Freckles and I had just enjoyed some home time and landed a load to California from somewhere within a couple hundred miles of Florida (I don’t recall.) We got about to Texas when the jake brake stopped working.

A jake brake, or retarder, is a function that slows the truck by a change in the engine power, and it helps to slow down a heavy truck.

I called the owner, we tried some basic things, no dice. I went to a truck stop, as they have basic mechanical services available, and again no dice. Having just come off home time, we needed to make some money, and taking our truck to a dealership was just not a good option. Dealerships have a ton of customers, and we have spent a week or more down time waiting for repairs.

We decided that we could do without the jake brake. After all, we could just slow down and be smart with our braking, right? We weighed about 78k pounds, and we were nervous, but we needed money. We ran it and sometime during the night when Freckles was driving, she thought she noticed smoke from the drive tire area for a little while but wasn’t sure and then nothing.

When she woke me up, we looked at all the brakes and I put my hand close; it was warm but not too bad. Well, I took over and hit some pretty steep grades on I-15 heading down to Southern California. As we were coming down one particularly steep section, not only was I sure I saw smoke… I thought I saw flames. It must of been 2 or 3 am and not much traffic at all so I pulled off on a shoulder, and we jumped out to look. There was an orange glow coming from the brake pads, and I was absolutely freaking out. This is the reason for runaway truck ramps, and we had just came perilously close to needing one! It was just luck I guess that I was at the end of a grade. I was on the passengers side and preoccupied with trying to figure out what to do, I walked quickly around the front of the truck headed for the driver seat. I wasn’t worried about cars, as I said the freeway was empty and I thought with five lanes to choose from anybody coming would switch lanes. As rounded the front of the truck before I could even blink, a flatbed tow truck was there and I felt something tug my sleeve as it went by. He came so close to me that something on his truck ripped my sleeve! He never slowed down or anything, and I was literally in shock.

I called the owner (he always answered anytime day or night) and he said I should have kept driving to cool the brake pads off! I didn’t know if that was good advice or not, and we were seriously considering just going home, the hell with this. We didn’t move until the brakes completely cooled and then had to get those replaced as well as the jake brake fixed after we dropped that load. We knew there weren’t anymore steep grades, or we wouldn’t have moved then either. Looking back, we shouldn’t have driven even then, but money needs trumped good sense that night.

This was only the first of many times that we quit in our minds and yet we would take another load only to be ok again and not think about quitting. One thing that changed forever about our approach to this new lifestyle was immediate. We would never again make decisions based on money. When we thought about how close to dying both of us came… not to mention how close I then immediately came to being hit by a full speed tow truck, that was an easy call. There is only one way to know you should stop for sure and that’s after the worst happens. It’s kind of like cleaning, what’s NOT there is what counts.