Middle Of The Road
Driving through Jackson Hole, Wyoming, firefighters were standing in the middle of the street raising money by asking motorists to drop cash in their outstretched boots. All I had with me were two-dollar bills, and I offered them up, but was summarily turned down because they wouldn’t take Confederate money.
Trucking through Shakopee, Minnesota, this thirty-year-old driver was kinda tired , kinda late at night. It was around 3:00 AM, and I saw a house in the middle of Main Street. Surely it was just my mind playing tricks on me.
Nope. Someone was actually moving a two-story house through town, working their way up the middle of a four-lane street. If I wasn’t wide awake on the approach, then I certainly was as it passed me!
We’ve all seen critters in the middle of the road, often deceased, but one trucker entering Michigan on I-69 saw a living elephant. But he knew it was his imagination because, after all, it was 4:00 in the morning. Seconds later, his car hauler collided with the pachyderm, which left the score at one critter totally dead, and one driver completely awake.
Traveling north through New Mexico on U.S. 54 late one night, I was following another truck a half mile ahead of me. Suddenly he started swerving and flashing his brake lights. I thought maybe he was falling asleep, but moments later I was surrounded by the same herd of mule deer. There were no fatalities that night, but even the critters were a little wide-eyed after that!
The list of things we’ve all seen in the middle of a road reads like a garage sale ad, including clothes, furniture, suitcases, and mattresses. I’ve also seen a slot machine, on I-35 south of Kansas City, and an open safe near Purcell, Oklahoma. But my favorite, which might have been my lost lottery ticket, was a 428 cubic-inch Ford motor, complete with a chrome air cleaner and valve covers.
Straddling the rumble strip with my Pete 579, I spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to take that bad boy into custody. But alas, I had no winch, no chains, no noth’n except the knowledge that I probably wouldn’t survive if I stayed there much longer. Although common sense is not the first trait close friends attach to me, it became readily apparent that parking in the right lane of a 75 MPH speed zone was not my brightest idea.
One day it was me in the middle of I-80, in the middle of Iowa, trying to weave through traffic in the middle of a snowstorm. Suddenly I noticed a four-wheeler approaching from behind me at a high rate of speed. Bracing for impact, I heard the hit but didn’t feel it, realizing almost immediately that he had hit a car that was directly behind me. Both cars ricocheted into a ditch, leaving my rig and their drivers completely unscathed.
The moral of the story is simple. You can live your faith, family, politics, and friendships in the middle of the road, but you can’t drive there without serious consequences. And you can take that to the bank, as long as it’s not Confederate currency!