There is a truck stop off Interstate 80 in Walcott, Iowa, that calls itself, without much fear of contradiction, the largest in the world. The Iowa 80 sprawls across more than two hundred acres of what used to be Iowa farmland, and on an ordinary day it functions the way any enormous truck stop functions: as a waypoint, a place where drivers pull off the interstate to fuel up, shower, eat something fried, and put another few hundred miles of solitude behind them before finding more of it up ahead. It has a dentist’s office. It has a chrome shop the size of a small department store, aisles of it, mirrors and stacks and mud flaps gleaming under fluorescent light like jewelry in a case. It has, somewhat famously, a movie theater. For three days every July, though, the Iowa 80 stops being a waypoint and becomes a destination, and the trucking industry’s most private people put themselves, briefly and almost shyly, on display.
The Jamboree is what that intentional solitude looks like when it briefly, deliberately, reverses itself.
This is the Walcott Truckers Jamboree, and this year, its forty-eighth, it will draw somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five thousand people to a stretch of Iowa that most of the country will never have reason to drive through. It is, by any reasonable measure, the largest gathering of its kind in North America, and it is also, to anyone outside the trucking world, almost entirely unknown, which is itself worth sitting with for a moment. Professional truck driving can be one of the most isolated jobs left in American life – often by design. A driver can spend two hundred, three hundred days a year in a space roughly the size of a walk-in closet, watching the country scroll past a windshield, talking mostly to a dispatcher’s voice on a headset. The Jamboree is what that intentional solitude looks like when it briefly, deliberately, reverses itself.
The centerpiece of the weekend, and the thing that draws people who have never so much as sat in a cab, is the Super Trucks Beauty Contest. The phrase sounds like a joke until you have watched it happen. Drivers spend the better part of a year, and often a meaningful fraction of a year’s income, preparing a single tractor-trailer for a few minutes of scrutiny: hand-rubbed paint, engraved stainless, interiors upholstered like the inside of a yacht, sleeper cabs with more woodwork than some studio apartments. On Thursday morning, judges climb into those cabs and sleepers and lie beneath the frames with flashlights, inspecting wheel wells and engine bays with the seriousness of art conservators, while owners stand nearby with the particular stillness of people watching a verdict get decided. The category every competitor actually wants, Trucker’s Choice, isn’t judged by the officials at all. It’s voted on by the other drivers, which tells you something about where the real currency of respect in this world circulates.
Photos courtesy of The Iowa 80 truckstop.
At night the same trucks become something closer to spectacle. The Lights at Night competition, held Thursday evening, turns the show lot into what witnesses reliably describe, without apparent irony, as a wonderland: thousands of LEDs strung along frames and mirrors and grille guards, competing rigs lit up against the Iowa dark like carnival rides that happen to weigh forty tons. Locals from the Quad Cities drive out for it the way people elsewhere might drive out to see holiday lights. For one night, an industry that exists largely to be invisible, that succeeds, in fact, when nobody notices it at all, makes a case for being looked at.
There is a gentler, sillier register to the weekend, too, in the Trucker Olympics, open to anyone with a valid commercial license: a tire roll, a coffee-cup relay, a contest that involves winding cargo straps as fast as possible, and, because someone along the way clearly decided the whole event needed one unserious afternoon, a water balloon toss. It is easy to be cynical about corporate-sponsored field days. It is harder to be cynical about it here, at an event built entirely around people whose working lives are defined by sitting still and generally alone, running around a parking lot laughing at each other while tossing water balloons.
The Iowa 80 Trucking Museum sits adjacent to all of it, a quieter counterpart to the noise on the show lot, and this year it will mark the hundredth birthday of a 1926 FWD, one of the antique trucks in its permanent collection, with something resembling an actual birthday party. It is a strange, touching detail, the idea of throwing a party for a truck’s hundredth year, but it fits the logic of the weekend: this is an industry that keeps its history close, in a country that mostly doesn’t.
New this year is an app, free, built to help fifty thousand people find their way around the schedule, the map, the vendors, the stage lineup, in an event whose culture otherwise runs almost entirely on analog things: chrome, diesel, handshakes, reputation. It is a small, telling collision, the oldest kind of American road culture getting a push notification. But that has always been the story of trucking, in a way: an industry built on distance and solitude, finding, once a year in a parking lot in Iowa, new ways to close the gap.
