reservation of the Bad River Tribe of Chippewas.

“This is where Jimmy Schitsu lived,” I told Culley Jane. I’ve been telling her stories about Jimmy Schitsu ever since we first met seven years ago. To this day, whenever we get into heavy Denver traffic I’ll re-tell her the story of the Ghost Deer.

Jimmy had been a sniper in Vietnam. He wore a silver necklace with a turquoise bead for each of his hits. After he got back, he buried the necklace in a cedar swamp, reenacting an ancient Chippewa ceremony, alone, in a northern ceder swamp. And then he got into trucking, hauling paper rolls from the northern mills to printing plants throughout the Midwest.

Within the loose fraternity of northern states truckers — known to one another as crackly voices on their CB radios (“Breaker one nine.” “Ten four good buddy.”) — Jimmy was a legend.

Jimmy knew the backroads paths around all the state weigh stations. He had mastered the occult art of keeping multiple logbooks so he could prove he was legal (like following federal hours-of-service laws) when he was not.

He never missed a delivery appointment; he was always on time. Even during the worst northern blizzards — the ones that had other drivers hunkered down in truck stops waiting for it to pass — Jimmy always kept going. Everybody said he must be like an animal with claws, sentient of other scents. He could feel the pavement through a foot of packed snow.

In 2000, when I first met him, he was the driver trainer at a small northern Wisconsin trucking company where I got my first job as a trucker.

Every Monday morning he was always on time for work and was always done by late Friday afternoon. He never worked weekends. He would drive his 20-year-old pickup back up to where he lived by himself in a cabin in the woods of the Indian reservation of the Bad River Tribe of Chippewas along the southern shore of lake Superior. All by himself and alone with his thoughts he ate canned food, drank a quart of rye whiskey and was back to work Monday morning, on time. And there I was, standing there, a 50-year-old rookie anxious to learn how to become a trucker.

It took a couple weeks, but after learning how to shift through the gears and double clutch and hook up to and back a 53-foot trailer into tight spots, it was time for me to go out on the road with the driver trainer.

I spent two weeks with Jimmy Schitsu living together in a truck out on the road. He only spoke when he had something to say. He said it was time for me to learn the “important things” about trucking. Like the Ghost Deer, the car passing you on the right that you can’t see in the rear-view mirror, but exists in the real world.

And how to respond to the middle fingers you get in Chicago, cars in a hurry honking their horns at the lumbering semi in their self-proclaimed right-of-way, ready to go to war if you don't do as they say. “You have the power to crush them," Jimmy said. "You control 80,000 pounds of steel and freight. At the next light, you could squash them like bugs. Put them out of your mind, as significant as yesterday's weather. Focus on getting around the next corner without hitting the light pole. Be sentient of the Ghost Deer, not afraid, but sentient. Back off. Let them pass. Do your job."

Jimmy Schitsu said the most important thing about trucking was to do no harm. “Focus on that,” he said, “and you’ll do ok.”