Most of us will experience a defining moment in our lives, an event that changes things forever in one way or another. Sometimes it’s a decision we make that directly sets the course going forward. Othertimes, it’s an event completely out of our control – being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time. For Marshall Howl, that event occurred at 5am on Wednesday, 17 December 2003.

Only 23 years old at the time and driving for Palmerston North-based Clark and Rogers Transport, Marshall was just pulling out of the Ōhakea weigh station when he got caught in a pile up when two other passing trucks connected. His Foden Alpha ended up 50m from the impact site; its cab impacted so hard it was displaced from the chassis.

“I was stuck in it for a couple of hours before they could get me out and into the helicopter to hospital,” Marshall says. “I was put into a coma and woke up on Christmas Day to my dad sitting in the hospital. I had a broken leg, a broken arm, skin grafts, a punctured lung … and I was in the hospital bed telling the boss I’d be back at work in six weeks. He said, ‘You effing won’t be!’ But the arm didn’t heal as quickly as it should’ve, and they had to eventually reoperate. I spent 10 months off the road, and after psychiatric and driving assessments, I was declared fit to drive.

“Mentally, I have no memory of it. I have no memory of going to work or my runs to Te Kūiti and back that night,” Marshall says. “As such, I have no fear from it. If I did, I might not have gone back driving. How I’m alive is a miracle, but I survived it and got back in the seat. I can hide from it, but I haven’t. Everyone who knows me knows that history.”

Marshall would go back to that same job at Clark and Rogers full-time in 2004. A career truckie, he is a driver to the core, tracing the trucking lineage back generations.

“Dad’s dad, Ron, was a farmer, but was sent to North Africa in the war and drove trucks there. He came home and went back to farming. Mum’s father, Dudley Thompson, had a three-truck transport carriers’ business in the 1930s and 1940s, two-axle Fords and the like. He sold his business in the late 1940s or early 1950s to what became Manawatu Transport today.

“Dad, Brian, left school and went working for an agricultural contractor, driving trucks and tractors, and he drove a milk tanker between 1965 and 1970 for the Manawatu Co-Op in Longburn. When he and Mum got married, he bought a farm and started that life.”

Marshall has memories of a couple of the farm trucks over the years. “The ’53 OLB Bedford once broke an axle and got stuck down a hill when we were doing a load of hay out of Rongotea. We got the tractor and dragged it home. In 1992, when I was 12, Dad bought a Butterbox International off another farm when we moved to Marton. I used to drive that round the farm as a teenager.”

With truck-driving uncles and cousins, the trucking influence was never far from Marshall. “My family do say I’ve got the truck driver in me. I’ve always been fascinated by it. But I only ever wanted to be a farmer because that’s what I grew up knowing; I wanted to live that lifestyle.”

The two paths would converge during Marshall’s teenage years when he worked for Bruce Gordon Contracting near Marton over three hay seasons.

“They had two little two-axle trucks and that’s what I learnt to drive on. We’d drive down the farm, on the country roads.”

In 1998, at 18, Marshall got his first truck-driving job, taking to the wheel of Marton ITM’s Ford N1317 two-axle, 14-tonner. “The furthest I went on that job was Ohakune. I was out on my own, and for an 18-year-old, that was first-class trucking!”

At 19, Marshall went off to Deca Training in Rotorua to get his trailer license and promptly got a job at Farmers Transport Fielding. “My first day was rough. The guy I was working with fell off the truck, four wool bales high, and died in front of me. That was an eye-opener. I was in the real world with big trucks now,” he says.

The job at Farmers included carting peas into Wattie’s Fielding, which progressed to running trailer loads of veggies to Hawke’s Bay, before moving onto stock trucks. “We had 380 Nissans; they were a big truck!” Marshall recalls. “Farmers Transport was good.”

However, with work slackening off, Marshall began driving stock trucks for a local Rongotea operator Egan Gennills of Egan’s Haulage. “We’d pick up beef calves and have to lift them three decks high in the crate. I’d have 30 to 40 pick-ups, with an agent, a few here and there. Then I would deliver them on my own, doing long days and half the night. I had a lot of fun working there, coming from a childhood on the farm.”

With three seasons behind him, the drought of summer 2003 meant the stock work dried up, and by July, Marshall was on the hunt again. He went door-knocking and Clark and Rogers had a job, running DB beer on a five-night swap. “That was the job on the Foden Alpha. It was a great truck,” Marshall says.

Having recovered from his accident and with Clark and Rogers selling out to Roadfreighters, Marshall did a short stint with Symons Tankers, running milk from Longburn to Hawera. “I only got six weeks work there … I married in the November and went to Aussie for a week on honeymoon. When I came back, I got two days’ work and they pulled the pin, volumes were down. So, I was looking for a job again.”

Palmerston North-based Cam Arnott Transport helped out with a job for three months over the Christmas period, but within two months, two drivers left, so in 2006 Marshall found himself part of the team full-time, running Yoplait to Auckland and Christchurch from Palmerston North, thus kicking off his career in refrigeration.

1 & 2) Two separate seasons at Symons on two separate Scanias.

When his time there ended four years later, it was back to Symons for another season before Marshall kicked off an 11-year stint with Hall’s on various runs.

“I took the Taupō swap out of Longburn for Woolworths. I did that for a year and a half but I wanted to move to the dayshift. I covered the South Island run for two months when I got a new day-cab eight-wheeler Western Star, followed shortly after by another with a DD15.

“After the Kaikōura earthquake I was moved to Blenheim, running trailer swaps there for three months. It was good fun and all, Blenheim filled up with North Islanders in the earthquake recovery, but I had two young kids at home, so I went back to Palmy and they gave me the Longburn- to-Christchurch swap – via the Lewis Pass to Culverden. I did that for a year and a half; it was probably the best time at Hall’s. It was great.”

Sadly, with the arrival of the Covid-19 lockdowns, Marshall found himself at odds with Hall’s mandates and with his hours reduced to 40 per week, he made a temporary move to Envirowaste running to Bonneyglen landfill at Marton. “That was a bugger with the mandates at the end. I wasn’t to know at the time, but I could’ve survived the two months before it went away, and avoided six months at Envirowaste. It was a filthy job; the trucks were disgusting. It was all unpleasant. It really pulled me down.”

As fate would have it, at the point Marshall decided his time at Envirowaste had reached the limits of ‘temporary’, an old friend now driving for Northchill posted to his Facebook about starting a new run.

“I messaged him, and they’d been advertising the job for a month, but only in the Auckland listings, so I hadn’t seen it! I spoke with Cory [Knox, group operations manager], and he basically said: ‘You’ve been at Hall’s 11 years, you’ve got the job!’ I started a week and a half later and have been there two years now.”

At 44, and having run the gambit of driving jobs, Marshall reckons refrigeration is where it’s at for him. “I’ve been on it 18 years in total now. This job is second nature to me – I’ve been going into Longburn since 2006! And that’s what they want, what the customer wants … the experienced drivers they can rely on.”

With two sons aged 20 and 15, there’s always the potential for a fourth generation of drivers in the family. “Their childhood is different to what I had – growing up in town compared to out in the country. The older one is into cars, but I reckon the younger might have an interest. He comes one Sunday a month to Taupō with me.”

A man who’s experienced road transport’s great highs and horrific lows, Marshall Howl is an inspiration in overcoming adversity by embracing it.