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Driving to a new career Photo by Bob Pennell Terri Campfield nervously navigates a parking lot in a tractor-trailer rig Monday -- her first time behind the wheel as she and her husband, Dave, retrain as truck drivers. Both lost their jobs when fire destroyed Boise Cascade Corp.'s Medford mill. Medford couple takes to road less traveled after Boise fire By JONEL ALECCIA About this series: Terri and Dave Campfield are among families who lost jobs in the Labor Day fire that destroyed Medford's Boise Cascade Corp. mill. The Mail Tribune is following three such families, chronicling their efforts to rebuild their lives. Stories will run occasionally during the next several months as workers look for new jobs, seek training and cope with daily struggles. S ix months from now, Terri Campfield won't think twice about climbing into the cab of an 18-wheeler, double-clutching the truck into gear and heading down a highway crowded with cars. Today, however, the former Boise Cascade Corp. millworker is terrified. "I have to push in both these, right?" says Campfield, 39, perched for the first time Monday in the driver's seat of a big blue Freightliner. "That's the parking brake. Oh, no! Here we go! Everybody hang on!" With that, Campfield wrenches the rig into first gear, sending the truck and its 45-foot trailer into motion. Slowly, she inches around the muddy training ring at Rogue Community College's White City truck driving school, the first stop on the way to a new career for Campfield, 39, and her 41-year-old husband, Dave. The pair signed up for the eight-week trucking school after a Sept. 6 fire destroyed Boise Cascade's Medford plant and gutted more than 450 jobs, taking the Campfields' livelihood with it. Now, halfway through the session, the Medford couple are out of the classroom and nearly ready for the income and adventure of the open road. In fact, Terri Campfield says they'd be hard-pressed to return to their old jobs now, even if Boise officials decide to rebuild the largest plywood mill in the West. "We enjoyed Boise, but I'd like to give trucking a go," she says. "If Boise did call back, I'd have to weigh what it would mean." Meanwhile, she's got a truck loaded with 35,000 pounds of cement to consider. "Oh! I wiped out a cone already!" says Campfield, peering into her huge sideview mirrors. "Oh, shoot!" Like the two dozen would-be drivers in the RCC class, Campfield's job is to keep the truck driving smoothly between two rows of orange cones arranged around the ring. Across the yard, Dave Campfield tries his luck in a separate rig. "The trickiest part is to learn to shift up and down with 10 gears," says Steve Bayne, a former trucker who turned teacher five years ago. "That and keeping it in your lane. When they're shifting, they want to look at the shifter and they veer left or right." Although she has studied shift patterns and dashboard gauges for a month, the road test is a different matter, says Campfield. "After all the bookwork we did, this morning, looking in here, all of it went out of my head," she says. "I thought, `What's that button for?"' It gets even worse when the rig starts moving. A missed gear sends Campfield into a panic as classmates Larry Balloy, 56, and Roger Kenyon, 34, watch from the back seat. "I want to shift into second, do I want to give it throttle?" she demands anxiously. The truck lurches forward. "It's OK, let the clutch in and out a little bit," says Balloy, whose calm comes from trucking experience a dozen years ago. "Push in the clutch brake. You're doing fine." By the third time around the ring, though, Campfield no longer needs her classmate's encouragement. She is shifting more smoothly, rounding the curves more easily, easing her white-knuckle grip on the gearshift knob. "I feel a little more relaxed," she says, shifting into third and smiling. "That was good! That was a little better!" By Thursday, Campfield will be shifting like a pro and ready to take on White City streets, predicts her instructor. By mid-December, she'll likely pass the state commercial drivers license exam. And by June, Bayne adds, she and Dave will almost certainly be a truck-driving team earning well more than the $46,000 they made annually at Boise. Still, Terri Campfield feels torn between her old life and her new one. "I would have been vested five years at Boise in February," she says, regret tingeing her voice. But if the Campfields are like other Boise workers who turned to trucking, they'll hit the road and never look back, Bayne says. "We had some in the last class who said they wouldn't take it back," he says. "They said this was the opportunity they were looking for." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA