You've Got a Friend in Jesus!

I hitched a ride with Tim at the 49er Travel Plaza, a truck stop that sprawls out into the farmland just west of Sacramento.

It was the summer of 2006 – a hot one even by Central Valley standards – and except for the rice growing underwater in the nearby fields, everything was dying in the heat. Out on the truck lot, the air was yellow, sticky, and diesel-scented, and engines were moaning like coonhounds with sunstroke.

Tim was a trucker’s trucker from Wisconsin, a 47-year-old with a sturdy build, buzz cut and long goatee. He was headed to the biggest truck stop in America, a place in the Inland Empire with room for over 1,000 rigs. The place was just off I-10 in Ontario, spreading out over two sides of Milliken Avenue. Its official name was TravelCenters of America, but Tim said a lot of folks liked to call it the TA. It was a 24-hour market for whores and dope, he said, a smorgasbord of sin for any guy with a hankering.

Tim said Ontario’s only saving grace was a mobile chapel at the TA. It was a church inside a converted 18-wheeler, a house of the Lord tailor-made for truckers.

“Things aren’t pretty down there,” he warned. “Are you sure you want to go with me?”

I was tired of the heat and too intrigued to care. Any place other than Sacramento sounded good to me.

When I first met Tim, I’d been looking for a ride for a few weeks, talking to drivers who attended Sunday services and Bible study sessions at the 49er’s own truck-stop chapel. Just like the chapel I’d later visit in Ontario, the 49er’s was a carpeted semi trailer with wood-paneled walls. On pamphlets and paintings around the room, there was an iconography made for the clientele. There were paintings of Jesus riding flatbeds, watching over big rigs, cradling whole trucks in His hands.

Dave Quignon, the hard-talking chaplain who ran the place, was the one who arranged for me to meet Tim. Dave lived in the chapel five days out of the week, reaching out to truckers, diesel mechanics, and servers from the diner, even homeless people sleeping in cars in the “civilian” parking lot.

Dave worked for Transport for Christ, a Pennsylvania-based ministry that runs 33 truck-stop chapels nationwide. There were other ministries just like it, he said, creating a combined total of more than 100 chapels across the continent. People of the road needed churches that took their circumstances into account, Dave said, and ministers who wouldn’t judge them.

“I may be a pastor,” Dave always said during his sermons, “but I’m still a sinner. I need Jesus just as much as anyone else.”

Dave wanted to help me find a driver who’d found God on the road, somebody who’d gotten holy the hard way. Tim fit that description. There was a definite godliness about Tim – his clean language, for example, and his Transport for Christ T-shirt emblazoned with crucifixes. But in his face was a kind of fatigue that can only be acquired over years of hard living, and the veins in his eyes were red with sleeplessness. It turned out those eyes had seen many a long haul. They’d gone over whole worlds of blacktop and white line before getting to the light.

Tim and I hauled south toward Ontario as soon as nightfall came, the towns and farms of the Central Valley blurring into a mesh of billboards, neon signs and moonlit crop rows. After I agreed not to use his full name in print, he told about his years of walking with the Devil.

For years, Tim said, he was a drunk and a drug user. He’d attempted suicide once, gone AWOL from the Navy, done time in the brig, and gotten close to criminals who’d stolen from his family and stolen from him. He’d run up gambling debts in Boomtown and spent too much time in Lost Wages.

Tim said there was a night he got so high he ended up in a hospital, strapped to a gurney. The hallucinations tormented him until he bent the frame of that bed around him, he claimed, turning it into a cocoon against his demons.

“Some of the people in my past that I’d wronged were coming back,” he said. “They were telling me I was the scum of the earth.”

But around a decade ago, he ended up at a Transport for Christ chapel in Lodi, Ohio, desperate to clean up and ready to hand himself over to the Son of Man. He’d just heard “Amazing Grace” play on a Christian radio station, and there was a pastor waiting for him at the chapel, ready to help him get right with God.

“I said, ‘Lord, I’m a wreck,’” Tim recalled. “I said, ‘If I don’t change the way I’m living, I’m gonna be dead.’”

It takes courage to be born again, Tim said. Only false preachers will say it’s something that happens overnight.

“The path to salvation is a rocky, rough one,” Tim said somewhere near L.A. “The road to destruction, on the other hand, is beautiful to start out with.”

Big rigs are pretty much everything at the TA. They’re office buildings and bedrooms. They’re family rooms, dining rooms, warehouses, barrooms, tweak pads and bordellos. Sometimes, too, they’re tombs. It’s not unheard of for the TA’s denizens to die in their trucks – at least two did just that between 2001 and 2008, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. There was one suicide in 2003.

It seems fitting, then, that the Lord should have a big rig at the TA, too. His place is conveniently parked, right near the diesel mechanics’ garage and the laundry machines.

On Sundays, Doug and Carolyn Young are the chaplains who greet people at the door, handing everyone a Bible and a hymnal. Both are veterans of the trucking industry, and in their time outside the chapel, they work for the same company – he as a driver, and she as a clerical worker. As much as time permits, Doug and Carolyn keep the chapel open to drivers, and they minister to anyone who walks in. Sometimes they’re called on to help drivers embroiled in crisis – the death of a loved one for example, or a mental breakdown. Lately, a lot of drivers have been coming to them with troubles about their finances. High diesel prices are squeezing people out of the business, and stories abound of drivers quitting right at the TA, selling off their rigs on the lots over in Fontana. Now Carolyn gives people money advice, Bible-based plans to get their accounts back in balance.

“It’s not just about money,” Carolyn said. “It’s about stewardship of what God gives us.”

Before becoming ministers in the early 1990s, the Youngs had struggles of their own. Doug was a denizen of “Party Row,” that proverbial place of debauchery to be found on every truck lot. Tattoos still show on his arms, remnants from his life’s sketchier chapters. But when he was 35, he found God via Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He married Carolyn after he cleaned up, and the TA is where they landed after seminary school.

“I had a desire to evangelize,” Doug said. “I traded the 12-step program for the one-step program.”

It’s rare for people at a truck-stop congregation to know one another, so Doug and Carolyn tend to start their services with introductions. When I attended a service this October, there were three people there: a Southern couple and a lone guy from Arizona.

Steve Bell, a driver from Georgia, was there with his wife, Pamela. Steve was sporting a ball cap that read CIA: CHRISTIANS IN ACTION, and Pamela was carrying a brand-new blanket, a gift for a troubled woman she’d met on the truck lot. Duane Zyke, a Wal-Mart driver from Phoenix, sat across the aisle. He had a load to deliver, and was dressed up for the road in his company uniform. In the banter that preceded the sermon, folks talked about how difficult it was to be openly Christian. Steve said he sometimes got flak for his hat, and complained that fewer folks would listen to prayers on their CB radios.

“Some people are nice to you; some people tolerate you,” Steve lamented. “Some people are downright mean.”

Chaplain Doug played a few hymns on his 12-string guitar. They were warm, bright songs, a soft prelude to a searing sermon. Everyone turned to the book of Timothy, where Doug read several verses about the painful life of the apostle Paul. Paul, Doug said, was always ready to put his life on the line for his faith. He poured himself out as a drink offering to God, he said, letting Him decide how much time he’d have to enjoy earthly living.

“He knew the highs of being a Christian,” Doug said, “but he also knew the lows.”

And that’s when the sermon grew fiery, just like the photos of bloody, aborted fetuses tacked to the wall near Steve and Pamela. Doug said too many Christians were straying from Paul’s example, living only to please themselves. Preachers were sugarcoating the Bible, he said, accepting homosexuality and questioning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We were in those conflicts for reasons beyond human understanding, Doug asserted, but it was God’s plan.

“Some Christians don’t want to confront sin and hell,” Doug said. “Their goal is to make people feel good, but there are words in the Bible that convict us.”

Not everyone at the TA is ready to be poured out as a drink offering. Most drivers walk across the truck lot and give the chapel wide berth whenever they pass. The U-shaped bar at the Fork in the Road, the TA’s all-night diner, is home to many. As one driver told me, it’s the domain of poets, prophets, and politicians, folks who speak a language that’s not welcome in God’s house.

“If we don’t persuade you with domineering conversation,” said Lee Bell, a 22-year-veteran trucker from Ranger, Georgia, “we’ll dazzle you with bullshit.”

Here, the women who serve burgers, steaks, and roast beef sandwiches are natural-born masters of rhetoric, charmers who can deflect cuss words, come-ons and phone number requests without ever breaking a heart. They’re also sociologists, anthropologists, and psychiatrists, experts on the code words and pathologies of the TA’s not-so-secret drug and sex trade. Some can recite the unwritten menu of services available from the prostitutes who sell “commercial company” out on the lot:

Blowjob: $40

Pussy: $80

Everything: $100

No condom: $150

The Ontario Police Department has tried to put a pinch on the trade, making 234 prostitution-related arrests between 2003 and 2008 alone, according to Officer Bill Russell. Corporate officials for TravelCenters of America – who wouldn’t return phone calls for comment – have also put money into a highly visible security force, which patrols the lot in cruisers 24 hours a day.

But as Russell and the servers explained, there’s little hope in stemming the flow of prostitutes who arrive at the TA in sleeper cabs. They’ll even climb or cut holes in the chain-link fence around the lot, or show up with pimps in the cars that lurk around the Fork in the Road at night. Illegal drug sales are just as common at the TA, Russell said, although statistics on those arrests are harder to track.

“We’ve been battling this for years and years,” Russell said. “It’s really tough. It’s such a big facility and there are so many places to hide.”

The TA’s sex industry, observers say, is far from a victimless trade, as young prostitutes often fall victim to abusive or exploitative pimps. Some servers have seen women show up at the Fork in the Road with bruises, burn marks, and other signs of violence. Others just disappear, said Liz Uribe, 43, a server for seven years.

“I’ve seen women come here and then show up on a Missing Person poster later,” Uribe said.

That dangerous transience often leaves servers with feelings of helplessness, which makes believers and non-believers alike see good in the TA chapel. Rebecca Curren, 25, once tried to help young strays stay out of prostitution, sometimes paying for their meals and giving them advice. But one time she took a young woman under her wing, only to watch her fall into a violent relationship and turn tricks. The girl later vanished, and Curren heard rumors – unverifiable – that she’d ended up dead.

“I never wanted to help anyone after that,” said Curren, a gentle art student. “Now I don’t like to get to know people here.”

Curren’s no Christian – “I only believe in people being six feet under,” she said. But now she sends the TA’s fallen angels over to the Lord’s place.

“I can tell when a person needs help,” Curren said. “I always send people over there.”