The Night They Announced My Name

The Quonset Hut Years

I want to be honest about how small the beginning was, because the smallness is the whole point.

I rented a Quonset hut off Highway 275 from a retired farmer who did not ask many questions about a woman starting a trucking company with one truck and a phone that still had my father’s old business number forwarded to it. My first client was a produce stand that needed refrigerated hauling twice a week. My second client found me because the first one mentioned me at church.

George found me during that first winter. He had been our father’s logistics manager for nine years, the man who actually knew how the routes worked underneath all the paperwork Nicole’s husband’s family inherited. When the new ownership let him go in a round of “restructuring” six months after the sale, he called me from a gas station parking lot and asked if I needed a partner who knew where every walk in cooler between here and Sioux City actually was.

I did not have money to pay him a real salary that first year. He took a share of the company instead, and a promise, and we ran routes together in a truck with a heater that only worked on the passenger side, so we traded seats every hundred miles so neither of us froze the whole way.

We named the company Prewitt Cold Chain, using my maiden name on purpose. My mother asked me once, a few years in, why I would keep dragging around a name that had already been sold out from under us. I told her the name was not the part that got sold. The name was still mine to decide what to do with.

It took twelve years. Twelve years of eleven dollar an hour drivers who became foremen, of routes that grew from two counties to eleven, of a single Quonset hut that eventually became a real dispatch office with a working furnace and my name on the lease instead of somebody else’s mercy.

None of that ever made it into a conversation at a family dinner. My mother asked about my “little trucking thing” the way you’d ask a child about a school project. Nicole, when she asked at all, asked in the tone people use when they already know the answer will not threaten them.