Drive, by Nathan Clement

“It’s been at least four years since the idea hit me,” says Nathan Clement. “It hit me when most ideas do, and that’s when I’m driving.” Sound familiar? Clement is the author/illustrator behind Drive, a new book for young children that focuses on a profession you know well.

It’s about a “little boy’s dad going to work and driving a truck,” as Indiana Truck Sales & Service sales manager Terry Garsey puts it. Garsey served as informal consultant to Clement over the years as he developed Drive. Clement himself describes the portrait of the father in the book as that of a “working-class man as hero in his family and on the road” with the potential to serve as a much-needed salve to the battered public perception of the American truck driver.

If “working-class hero” sounds like a far cry from the mainstream media image of the truck driver’s profession these days, that’s because it is, says Garsey. “I’m 57, but when I was 10, being a truck driver was considered a good profession. There was no one looking down their nose at drivers. The image was a lot better.”

Clement came at Drive from a lifetime on the periphery of the industry. While he was never a driver himself, he was, like so many children of the late 1960s and early 1970s, immersed in the pop culture of the big-truck driver. Furthermore, a close older cousin has been an owner-operator all his adult life, and he regularly took Clement and his brother out on runs. “At age 5 my brother could identify every truck by sight,” he says. “We all had CB handles. My brother was ‘Little Sodbuster.’”

Fast-forward 30 years, and Clement’s a graphic designer and freelance illustrator based in Indianapolis, but his in-laws are in Chicago, where he and his family drive north on I-65 regularly to visit. It’s a high-traffic haul for big trucks. “In the middle of one of these trips,” Clement says, “being a little annoyed by all the trucks, truthfully, it struck me that every one of them had somebody in it with some family at home. I spent the next two or three hours mulling it over.” Those thoughts bloomed over the years, during which time Clement met Garsey, consulted with budding long-haul drivers at a local truck-driving school (“change the alarm clock from 5 a.m. to 4 a.m. on the first page,” one said, and Clement did), and met the publisher of Front Street Books, based in Asheville, N.C.