Too much thinking

Last night was windy and rainy, with a low of 55.* Today it was overcast, with occasional snow flurries, high of 26.*

400 miles can do a lot.

I've talked about crossing a front before, but it's still a weird feeling. Keeping the heavy coat in arm's reach all the time is a habit I still work at. And hiding in the warehouse until you're unloaded because they won't let you idle the truck still jars, too.

This particular warehouse didn't have a break room, but at least it had a place to sit down. With vending machines nearby. Also a TV, though that's not an attraction for me. This one was a little less painful than some--it was tuned to Telemundo, so I had no idea what was going on most of the time. That makes it less annoying, somehow.

Then the news came on. (I hope the anchor was using her real name. "Maria Celeste" would be a bit over the top even for an actress, in my unenlightened opinion.) And one of the stories included a clip that needed no commentary. Some driver had a camera looking out the windshield (I hope it was a police car) when an SUV just ahead of him suddenly swerved into oncoming traffic (why I don't know). The tractor trailer he was charging ran clear off the road trying to avoid a head-on collision, and almost succeeded. Instead of squashing itself on the semi's bumper, the SUV sideswiped the trailer.

The car scraped along for about half the length of the trailer, grinding every bit of sheet metal off the driver's side, before it caught a corner on something and went spinning back into the middle of the road. The car behind the semi swerved wildly, dodging the tumbling SUV. Which put it right in front of our roving camera crew.

All of a sudden the view out the windshield got real hard to interpret. Everything seemed to be jumping around. Then the clip ended. And they started the clip over again, with different commentary.

I've never seen anything that spectacular. I have seen a few things that were probably as bad or worse, but so far I've always been passing by AFTER it happened. The crash I wrote about here was pretty mild, as they went. This is more like what I'm talking about. (I've seen at least one other truck that completely gone...) I haven't mentioned the time I passed a semi that had apparently left the road, crossed about a hundred yards of grassy right-of-way, and driven straight into an embankment. The dust was still rising around it. Two or three other trucks had apparently been right behind it--they were stopped on the shoulder, and their drivers had bailed out and were running to see if anyone was still alive.

The only time I've actually seen something that bad happen predated my trucking career. I was walking down a street when, a few hundred yards ahead of me, someone stepped out in front of a delivery truck. An instant later he went flying back into the grass.

Like a rag doll.

I've read dozens of stories where someone used that simile. It got to be such a cliche. Then I saw the real thing, and that's exactly what it looked like. Nothing spectacular. Any self-respecting action-flick director would have been embarrassed.

And then the driver got out came back, and had promptly got hysterical. Yelling, waving his arms around, tearing his hair. Melodrama. He'd never make the Oscars.

The truck crammed into that embankment didn't explode properly, either. Odd, how reality makes such bad theater.

Somebody's going to think I'm trying to be cute here. I'm not. Just the opposite, I think. I'm not sure what I'm trying to be.

There's something in my head that I can't bring out properly. Something about how real life and real death aren't spectacular or dramatic. How maybe both drama and spectacle are ways of hiding from the real. How no movie crash, with all its fire and noise and thunderous background music, has ever done to me what that flat, undramatic news clip and those flat, undramatic sights along the road have done. Made me watch the road more carefully, fear for myself and those around me, realize just how easy it would be to die, or kill someone in that other lane.

More philosophy than trucking, I know. Sorry 'bout that. But another thing about this job--you end up thinking too much sometimes.
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*That's degrees Fahrenheit, just so you know...