Sometimes it’s easy, when confronted with conflict, to turn to a narrative that most aligns with our belief system. This human tendency often puts us on one side or the other. I traveled with the People’s Convoy for four days in March to complicate the narrative around COVID-19. Mandates. Public health restrictions. Vaccines. And human beings. My time with Ben and other truckers let me learn more about this conflict and, hopefully, write a story that doesn’t fit into a blue or red mold. At Source Media Properties, we follow a set of principles that allows us to “complicate the narrative.” The goal for you, the reader, is not to change minds or beliefs or political affiliations. It’s to gain a more nuanced mindset when it comes to confronting conflict in our lives so we can treat each other with more respect. Part I was published on March 21.
Ben Bowman, 36, sits at an Italian take-out shop in Arlington, Virginia on the fourth day of his People’s Convoy trek. The Ashland man dips his Philly Cheese Steak sub in barbecue sauce as he explains where much of his anger stems.
He was 10 when his parents split after a 12-year marriage. Some time after, his mom pulled him out of public school because he’d already failed the sixth grade and was on track to fail again. He was also bullied a lot and he was having behavioral issues. Her plan was to homeschool.
“She didn’t,” he said.
His mother died in 2019. His father declined to comment for this story.
Laura Lund, his aunt who lives in Hudson, helped Ben’s mother look after him and his siblings during those early years.
“He’s my nephew, my sister’s son. She was having a hard time in her life, and she just really couldn’t take care of her kids. My kids are younger than hers, so I was helping how I could, but I couldn’t do enough,” she said.
So from age 12 to 18, Ben didn’t go to school — formal school, that is. He was placed in a number of different foster and child care protective services. Some of them included “schooling,” he said, making air quotes with his fingers.
The lack of consistency at an early age led to anger issues, Ben said. Looking back, he wondered why he, with two living parents, needed to be placed in so many out-of-the-home programs.
“I think it was just to give my mom a break from me. She needed a break from me, she just couldn’t deal with it. I don’t blame her, I wouldn’t have wanted to put up with me either,” he said.
It became a game to him to see how soon he could get a new case manager. He wanted to throw them off. It was his way of lashing out.
Eventually, at 15, the lashing out landed him at Parmadale Residential Treatment Center in Parma. He stayed there for a total of 28 months during two separate stays in the early 2000s. The facility has been in the news several times over the last two decades for its alleged sexual and physical abuse to children.
Ben said he never experienced sexual abuse. “But there was physical abuse,” he said, adding it only ever came from the other troubled kids also staying at the center.
Trump, patriotism and ghosts
By the time he got out of Parmadale, at age 18, Ben had experienced some things that would lead to what he said was Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He was never formally diagnosed with the condition. He was, however, diagnosed with an anxiety disorder years after staying at Parmadale, yet doctors at the time told him the disorder was unrelated to his time at the treatment facility.
Ben is adamant he suffered from PTSD as a result from the bullying, punching and hitting he endured during his time at Parmadale. The kids, he said, would wait until staff members weren’t looking.
Still, something good came out of the residential treatment center, said his aunt, Laura.
An employee at Parmadale got through to him. The woman does not work there anymore.
“She connected with him somehow. He was able to see his life ahead and what it could look like if he got things in order,” Ben’s aunt said.
Ben said it was the woman’s kindness. On her last day at Parmadale after recently quitting, she and Ben shared a moment before she left.
“She told me I would do great things,” he said, fighting tears. “And that she has faith in me … she lifted me up.”
Efforts to reach the former employee, who now lives in a different state, failed.
Soon after his discharge at Parmadale, he set a goal of obtaining his GED. He did so in 2004, at the age of 19. Soon after that, he earned his driver’s license. “I was lucky enough to pass my test after the first attempt,” he said.
Lund said she’s proud of him. “He had some hard times to get through,” she said.
Another goal he set around that time was getting a library card, which Ben did. One day he drove his bicycle — it would be another year before buying his first vehicle — to the Akron-Summit County Public Library and browsed through the nonfiction section. It was there he found a book written by Donald Trump. He doesn’t remember which one he read first, but it didn’t take long for him to finish it and a few others written by the New York business mogul, who at the time also happened to be the star of NBC’s relatively new primetime reality television series The Apprentice.
Ben tore through the books.
He didn’t exactly care about Trump’s political stances or aspirations at the time, he said. But Trump’s story, as told through a number of his books, inspired Ben.
“Just him talking about his childhood, his father, his struggles in life, how he runs his businesses — it was amazing reading all of that,” he said.
Ben is patriotic. At one point on the road to Washington, D.C., as he saw people lining the highway waving American flags and waving in support of the convoy, he explained this side of him developed very early in life.
As a toddler, he remembered a story his grandfather told him about why he voluntarily joined the military during World War II.
“I asked him, ‘why would you do that?’ I couldn’t fathom it at the time. I will never forget his answer. And it’s something that shaped my beliefs the most. He told me that he saw Hitler and the Nazis on the move, trying to take over the world. He had to be stopped … He wanted to play a small part. He couldn’t fathom the thought of his kids and grandkids growing up in America without the liberties he had. That was why he wanted to join the Army. To do his small part,” he said.
When Ben broke off from the People’s Convoy on Sunday, March 6, the fourth day of his trek, he decided to be patriotic in his own, unique way. His aunt, Laura, said Ben “marches to the beat of his own drum.”
“I appreciate that about him now,” his aunt said. “Sometimes I didn’t. He was a little different. He lived in Ben’s world. And that world wasn’t always reality-based.”
At this point, as a member of the People’s Convoy, Ben was disappointed with the group for not courageously taking their beef with pandemic-related restrictions straight to the top at D.C. proper.
He brought up the fact that thousands of people had donated money, which at one time, according to the People’s Convoy’s website, purportedly raised $1.7 million, based on the premise they would “do something” in the D.C. area.
Organizers of the convoy eventually decided to lead the truckers around the 64-mile beltway. They would also organize meetings with politicians like Sens. Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson to make their pleas known.
Ben didn’t like that plan. It wasn’t enough. Besides, the price of gas, at the time, made leaps of around 10 cents per gallon every day. That’s a lot of gas money for driving around in circles, he said.
So he decided to march to the beat of his own drum as the “lead element of the People’s Convoy,” he said one Sunday afternoon while driving on the beltway as part of the convoy. He was going into the city.
The music that would come from the beating of his drum would make a different, more personal, sound though.
For Ben, being in D.C. for the first time in his life allowed him to spend time revering the sites.
Ben never joined the military. He said it was because he’s always been too short and wears glasses. Then again, he never really knew what he wanted to do in life, he said.
Ben is also into tracking and documenting paranormal activity. He attempted to do that when walking through Arlington National Cemetery on the fifth day of his trip as part of the People’s Convoy. He decided to break off of the convoy a day earlier in order to do some sightseeing in D.C., a city he had never before visited.
“What is your name?” he asked, leaving the question unanswered in Arlington National Cemetery’s 36th section, where World War II veterans are buried. He asked the question shortly after turning on his body-worn camera. He uses it for recording electronic voice phenomena, which are sounds found on recordings that are interpreted as spirit voices.
He was doubtful he’d record any EVPs that day — too many noises from maintenance workers, traffic and emergency vehicle sirens.
Had he recorded any, Ben would have reported it back to the 58 followers of the Ashland County Paranormal Society, a public Facebook page he founded in 2013. He leads hunts in and around Ashland County at cemeteries and vacant homes, among other sites. He posts EVPs on the page as evidence of paranormal activity.
Between the ages of 18 and 33, Ben said he struggled with distressing flashbacks from the time he lived at Parmadale.
The inner turmoil brought him to a point where he felt apathetic toward living. He wasn’t suicidal. He just didn’t care to live anymore, he said. At the time, he didn’t have a job. He lived with his mother in a house his father owned and that, unbeknownst to him, would soon face foreclosure, forcing the family to find another place to live.
He said his life was miserable, and he often found himself depressed. It was around this time he became interested in the paranormal, an activity that allowed him to escape and meet other people. It’s how he met Ralph Taylor, who at the time lived in Wooster. Ben was 23 and living in Ashland.
“We were both into the paranormal kind of thing,” Taylor said. “We talked back and forth for a while and then he wanted to meet me.”
Taylor, who is now 59, said he was reluctant to meet with Ben, not knowing him other than brief chats about ghosts and spirits. They ended up meeting at a McDonald’s and hit it off, he said, after Ben opened up about his life and his struggles.
They’ve been friends since. Taylor calls him a “good kid.”
“He overcame a lot in his life. I’m really proud of him … I wish more people were like him. He’s a caring kind of kid and he’s just a friend. If you need something, you go to him,” Taylor said.
By the time Ben turned 25, he had no job and future prospects looked grim. He still lived with his mom. Months before the house was foreclosed, though, he decided to enroll at Hamrick School in Medina, known for its truck-driving programs.
For the next several months, Ben learned about being a truck driver – a profession he never considered as being his own because, he joked, could he even reach the pedals? He also wondered if he could be responsible for such a big vehicle. He knew the job was hard, having grown up with a father who spent long periods of time over the road. How would he cope being away from family for so long?
“But I thought, ‘It can’t be worse than what my situation is now,'” he said.
He graduated in March 2011 and passed his test to receive a Commercial Driver’s License a month later. He started driving for Swift as a long-hauler in June.
Over the years, he’s enjoyed being a trucker. He can blast music as he drives and sing at the top of his lungs. He can feel like he’s part of something bigger — “the heart and soul of America,” a country he’s learned to love and respect.
He views being a trucker as a calling, similar to how servicemen describe being in the military or how clergy describe being in ministry.
In Part 3, our final piece of this series, we will learn about a vexing angelic encounter Ben had about three years ago — one he is still figuring out after his time with the People’s Convoy.
