Big Time Truckin: True Trucking Stories
Dispatch 6: No Sleep 'Till Columbus
by Kirk Gonnsen
It was midnight and I was dead tired. I pulled my rig into the yard in Bowmanville and switched trailers in the dark. I urinated in the space between tractor and trailer, yawned and stretched my neck until I was looking toward the stars. I became overwhelmed by the fact that I had to turn around and drive to Columbus by 10 AM the next day.
I sucked down a juice box and ate a cereal bar hoping to get enough energy to get myself through Toronto until I could grab a coffee at the service center in Cambridge. There was nothing on the radio and each song turned to a mash of noise as my mind drifted.
I rolled down the windows, kept my body moving, drumming on the steering wheel. I knew I wouldn't make it to the border before I took a break. I decided to skip the coffee so I could make it to Dorchester and sleep without caffeine jitters. There, I would crash for a few hours, fuel up and gladly grab a coffee to make an early morning run to the Ohio state capital.
I fell asleep. Actually I woke up. But I was tangled in my shirt where I had fallen between the two seats. The engine was roaring and I knew I only had a few seconds before I was off the road. I jumped into the driver's seat and grabbed the steering wheel. To my right was a tractor trailer just ahead of me. I veered to the left, and saw a tractor trailer on that side of me. I pulled the truck back to the right and held the wheel straight. I clicked off the cruise and took over the gas pedal. Amazingly I hadn't hit anything. I stared ahead. My vision was blurry. My glasses had fallen off. The highway lights moved toward me as the
trucks rumbled westward three abreast. I couldn't make out the dotted lines but I kept my rig between the other two and hoped they were in their lanes.
My heart was pounding now. I still couldn't make out where the road was and the two trucks on either side of me weren't moving ahead or falling behind. I decided that I had to slow down, pull onto the shoulder and get a grip. I let off the accelerator but the sons-of-bitches slowed down with me. I slowed down even more knowing that I was about to cause a major incident on the 401. I didn't care. I had to get off the road, for everyone's sake. I slowed down to a crawl and looked over at the truck to my right. To my surprise, and shock, I realized it was facing the other way. I looked over slowly, unable to take my eyes off the road for fear of crashing. I saw it then. The truck cab was empty. There was nobody driving. The truck was parked and so was I.
A full minute had passed before I realized I was steering, accelerating and acting like a two-year-old in a twenty-five-cent mall ride. I sighed, heavily, then laughed. If only I could have been in one of the other trucks watching me and thinking "look at this idiot, thank god, he pulled over before he killed someone."
