Lily Cox-Richard was so intrigued by her friend’s life as a truck driver that she took off a year from her studies at California College of the Arts to follow the lure of the highway. Her trucking experiences back in the late 1990s were the impetus for “Over the Road,” her exhibition of one-of-a-kind handcrafted belt buckles.
At the time, Cox-Richard’s friend Johnny Vince Evans was hauling a great deal of auto freight for the big three car manufacturers. He traveled from Canada to Mexico and throughout the 48 contiguous states. “I would send Lily postcards from wherever I was,” recalls Evans. “When she took off from school, everybody said it was a terrible idea because they worried that she wouldn’t finish.”
Cox-Richard left for her on-the-road adventure after her second year of college. “I was just a seat cover,” she says with a wide smile. “I was usually on sandwich duty.”
Truck driving had been a dream of Evans’ ever since he was a child. “We used to drive to my grandma’s house in Boston from northern Virginia every year,” he recalls. “I would sit in the seat in the back of the station wagon and try to get truckers to honk their horns.”
Back in the 1970s, truckers had a certain flair, he adds. “They wore vests and cowboy hats. It was the time when the film ‘Convoy’ was playing at the movies. I thought their lifestyle would suit me.”
As it often happens, Evans found other interests – music and audio engineering – that filled his time. He didn’t think about trucking again until he was 28, single and worried about paying the bills. In 1995, he took a job with CFI (Contract Freighters Inc.). “It sounded like a great adventure,” he says. “It was a good opportunity to meet different people.”
Cox-Richard based her belt-buckle art on the stories that Evans shared as well as her own experiences. Her first buckle, Highway Hero, was inspired by one of Evans’ memories. He and a buddy were headed east on Interstate 10 in Arizona. It was late at night. “I-10 takes a turn in Gila Bend,” Evans says. “That’s when we saw a light Jeep vehicle off the road. It looked like it had flipped over a bunch of times.”
Another driver was already on the scene. He asked Evans and his friend if they spoke Spanish. “My buddy, Roy, did, so he tried to talk to the occupants of the vehicle, a man and his girlfriend,” Evans says.
The accident occurred in the middle of the desert, hours from anywhere. When the ambulance finally arrived, the girl was transported to the hospital. Her boyfriend suffered internal injuries and head trauma. “It was an awful scene,” Evans recalls. “It was obvious that the guy wasn’t going to make it. They had called a chopper for him and we watched them take him away.”
Cox-Richard captures Evans’ sentiments on the back of the Highway Hero belt buckle through his quote, “By the time the chopper touched down, that man was as close to death as I’ve ever seen.”
She wanted this piece of art to convey the compassion of truckers when they come upon an emergency situation. “So many truckers are heroes on the side of the road after an accident,” Cox-Richard says. “When you’re driving up and down the East Coast it’s so easy to forget there are giant expanses of road with nothing out there. Sometimes it takes hours for help to come. Almost every trucker I talked to shared some kind of personal experience with being the first person at the scene of an accident.”
When she started crafting the belt buckles, Cox-Richard says, she “wanted to identify with the on-the-road culture.” She spent hours talking with truckers on the CB and at truck stops, asking them to share their stories with her. She was drawn to their independent spirit and wanted to channel that feeling into her art.
After completing each belt buckle, she would carry it to truck stops and ask truckers their opinions. “Their feedback was important to me,” she says. “It was a two-way conversation.”
Cox-Richard became interested in belt-buckle art after learning that trucking companies traditionally present truckers with belt buckles as a company award. “They were a symbol of your identity or your accomplishments,” she says. “Having something etched on the back, well, that’s the more private story. The buckles have an outside presentation and a private presentation.”
The three-dimensional buckles are made out of non-ferrous metals such as silver, copper and brass, along with some found materials, like a tiny truck.
Cox-Richard completed five belt buckles while she was riding with Evans. Of the four remaining buckles, one is the Lot Lizard belt buckle, which carries a “no lot lizard” symbol on the buckle. “It’s kind of like a last line of defense against this urban legend,” she explains.
The Hello My Name Is buckle has a blank introduction. “It’s the idea of a belt buckle serving as a billboard for your identity,” Cox-Richard says.
The Map Home buckle is etched with the U.S. highway system. Inside the buckle are pictures of the trucker’s family and map pins. “There are holes drilled at each major junction or city so you could keep track of where you are going or started,” she says. “I found that the time truckers spend at home is very important to them. They would talk about things like missing their son’s birthday and how devastated they were. You can’t always be where you want to be.”
The last buckle displays the road signs for food and diesel. The inside holds Gas-X pills and a reduced-size truck-stop menu. Cox-Richard, who is a vegetarian, remembers how difficult it was for her to follow her meatless lifestyle on the
road. “At one restaurant in Texas I told them I was a vegetarian and the waitress said, ‘Honey, we have lots of chicken,’” she says, laughing.
One of the most interesting stops for Cox-Richard was the legendary Wall Drug Store in Wall, S.D. “It’s a huge drug store/souvenir store on the edge of the Badlands,” she says. “I was so curious about it because of the billboards leading up to it. When we got there, I didn’t get to stay long enough.”
To rectify that, Cox-Richard took a summer job at Wall Drug, where she sold cowboy boots. “I was introduced to a lot of stuff like that on the road,” she says.
Even though Cox-Richard and Evans are not together today – she is in graduate school in Virginia and he works as an audio-engineer in Minnesota – they did get engaged on a run to Portland, Ore. “It was a Sunday and nothing was open so he couldn’t buy me a ring,” Cox-Richard recalls. “He used a hose clamp from his toolbox to propose at the 24-hour Church of Elvis. Unfortunately, the engagement didn’t last that long.”
Cox-Richard’s year on the highway taught her several lessons. She learned that trucking can be a lonely job but that there is camaraderie among truckers. “I found it interesting that you don’t have an end point, just layovers,” she observes. “You’re passing through. That’s one reason I wanted to work at Wall Drug. I wanted to be at one place where everyone else was passing through.”
When she returned to school, Cox-Richard prepared for her senior exhibition, which would showcase her belt buckles. She used photographs of the truckers who had inspired each belt buckle. “The exhibition was my perspective and their perspective,” she explains.
Now an advocate for the trucking industry, Cox-Richard believes that trucking is an under-appreciated profession with cruel and unrealistic stereotypes. “The people I met were so real and diverse,” she says. “They were opposite of what people think. I may have been an outsider because of the time I spent on the road, but having that perspective for a year has changed the way I view a lot of things, including travel.”
Evans knows firsthand how Cox-Richard’s views of life have changed because of her experience. “Lily was on an art-school track,” he says. “On the road she realized real life isn’t in the studio, it’s on the road in little towns scattered around. I think she carries that with her in her art.”
