FEATURE
After a near-tragedy to close 2020, expat Kiwi truckie Ben Overton has had the thrill of his customised Jade Transport 389 Peterbilt making the world’s most prestigious truck calendar
Calendar caps Kiwi’s comeback Story Wayne Munro
Photos www.wowtrucks.com
AVING YOUR TRUCK MAKE IT ONTO WHAT IS ARGUABLY the world’s most prestigious truck calendar is one thing: Enough to make any truckie hugely proud. Achieving that as a Kiwi, driving in North America? Wow! Now that is seriously next-level. But actually, having his 389 Peterbilt Pride & Class special edition feature in the 2022 Shell Rotella SuperRigs Calendar isn’t even the half of Ben Overton’s story over the past year and a bit. Making the calendar caps off a fantastic comeback from neartragedy at the end of 2020 for the 34-year-old, who’s been living in Winnipeg, Canada for the past six years – driving all over North America. He and fellow-Kiwi, close friend and workmate Andrew Worth were tobogganing near home on December 27, when their toboggan slammed into a concrete culvert buried in the snow. Ben sums up the aftermath: “I nearly paralysed myself…. breaking my back in four places – bursting two vertebrae and cracking two others.”
Worth – who, like Ben, drives for Winnipeg’s Jade Transport – was also seriously injured. Ben underwent an eight-hour operation to repair his back, a badly-injured knee and shoulder, and nerve damage….with no guarantees he’d be able to walk again. “Nah….it was pretty sore,” he says with serious understatement, adding: “It was a pretty dark time.” Even when he went home “it was pretty tough….difficult: I needed people to help me get up and everything.” There was, he says, one saving grace: For a long-haul truckie who’s normally away from home for up to 260 days a year, he got to spend some quality time with fiancée Megan (also a Kiwi) and their two girls, four-year-old Evie and Emersyn (now just one). And slowly, painfully – after five months of recuperation, then rehabilitation (he and good mate Andrew “motivated each other to go to the gym every day”) – he returned to work…. To find that his boss had not only kept for him the brand-new 389 Peterbilt he’d been meant to get in January….but had also Truck & Driver | 73
