When you are an over-the-road trucker you will find yourself with no shortage of time on your hands. A guy can't drive a truck for more than a couple of months without getting bored with music and looking for a radio show that is more interesting to him. Some guys turn to sports talk, others to news. More than a few drivers can be spotted with a stack of audio books on their dash board. Paul found his attention to be captivated by the paranormal. He had been driving for only a couple of weeks when he stumbled onto an all night show that addressed topics like ghosts, aliens, and demons. 17 years later he still tuned in every night that he was up late enough to get the opportunity. This evening he wasn't driving late, but he had been waiting for this episode ever since the host had announced it and he wouldn't have missed it for anything.

In July of 1998 I took a job with a small trucking company in Inman South Carolina. They gave me an old T800 Kenworth to drive, as I was one of the new drivers. The owner had a couple of newer W900 Kenworths, but those were reserved for the guys who had been with him for a longer period of time. One week after I started working for him, he offered me one of those trucks... with a catch. The driver who had it had stopped at the I81 Auto Truck Stop in Max Meadows Virginia and gotten a motel room. Some time during the course of the night, he had gone into the bathroom and hung himself. I could have the truck so long as I was willing to take a bus there on Saturday, retrieve the vehicle, drive it back to our shop in South Carolina, and inventory and remove the drivers belongings so they could be returned to the family. I agreed to these conditions.

Jeff slapped himself in the face again in a desperate attempt to fight off the sleep that was trying to invade his brain. He wasn't in any particular hurry to get anywhere, so this was a problem of his own making, but it was none the less the situation that he was in. In trucking there were two ways to stay awake when your body yearned for sleep. Clean and dirty. Make no mistake about it, Jeff wasn't above a chemically enhanced 72 hour driving binge, but the altoids box in the glove compartment of his 2010 Freightliner Cascadia was completely empty. Wasn't it? He reached across and opened in to check, not that he expected to find anything, but out of the realization at how stupid he would feel if there was something in there and he fell asleep at the wheel. Better to pop a pill and avoid the scene of the accident than to try to explain why it was in there to the cops and why he hadn't taken it to the drivers that would take pleasure at his misfortune when it was retold later at countless truck stops across the country. “Had a co-driver* right there in his glove box but he fell asleep and rolled her over right in the ditch on I 70. Fucking idiot.” The rumble strip jolted Jeff back to reality. He jerked the truck back into his lane and slapped himself again. No pills in the box.