This is a true story from my truck driving experience and is part of my Journey’s of a Professional Truck Driver series. This story gives me a bit of a shiver when I think about it. With Halloween on the horizon I thought this would be a good time to put this out there. Fair warning, this story I’ve titled A Dark Night in the Bayou is a bit disturbing.
Rolling Down the Road
It was roughly 2am as I was traveling west bound on the I12 through Louisiana. I had been periodically checking my mirrors, but it was early Monday morning and there was hardly a soul in sight. It was in fact a dark night in the bayou.
The road was flowing up and down as we passed over surface streets in a suburban town. The freeway lights weren’t the bright white you find in a city, they were the burnt yellow of an angry demon eye. The lights on the truck I was driving were the older halogen technology and didn’t hold a candle, pun intended, to the modern LED’s. I’m not saying there wasn’t any light, probably just enough light to feel like you could see.
There were 3 lanes in each direction and I was driving in the middle lane. It’s the safest lane for truckers. You avoid the turbulence of the granny lane and stay out of the way of the speedsters in the hammer lane. Anyway, I had just gone over another hill and coming down the other side the light level was low. A quick check in the side view mirror and I can’t see anything except the hill I just came down.
Something ahead caught my eye and I found myself staring. Unable to process what I was seeing I kept staring until… He was next to me, then he was behind me and as I popped my eyes up to the side view mirror I saw the 4 wheeler. 4 wheeler is a term of endearment used by us 18-wheelers for the cars and pickup trucks buzzing around us.
I Saw Him
There was a man walking in the fast lane on the freeway, not the shoulder, but in the lane. His clothes were fairly dark and he had a hood pulled up over his head, but there he was. It all happened so fast, I saw him and then I was passing him and then I saw the car. Where did the car come from? By the time I saw the car they were next to my trailer. There was no where to go even if they had seen him, because I barely did. No sooner had I seen him, there was the car and then the car ran right over him. I don’t really know if I had quite processed the man walking in the fast lane before I was watching him being run down.
It happened so close I saw more detail than anyone should. I can still close my eyes and see it even though it was over a year passed. There are details I remember so clearly and then others that seem cloudier, like a mist that rolls in to soften the sight.
911
I pulled over at the next exit and called 911, I wasn’t thinking about the man, but the driver of the other vehicle. I saw it, but I still didn’t live it. Thinking about the other driver I hope they weren’t hurt, physically or otherwise. Picking up my phone, I called 911 spilling out of the details of everything I saw, where I was as the details of the scene played over and over in my mind. Taking a pause I hung out there for a bit incase one of the officers had any questions, but no one came. Eventually, I saw the emergency lights and heard the sirens responding to the scene. I couldn’t breathe, I was in no condition to keep driving that night so I woke up my husband and relayed the event.
Rolling On…
Eventually we got back on the road, but I sat in the passenger seat next to him for a while. I wasn’t ready to sleep, but sometime after we crossed into Texas I took a sleeping pill and knocked out. My dark night in the bayou had come to an end, but continues to haunt me to this day.
I still drive nights, I love driving at night. They say being a truck driver is one of the most dangerous jobs. I always feel the gravity and responsibility of moving up to 80,000 pounds down the road, but… I don’t know, that night the reality of the danger of the road was crystal clear.
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