MPR: Working Nights

Working Nights
Part 6

Music: "Strange Meeting" (same as cop scene)
Voice on speaker: Evening, Sir.
Myrna Patterson: Oh, hi. Good afternoon. This is Dart with an inbound.

Myrna Patterson is a 30-year veteran of the road. This year, her lifetime trucking odometer will click it's three millionth mile.

Guard: Just come down, park, and wait in your truck.
Myrna: All right. Gotcha. Thank you.
SOUND: Starts truck up x-fade to dropping trailer

Myrna's just finished a two-day day trip from Minneapolis to Fountain Inn, South Carolina hauling paper and hazardous chemicals. So far she's getting pretty good sleep. But then comes a tough assignment from dispatch. It's 4:30 PM and they need her to turn around and drive through the night.

Myrna on phone: I have a real stupid question to ask you. If I didn't take this load, would there be any other loads available? Right, right. (laughs) Thanks. Bye. (hangs up phone)
SOUND: Truck

Myrna agrees to haul 78 thousand beer can lids to Trenton, Ohio by seven the next morning. She could refuse to drive at night. But Myrna needs to stay on the good side of her dispatchers, so she says yes.

SOUND: Truck starting

Federal regulations limit truckers to ten hours behind the wheel in any 24-hour period. Myrna's already burned up six hours of drive time today, so she can't motor straight to Ohio without stopping for sleep. If her driving logs don't add up right, she could pay a big fine. Myrna plans to juggle sleeping and driving to stay just within the law.

SOUND x-fades: tire air sounds

But first a flat tire blows her schedule and then there's a long, aggravating delay at the aluminum can factory. So Myrna catches a brief nap before midnight, drives awhile, sleeps a couple hours, drives again.

SOUND: truck sounds up
Myrna: When I first came out on the road, the old salts would tell me, "the day hangs heaviest just before dawn." Right. Then I noticed that I started to get sleepy. Now I'm one of the old salts.

At 5:30 AM, just outside Roanoke, Virginia, Myrna sets her obnoxious talking alarm and beds down for a final snooze.

"Oh, yes sleep. (dinging of the alarm being set. It says 7:30 am) Oh....that mattress feels good."
SOUND: Truck idling

This kind of hard driving would weary the bones of even the youngest truckers. Myrna is 55 years old. The Federal rules regarding hours on the road remain substantially the same as when they were written in the 1930s. No one was thinking about circadian rhythms back then or even the quality of sleep. Myrna hates this kind of patchwork, all-night driving. Years ago she nearly died when she crashed into another truck during the pre-dawn hours, when the brain tends to be most sluggish.

Many long-haul truckers have a strategy to outwit sleep, like taking brief naps at a truck stop or rest area. Some researchers are studying the science of napping.

SOUND: flight deck

This is a Boeing 747 flight simulator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Palo Alto. Scientists here study how commercial airline pilots are affected by jet lag and irregular work schedules. NASA recommends a number of strategies to fight off pilot fatigue. Research chief Mark Rosekind says the most simple method may be the most controversial: while one pilot flies, the other one takes a brief nap in the chair.

Mark Rosekind: Brief naps are extremely effective in helping to promote performance and alertness. And whether you take a nap before a period where you're gonna be awake for a long time, or in the middle of being awake for a long time, the nap really helps to performance and alertness.

The timing and duration of the nap could be critical. Rosekind warns a nap that's too short or too long may not work. Now hang on. Napping on the flight deck? How would passengers feel about a snoozing pilot? And what about all the macho military talk about pilots having "the right stuff?" To repackage sleep as a sign of strength, NASA calls it a "personal performance enhancer." Mark Rosekind says pilots and everyone else in our sleep-starved world, need a new outlook.

Rosekind: Rather than seeing sleep as a negative thing. Oh it takes up time, it's a waste of time, napping means you're stupid, lazy, dumb, etc. Sleep is actually a very powerful tool for people to manage their performance and alertness when they need to get their job done.

The Federal Aviation Administration which sponsored some of the NASA research on pilot fatigue has yet to approve so-called "strategic napping" in the air.

Music fades up: "Strange Meeting"

Will our modern, 24-hour world force humans to evolve a reduced need for sleep? Can we afford to wait for our biological clock to sync with our cultural clock? That might take millions of years. Our mass excursion into the night, guided by the glowing filament of an electric bulb, is little more than a century old. Some have called this nocturnal time migration the crossing of a new frontier. Researchers appear to be closing in on ways to make the night shift more tolerable. But as they develop new techniques, sleep researchers also warn we can no sooner dispense with sleep than shed our biological need to eat. If anything, we should all be sleeping more. So, get comfy and catch as many winks as you can.

(For more about the reporter's experiences trucking with Myrna Patterson, see Scenes from the Road, by Stephanie Curtis.)

Part 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - Home

	Sign up to receive e-mail newsletters

	Audio help

	Text: Sm : Md : Lg