This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

One of the missions of 99PI is to give you the tools to decode the built world in cities, in the country, and the highways in between.

It's those highways and the truckers that drive the American economy that is the subject

of the new radiotopias show called Over the Road. The podcast is a window into a world that you

pass by at 65 miles an hour without giving much thought, but it is so fascinating

you will never see a semi truck the same way again.

Every 99PI beautiful marriage to subscribe it is run up your alley.

Here's the first episode of Over the Road hosted by Long Hall Paul.

Four years ago, I was northbound on I-75 in Knoxville, Tennessee.

My cargo, a load of imported watermelons.

They had sailed on a container ship from Guatemala to South Florida, where they were transferred

by Forklift onto big trucks driven by folks like me. These were those tiny seedless

designer types they call personal watermelons. I always wondered about the

marketing cat who came up with that one.

Personal watermelons.

It's like a watermelon trailer back then, a reefer as we call them.

A reefer is a heavily insulated box trailer equipped with a giant diesel-powered

temperature control unit. It's actually got the capacity to maintain more than

40,000 pounds of perishable freight at temperatures as cold as 20 below.

It was rush hour in Knoxville or K-town and trucker code.

Traffic came to a screeching halt at the junction of I-75 and I-640.

I got stopped in time, but the trucker behind me well not so much.

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