Lovely day. Visually, anyhow.

Color has come to northern Pennsylvania.

See for yourself.

The pictures were taken from the parking lot of a hardware store in a middle-of-the-mountains town in PA. This is the kind of thing they see just stepping out the front door. Part of me would be afraid to live up here. I'd hate to take that kind of view for granted.

As it is, I earned that view.

I'm such a fine fellow...
Last night I got a call in the darkness, summoning me to a humanitarian effort the next morning. One of our other drivers had had a death in the family and needed to get home in a hurry. Would I trade loads with him, seeing as how the load I was hauling was headed much closer to where he lived than the one he currently had?

Knowing something about being trapped days away from your loved ones, I would've had a hard time laughing that one off.

So I drove north instead of south the next morning, hurrying toward a truck stop I'd been to several times. When I got there I called my dispatcher and got his cell number. (My own cell actually worked where we were supposed to meet, for a wonder.)

He told me where he was. I went there and couldn't see him.

He described the trucks pulling out of the spaces around him. I looked, and they weren't there.

I got a nasty suspicion, and asked him one more question.

He told me which truck stop he was in. I was in the one ten miles over.

Same chain, same city, different highway.

Sigh.

Earning the view
Well, I did get there eventually. And got the new load. And headed north into Pennsylvania instead of south into Tennessee.

And it was beautiful.

Up the Susquehanna River valley, and then up and over the Appalachians of central Pennsylvania. I wish I had pictures. As you can see, I do have a camera now. But I don't wave it around while I'm driving. Darn it.

At length I followed a two-lane into a little town that sat in the middle of a blank spot on my road atlas. Two twisty highways, a dot on the map with a name, and that's it. The GPS gave me a little more information, but kept trying to get me to follow ONE-lane roads to cut the corners.

Computers. Bah.

At the intersection, my directions said, go straight. Make a hard left onto THAT narrow street. Make a hard right onto the NEXT narrow street. It'll be right there on the right.

The hard left was HARD. The trailer wheels cleared the corner by about six inches. Not a good sign—right turns are much worse in a tractor-trailer than lefts, as I think I've mentioned.

Sure enough, the right turn was impossible to make neatly. No matter what I tried, I could see I would catch the wheels on that white-painted curb at the corner. And so I did.

The curb was both taller and squarer than it looked. I did some damage to one of the trailer tires—not enough to make it unsafe, but enough to affect my language. Then I carefully pulled into a small-town hardware store parking lot, wondering how I was going to get back out.

The owner of the store was waiting for me. Wondering why I'd come in that way.

Turns out there's another way in. That doesn't involve any right turns. Or tall sharp curbs. And only one tiny side street, not two.

He's been telling people about it for decades. And every single company still uses the other set of directions.

The town had been talking about putting “no trucks” signs up on that street for twenty years. They were still talking about it.

Sigh.

I did a pretty good job, he said. About the least damage he's seen anybody take coming in from there. The worst? He remembered the fellow who'd come in with a heavily loaded trailer in the dead of night, and apparently hadn't slowed down much when he took the last corner. That tall sharp curve had blown every tire on the right side of his trailer, then hooked a rim and pulled the wheel assembly loose from the trailer. It sat in his parking lot for two or three days before a crew came out and got the wheels reattached.

I feel a little better.

Scenery is where you find it.
As they got their forklift out of the corner and started pulling bundles out of the trailer, I wandered into the store, and out into the parking lot. The store was nice enough, but what was around it was lovely. There was a valley with a little stream right behind their little warehouse. Walk over to the back door and lean a little. Beautiful.

And looking up from the parking lot—well, go back up top and look again.

I sat in that lot for a couple of hours before I had both an empty trailer and instructions on where to go next. No hardship.

They do it with mirrors
At length, the old fellow who owns the store helped me get the rig out of his parking lot without running over anyone. This time I took the route HE suggested. And it was good.

Got one good scare, though.

I got to the end of his little street and prepared to turn right onto the highway. I looked to my left and saw a car coming around a curve.

Then it disappeared.

So did the highway.

The yellow lines were gone. I could still see asphalt, but neither the paint nor the trees were there anymore.

Before I could panic completely the car reappeared. Right in front of me, passing casually before my windshield. I still didn't know where it had gone, but at least I knew I wasn't losing my sanity. So I looked anxiously out my left window again.

After several seconds I realized I was looking at a different road. Unpainted. With neatly cut lawns lining it, instead of trees.

I was looking at the road behind me.

My mirror was blocking the whole highway, and the street in the mirror was exactly where the highway would have been. And it looked right.

It looked right. If I hadn't seen that car disappear, I would have pulled out happily. And God knows what would have happened.

Shivering a little, I looked to the right. And as my eyes focused, the town disappeared.

Exactly the same way. Apparently my right-side mirror was blocking the entire road THAT way. And the reflection of the street behind me looked just as right on that side.

Neither view really looked right, of course. But they were close enough to something you could expect to see that I had to consciously TELL myself I wasn't really looking “out the window.”

Suddenly those magician's tricks started to sound a lot more believable.

And the stories I'd heard about truckers who'd pulled out in front of speeding cars they never saw seemed a lot more believable, too.

I spent the next thirty seconds or so rocking frantically back and forth, looking for angles where I could see the real road, past my mirrors. I finally satisfied myself that nothing was coming and pulled out.

But I must have looked awful strange, if anyone was around to see me.

The problem with “scenic"
I had to go back the way I came. And it was still beautiful.

And I was behind schedule. And I didn't dare go much past tourist speed. Not on those roads.

I got to my next pickup late. And by the time I got my load, I was past my legal hours.

The customer didn't care. Truckers are a security risk, don't y'know. So they politely told me to get off their property.

On the other hand, they did tell me where I could go to park for the night. And it only took a few minutes to get there. And the DOT does understand that sometimes you can't just park where your hours run out. So I carefully wrote down in my logbook what I'd done and why. In theory, I shouldn't get in too much trouble about it. It's the guys who ignore the rules and/or try to lie their way around them that get the heavy end of the hammer. Or so I'm told.

I hope so.

But that's for another day. Right now we sleep.

G'nite.

Oh, yeah. Random note.
Passed a small business this afternoon, with an interesting name.

Curl Up and Dye

Wonder what they do there...