Yep, one of my brother's brothers-in-law was a trucker. It's not easy by any stretch of the imagination. He owned ... well, he and the bank owned ... his own rig, but he lost it simply because he wasn't a personally responsible adult, which, unfortunately, wasn't too terribly unpredictable in his case.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence