Nearly everyone has imagined what it would be like to drive a truck. A big rig, that is, like the tractor-trailers that command the interstates.

Mark Sager’s book tells you how it feels in his memoir, “The Last American Cowboys” (125 pages; Blue Heron Book Works; paperback $16.99; 2024).

“I was destined to drive a truck,” says Sager during an interview in a Bethlehem diner.

“I wanted to let people know what it was like. It’s the best job in the world. I could have called the book ‘The Calling.’”

Sager, now retired, spent 43 years on the road:

“The book is me, talking to myself in the cab of a truck at two in the morning.”

Reading it makes you feel like you are in the cab with him, as in this passage from his book:

“After many hours of hard-nosed trucking through four rather large states and a boat load of thirty-weight coffee, the ole’ Model 359 Pete and I ramble our way across the Nebraska border only to be confronted by a large, well-lit sign that reads, WEIGH STATION OPEN.”

It can be a hard and lonely life. For the first 20 years, Sager did a lot of long-distance hauling.

For the last 23 years, Sager had a job that let him come home every night to his family, and be with Marie, his wife of 44 years. But even then he had 13- or 14-hour days, with five or six hours of sleep.

Sager began trucking two years after President Jimmy Carter mandated a 55-mile-an-hour speed limit after the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Sager writes, “Rates fell to an all-time low as the price of petroleum was rising. Thus, The Outlaw was born.”

You had to break the rules to survive.

Drivers used CB (Citizen Band) radios, made famous in “Convoy,” a 1975 novelty song by C. W. McCall (a character co-created and voiced by Bill Fries, along with Chip Davis) that was a No. 1 hit on the country and pop charts in the U.S., and in the movie, “Smokey and the Bandit” (1977) starring Burt Reynolds and Sally Field.

Says Sager of CBs, “They were not just a prop.”

Now replaced by GPS and cell phones, CBs could be used to evade speed traps, but also for conversations or for warnings, like indicating a horse and buggy around the bend of a highway in the Lancaster area. Or they could be used for rescue after a breakdown or accident.

Sager is a lifelong Bethlehem resident who attended Liberty High School and Bethlehem Area Vocational Technical School.

“The book grew from a stack of stories. I was writing for family, close friends and fellow truck drivers,” he says.

His wife’s sister knew Bathsheba Monk, founder and editor of Blue Heron Book Works. Monk and her late husband Paul Heller encouraged Sager to turn the stories into a book.

Sager did not want to be negative in the book, but he says that trucking is not what it used to be. He says the “new breed,” as his fellow truckers call them, are often reckless. “Not all of them, but some belong in a warehouse driving a forklift,” he says.

“Regulations change every three of four months. And about 15 years ago, the big engines all went auto shift. There was a driver shortage. It took away all the skill.” Drivers used to use “double clutching” with manual transmissions. The technique could be used for acceleration and faster gear shifting.

Sager writes about being a participant in Trucker Buddy International (https://truckerbuddy.org/) for seven years in three different states. It is a program for truckers to visit school classrooms, where the drivers explain what they do. Sager was especially happy to drive his rig to a school, where students could climb in the cab and sound the truck’s horn.

Sager says his desire to be a trucker began as a child when he was at the bus stop, waving to truck drivers:

“Every morning rigs would roll by, blow their horns. I was like a kid in a candy store with no money in his pocket.”

He grew up to live his dream of driving a truck.

“Literary Scene” is a column about authors, books and publishing. To request coverage, email: Paul Willistein, Focus editor, pwillistein@tnonline.com