A couple of years ago, I was asked to do an interview about my work and experience at the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health (RMCOEH). It has since haunted me, as clips from this interview still play on a couple of monitors around the center. Still, it brought some things into focus I hadn’t put together. As my psychology colleagues say, research is me-search, but it’s sometimes difficult to see that until someone else points it out. Turns out, I was doomed to become obsessed with construction and trucking from the start.
My dad was a residential framing carpenter for 20 years. When the 2008 recession hit, his industry disappeared overnight, and he had to find something else. He ended up driving truck, first long-distance truckload, with CRST and Roehl, then a series of local and regional outfits hauling cars or industrial equipment. Construction and trucking are both incredibly difficult jobs, and I had front row seats to the physical and economic hardships of trying to build a life in these industries. My dad drove truck nearly until he passed away back in 2024.
Anyway, while I can’t bring myself to watch it, I seem to recall talking about some of these things at length in this interview: