This is an experience from Memorial Day weekend a few years ago when I was driving my 18-wheeler and it’s too long to be a blog, it’s more of a short story. Read it through and perhaps you will forgive me for being so wordy!
Late spring out on the plains can often produce unsettled weather. But not today, it was the most perfect morning I had ever seen. Up and out of my 18-wheeler at daybreak, I was walking around my trailer as the sun finally yawned and stretched, pushing golden fingers of brilliant sunshine across the sky. It scattered the last hint of nighttime, revealing a crisp, blue sky completely void of clouds. The air was still with not even enough of a breath of wind to transport a hitchhiking dandelion puff. I fired up my rig and headed west. In Amarillo, Texas I stopped for a quick break then I turned south on I-27. I now noticed that my perfectly blue sky had begun to manufacture clouds that sat lazily on the southern horizon like huge balls of cotton candy and a breeze had started up. Arriving in Lubbock by late morning, I dropped my loaded trailer at a customer’s warehouse and drove a couple more miles to pick up a set of trailers that needed to be shuttled to El Paso. Doubles or “pups” as drivers like to call them, are not too bad to haul but they can sure get squirrelly in the wind or on slick roads. By the time I had switched my trailers, fueled my tractor and filled out my logs those fluffy clouds had turned a nasty shade of grey with sheets of heat lightning, although I was too far from the storm to hear the thunder. The breeze was now a light wind. I left town just before noon, picking up US 87, still heading south. Not 10 miles south of Lubbock, I realized that I was headed into a summer thunderstorm. These are quite frequent out here. The wind was getting a little stronger so I shut off the cruise control and dropped a gear. There is nothing out in this part of Texas other than pastures, a handful of trees that are more like bushes, herds of cattle and their barbed wire boundaries. I noticed the cattle this day because they were all standing around with their heads (and horns) stuck in these bushes. How strange, I thought. As it turned out though, those cows were smarter than me. The raindrops started, at first just huge scattered drops, the wind came in gusts – I dropped another gear – and I was now close enough to hear the thunder that quickly followed each lightning strike. I knew without looking that both cats had disappeared into one of the closets. They do not like thunder. I would not, in fact, see either of them again until the next day. Another 10 miles and I hit it. A severe storm cell. It was like driving through a wall and coming out in a different world. Instead of the cloudburst I knew was coming, it was more like the clouds had bumped into the earth and were skidding along the ground. The rain was instant and hard, the water collecting so fast on the road that I worried about hydroplaning. At high noon in Texas, it was pitch black. The thunder and lightning came together. Deafening loud, even the trailer walls would suck in with each roll; the lightning turned the landscape into photo negatives in need of processing. My C.B. radio screeched and howled but I was afraid to touch the metal switch to turn it off. The lightning struck the treetops, becoming St. Elmo’s Fire and rolled along down the line of trees and I suddenly understood what those cows were all about. I slowed down as quickly as possible, fighting the steering wheel against the driving winds. I had to get off the freeway. There was no way that I would be able to keep those trailers upright in this situation. In the next flash, I saw a blue sign indicating a rest area coming up. I was doing about 30 mph by now and touched the brakes to try and slow enough for the exit ramp. My rear pup went out of control and started skidding into the next lane. I could see the company logo on the side of the trailer in my mirror. My brain was screaming at me to do something – jackknife… skidding wheel leads… can’t stop it… gotta outrun it… I stood on the accelerator. For a sickening second I thought that my drive tires would lose their traction in the standing water on the road surface but the 470 diesel-fed horses responded and the tractor jumped forward, yanking the errant pup back into line as I shot past the rest area. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to stop there. The only good news I could manage at that moment was that I knew I was heading through the storm. I was going south and it was traveling northwest. A couple hundred more yards and I popped out of the menacing cloud. The visibility was more clear and the thunder and lightning behind me. But I could still hear the thunder roar. No, wait, that’s all wrong. Thunder rolls and crashes but it doesn’t roar. Tornadoes do. I looked to my left. Oh dear Lord, here it comes. My only chance was to get out of it’s path before it actually touched down. I picked up a gear and held on to the steering wheel for all I was worth. I could see the marker lights of two semis coming north. I grabbed the C.B. mic, hoping I wouldn’t get zapped, and yelled, “Break northbound!” I didn’t wait for a response, I just kept shouting, “Back it down, back it down, you’ve got a twister coming up on your blind side!” Both trucks’ hazard lights came on and they began to pull off to the side of the road. Another gust of wind, my trailers shuddered but kept moving. The first northbound truck was not as lucky. I yelled into the mic again, “STOP, northbound, STOP! Your trailer is breaking up.” The angry wind had managed to get a tendril into an unseen hole in a seam between the trailer sides and the roof and it peeled the roof right off, just as easy as you or I pulling the lid off a tin of sardines. The metal roof and bits of his cargo went crashing off into the pasture, dancing in the wind like a child’s kite. Now the second driver was yelling at me, “Southbound, keep going, go on! Get out of here!” As much as I wanted to try to help, I could see the logic of this and kept driving. Another 20 minutes and the whole storm was just a surreal memory. The sky was bright and sunny in front of me, but the view in my mirrors was engulfed by black clouds and distant lightning. At Big Spring, I pulled into the truck stop parking lot, choosing a space off to one side. I moved from behind the wheel to sit on the bunk. I was hungry but speaking in the general direction of the closet I said, “I think I’ll just take a nap before I go inside for some dinner.” When I awoke, the sky was introducing another day, Barnum was sleeping in my arms and Wyatt was curled up behind my knees. I lay there for a minute, greeting the kitties and I told them, “Boy, I had an awful nightmare.” Getting up and out of the truck, I headed for the truck stop to get some breakfast. I was really hungry. Walking up to the entrance, I passed the usual newspaper racks and as I glanced down at them, I stopped in my tracks, my blood nearly froze. The headline of a local paper read “TORNADO DESTROYS REST AREA ON US 87″ …
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