Age: 67
Occupation: Trucker (retired), author
Previous jobs: ESL teacher, librarian, cellist, lay missionary, technical typist
Year 2004 was no easy one for Annette Wilcox. She had recently lost the hearing in her left ear, which, in effect, ended her career as a teacher and cellist. Just back from a one-year missionary stint in East Africa where she taught English in Tanzania, the one-time magna cum laude graduate was now nearly broke, with no job prospects, and nowhere of her own to stay.
So the former librarian chose a non-traditional career path, one she conceded early on was “physically a little too hard for me.” In the dead of winter, in a borrowed Toyota, she drove up to a trucking company in Pennsylvania. There, Wilcox began her rocky apprenticeship as an over-the-road trucker. An unlikely student, now in her 50’s, navigating a new subculture with its own language, Wilcox quickly found it would come to demand from her “a radical dependence on God.”
It would also compel her to write.
In those difficult first 12 months, she devoted herself to an autobiographical account, written all in longhand, that chronicled her sometimes harrowing transition into a business where one’s service is measured in miles. Hers would eventually come to 1.1 million. Not bad for a latecomer.
While her “Bumping the Dock” book began as a cathartic exercise, Wilcox, the daughter of a college professor, had the presence of mind to realize that one’s early impressions only remained fresh for so long. The first draft of the book was completed within that first year.
I had a chance to chat with the trucking librarian a few weeks ago:
