Stories from the Road: For the Skeptics

[Tobin S.]

I was thinking about writing a story that would relate to atheists and skeptics, and I thought about a man I met early in my trucking career who made a lasting impression on me. I was down in Florida and it was hotter than hell. I was holed up in this little truck stop for the weekend because I couldn't find a load out of there on Friday and the company I had my truck leased to didn't work weekends. Well, the office people didn't work weekends. They liked their truckers to work around the clock.

Anyway, I was just having a hard time. I wasn't making any money, it was 100 degrees out with 1000% humidity, and my truck's a/c was on the blink. I was sitting in the truck stop soaking up some a/c and watching TV in the trucker's lounge. I'd been a trucker for a couple of years at the time and I was about 26 years old. The old hands, guys who'd been truckers for decades, fascinated me and pissed me off at the same time. A lot of them liked to give young drivers a hard time. I guess it was sort of like an initiation, but after a couple of years it was getting old. But some of them old guys also knew how to tell a story and I couldn't help but be sucked in by them.

So I'm sitting there in the trucker's lounge by myself and this old driver walks in and takes a seat. One of those woo woo shows about aliens was on the tube- the kind that seem to run on every other basic cable TV station. I thought I'd strike up a conversation with the guy.

"How long have you been a trucker?"

"Thirty years."

"Have you ever seen anything out there on the road that you weren't able to explain?"

"Nope."

End of conversation.

Now, you'd figure if there really were space ships out there tooling around in the deserts and the mountains, a trucker would see one at some point in his or her career. That driver had probably driven more than three million miles all across this country and maybe the lower half of Canada. I mean, there had to be something out there.

I thought I was having a genuine supernatural experience one time. One time- that was it. I had run out of fuel out in the West Virginia wilderness one night. I knew that there was a truck stop ten miles up the road and I had thought that I had enough fuel to get there, but a heavy load combined with mountain grades sucked that fuel out of there a little faster than I thought it would. Man, it was dark out there. I started hoofing it up the road and another trucker picked me up and took me to the next exit where there was an old run down gas station that had a pay phone. I got a hold of a road service guy and told him where I was. The other trucker took off.

There was just this one gas station there that backed up to some woods. It was closed, of course. There was a street lamp in the parking lot. I looked around and there were a few houses down the road and they were dark. It was very, very quiet. I started to get a little freaked out. Then I heard this faint bump bump bump like footsteps from something heavy hitting the ground. I looked all around me and the footsteps stopped. Then I got still again and tried to calm down. Then bump bump bump there it was again! I whirled around and started searching the tree line of the woods expecting to see the glowing eyes of something evil peering out of there right at me. Bigfoot, chupacabra, a demon, something! But there was nothing there that I could see. I tried to settle down, but I was probably as scared there as I've ever been in my life. Then bump bump bump there it was again, only this time faster! Then it occurred to me what it was...

It was the sound of my own heart beating.

Well, I've been a trucker for nineteen years now and my answer is "nope" too.