I’ve got several boxes of old logbooks stashed away in the basement. Twelve books a year — give or take a few for “errors in judgment” — for each of the 20 years I spent playing in traffic. That’s 7200 pages representing half a lifetime. What’s on those pages isn’t as remarkable as the fact that I can still recall almost every load, to the day and location, as I read the detail etched in carbon.

Whatever memory’s made of, I’m glad it doesn’t get used up like the money I earned. If it did, I’d need to wear a nametag.

There’s the time I told a waitress in this sunny little truckstop near Augusta, Ga., one Sunday morning that I was absolutely sick of scrambled eggs and bacon, and Raisin Bran cereal too, for that matter. “Surprise me,” I said.

I’d never eaten pork brains before. Haven’t touched them since. Live and learn.

Here are four consecutive blank pages in from September of ’84. Rapid City, South Dakota, it says. Nothing moving toward eastern Canada, but plenty of stuff to see in that part of the world. I bobtailed over to Mt. Rushmore with a guy named Dan who lived in St. Louis. He had a gunshot wound on his cheek and a metallic green 357 Pete with gold striping. We spent most of the day underground in a cave, but still managed to get a good look at the work carved into the side of the hill before the sun went down.

The old logs are a diary. The pictures are a little faded, but when part of the image clears, the rest comes into focus pretty quickly. It’s like driving through fog. I can see part of the scene, and that leads to the next part, or was it the last part? Seventy-two hundred pages: a long montage of scenes and memories that have no place on the current radar screen, except that they contributed to the present condition in a very significant way.

It makes me wonder how many other people have kept such a detailed record of their lives. If I ever become rich and famous, I wonder if the logbooks would protect me in a paternity suit?

“I’m sorry, your Honour. My client was clearly nowhere near the plaintiff on the evening in question. It says here, in his logbook, that he was in Montgomery, Al., while she claims to have been home in bed, in Halifax.”

My wife tells me they take up too much space in the basement and I should get rid of them. I tell her I’m hanging on to them in case I’m ever audited by Revenue Canada. That works. The truth, of course, is that they represent a part of me that I’m quite proud of but can never hang on a wall the way I could a university degree.

They’re my Red Badge of Courage.

The triumphs are there, and the tragedies, too — separated only by a few pages. The day I assisted with the birth of a baby girl in a cabover Freightliner on the dirt parking lot of a truckstop near Red Skelton’s hometown of Vincennes, Indiana. The morning the guy crossed the line and slammed into the left rear wheel of my trailer near Latchford, Ont., killing himself when he fell asleep at the wheel on his way home from work. Memories provide background.

Those 7200 pages represent roughly 57,600 hours behind the wheel. My father, in contrast, was an airline pilot who accumulated some 22,000 hours of flying time during his 35-year career. Amateur aviators gasp at the number. Other professional pilots wink, or nod their heads when that figure comes up in conversation. It’s no world record, but he’s earned his stripes.

As I climb over the top of the hill that’s middle age and begin to gather momentum for the trip down, my well-honed trucker’s instincts are kicking in. It’s time to drop a gear, hit the jakes, and coast. Worked pretty hard to get up here, and I’ve got the paper to prove it. Let’s enjoy this part of the ride.

One of the chaps who works in my office, an imaginative and observant fellow, recently told me that as he watched me walk toward the office from the coffee shop on the corner, it would never have occurred to him that I was once a truck driver. For the record, he also said that if he didn’t know me, he would never guess that I was a magazine editor, either.

That’s good, I think. I’d hate to be defined solely by what I do to earn a living. Twenty years of hanging on to a steering wheel must have left a few scars, but I haven’t noticed them yet.

Hang onto those old logs. They tell the greatest story you’ll never remember.