Embracing the open road of life

SCARBOROUGH, Maine -- A slender man bounded intensely down an icy patch of parking lot here Monday night, kicking the tires of an 18-wheeler as he readied the behemoth for a journey down the star-lit highways that have become his unexpected lifeline.

After 30 years as a reporter, 29 of them at the Portland Press Herald, Ted Cohen six months ago embraced a new profession: trucking.

''It's all about the open road, right?" Cohen queried a trucker colleague that night. ''The freedom of the open road?"

The trucker nodded, bemused, it seemed, by Cohen, a bespectacled man in an oxford shirt and sweater, a pen clipped to the neckline.

Cohen's change is at once radical and logical -- propelled by a boyhood fascination with trucks and necessitated by a career crisis. Cohen, who is 53, was the reporter who during the 2000 presidential campaign learned of George W. Bush's arrest for drunken driving in Kennebunkport 24 years earlier. He told an editor at the newspaper of his find, he said, but the paper never published the story.

When the arrest was uncovered by a Portland television station and a barrage of news reports followed three months later, the Portland paper's decision to ignore the story became a story unto itself. Cohen said the Press Herald made him the scapegoat in the matter.

In March of 2004, Cohen left the paper, by his account, after being demoted and punished for a number of alleged infractions. Press Herald editors, including the manager editor, Eric Conrad, declined to comment.

Out of work, Cohen came up with the idea to become a trucker.

''Dare I say, it seemed like theater to me," he said. ''It's not like a job. It's almost like performing. These rigs are hard to miss -- and so many people are fascinated about how these things can use the road and make it from one place to another being so huge."

By April, Cohen was enrolled in a local trucking school, ProDrive of Maine, paying $4,100 to learn the ways of a tractor-trailer. Come July, he was on the road, working for Land Air Express of New England hauling merchandise for clothing companies and department stores from Scarborough to Springfield and back four nights a week, and a randomly assigned route the fifth night.

Cohen stands out among the truckers. Most wear rough-hewn flannel and one-piece winter-wear; Cohen wears a Land's End fleece-lined jacket and Levi's. While the other truckers indulge in small talk, Cohen quizzes them, reporter-style, on the finer points of trucking.

On this night, he pressed Richard Buzzell, 42, to repeat a truckers' convention for determining the right driving speed.

''If you think you're going slow," Buzzell replied. ''Slow down."

Cohen stared intently and nodded, then prodded Buzzell to explain the philosophy behind the rule. ''What brought you to that point?" Cohen asked. ''Where'd that come from?"

Buzzell smiled and obliged the rookie. ''You're not driving a car. Speed limits are for cars."

At times, Cohen almost trips over his enthusiasm for trucking, treating it as both an amusement park ride and a foray into a foreign culture. As a boy, Cohen was enthralled by trucks. But he didn't imagine a life as a trucker when he was growing up in Burlington, Vt., the son of a psychiatrist and clothing designer. Cohen began his studies at the University of Vermont in accounting, later switching to media studies.

''We're very different, let's face it," Cohen said of his fellow truckers as he maneuvered a 13-foot-tall, 53-foot-long trailer down Interstate 95. ''I grew up in a white-collar family and they mostly come from blue-collar backgrounds."

''It's been an assimilation," he continued. ''It's been hard for me to fit in. But I want to be one of the guys. It's about collegiality in a workplace. You want to understand them and I want them to understand me."

Other truckers still stare at him a bit slit-eyed, as though trying to make sense of a guy who traded a plush desk gig for the cab of an 18-wheeler.

''You had such a gravy job," Larry Rich, 62, a driver of 30 years from Gray, Maine, told Cohen the other night. Rich is among those who struggled to believe Cohen's authenticity, believing initially he was an undercover reporter. ''That's why I was real nice to him," Rich quipped.

Cohen might have stayed with reporting, but for the story that slipped away -- the scoop that top political reporters at big papers had been searching for and unable to uncover.

''I called the police chief and asked if he had dirt on Bush," said Cohen, whose beat at the paper included coverage of Kennebunkport. ''He said, 'Yes, we did, in 1976 for drunk driving.' "

Cohen told his supervisor what he had learned. The supervisor, Andrew Russell, he said, told him to drop the matter. ''I left it at that," he said, much to his chagrin.

The story later exploded, and when word got out that the Portland paper had known about but not reported Bush's drunken-driving arrest, the matter became the talk of political and journalistic circles.

''I failed to follow my heart, which told me I had a big story, the biggest of my career, a national story, perhaps the biggest locally generated story the Press Herald has ever had," Cohen wrote in a first-person account in the American Journalism Review in August 2001. ''Make that the biggest story the Press Herald has never had."

His decision to talk about it, he said, provoked his demotion at the paper, followed by other punitive measures, forcing his departure. Cohen threatened a lawsuit claiming that the newspaper had violated his First Amendment rights. Last week, the newspaper and Cohen agreed to an out-of-court settlement. The terms of the agreement are confidential.

These days, Cohen, who is single with no children and lives in South Portland, sleeps by day and reports for work at 8 p.m. He heaves himself into the cab he is assigned for the night, and with what seems like great glee he lets loose two horn honks, backs the tractor into the trailer for hookup, and soon after departs on the 190-mile trip to Springfield.

He doesn't make detours along the way, he said, resisting his old reporter's instinct to explore the towns that line his route.

''I do wonder about them," he said. ''But I realize it's not what I am paid to do."