A day in the life of a YH Logistics Driver

Joss, one of our loyal logistics legends (pictured), has written the below piece giving an insight into a day in his life as a delivery driver for YH during Sydney’s lockdown.

Military Road is a stretch of Sydney that needs no real introduction. We have all sat on its baking tarmac and soaked in its uniformly straight traffic jams. This time, I however sit here, with a truck full of beer.

The traffic lights flicker between colours, and the air conditioning wafts past my fingers and blissfully reaches my sweat-stained face. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s ‘Woodstock’ immerses the cab with a 70s-like vehemence, drowning out the engine that strains to keep me cool on this sweltering summer’s day.

I glance up at my phone, looking at my remaining drop-offs as the lights yet again switch from the inviting green to an all-too-familiar red. With over fifteen drops left for the day, the beer in the back transforms into the thought of the amber nectar flowing freely from an ice-cold tap.

***

It’s Friday afternoon, and as my loop of the Northern Beaches nears its end, my hands grimy from the number of kegs being spun into countless cellars; the sun starts to drop — soaking my remaining run to the brewery with an incandescent haze of deep orange and silhouetting rows of palm trees in an album cover-esque image.

King St appears in my windscreen, and I greet it with all my windows lowered and the voice of Stevie Nicks wafting across the numerous pedestrian crossings that sit before me and my cold beer that awaits at the brewery. Newtown looks like it’s physically bristling with anticipation — the people that make up this part of town grace its paths with a colourful hum. The 123rd traffic light of the day oscillates for the final time, completing its job of protecting the walking babble of excited-looking students drifting into yet another happy hour, and allows my truck to pass. I turn into the final corner and 76 Wilford Street hones into view, and a line outside the brewery greets me as I mount the curb and park the vehicle.

The characters in the streets that I occupy on a daily basis, have, until now simply inhabited similar spaces on similar roads, crisscrossing each other, producing the familiar picture of a city hustle and bustle. The individual drama was simply lost in the bigger picture. The story, if you like was gone. It simply, ‘was’.

***

This lockdown has a particularly vicious way of creating insurmountable questions. It’s a repetitive cacophony of conversation that rarely sways from the obvious narrative, one which has gripped us all in what is the first major novel to which we are all primary characters — as opposed to simply inhabiting the same physical space.

We are all watching on from our own worlds, myself as a drayman working around the Delta, delivering beer and spirits to the people that make this brewery such a mainstay in the Newtown community. I have noticed a few important seams of behaviour within the community which gladly receive the product that so effortlessly glides out of my truck. With an almost extra sensory perception, the people’s need for our ‘Unifier’ beer may have more to say than our obvious love for the hazy nectar within. It’s a word that perhaps says more of our situation in this story than any other.

So as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young so prophetically put it:

We are stardust

We are golden

We are caught in the Devil’s bargain

And we have to get ourselves back to the (beer) garden

Words by Joss Guyer