Pea soup. I think that’s what the seafaring bunch calls it. So foggy that if anyone had known how bad it would be they would have stayed somewhere warm, dry and safe. At this late date, I don’t remember if we were loaded or empty. Northbound on one of the roads on the east side of my hometown of Nampa, Idaho. I knew the roads there well, as they were the same roads I’d traveled back in my high school days to see friends or to work. Even with the fog so thick that it was difficult to see where we were on the road, I had some feeling for when we were approaching an intersection.
As I began looking through the soup for signs of the crossroad and slowing from the 20 miles per hour or so we’d been inching through the fog, I caught the first faint impression of the stop sign. I braked and slowed, preparing to make a stop long enough to hope opposing traffic could clear – if I could even see it.
As I had the truck and trailer almost at a full stop at the proper stopping spot by the stop sign, a genuine Volkswagen bus blasted past us on my left, I’m guessing at about 30 miles per hour. I had seen no headlights following me nor beside me. What I blurted out, almost shouting, as I waited for the sounds of a crash (which never came), was an epithet roughly describing a perforated cowpie.
We stopped for several seconds with the windows down, hoping to see if and when we would be safe to proceed. With no indication of anyone else so foolish as to be out driving, I pulled forward, hammering down and shifting through the lower gears as fast as the Cummins engine would pull us to the shift point of the next gear. I was hoping to avoid having the 70-plus feet of hay wagons behind me T-boned in the intersection. We made it home unscathed.
But not without another eye-opening experience. The fog thinned ever so slightly as we neared the next intersection. In the exact center of the crossroad, there sat a young man – on his haunches with his knees pulled up toward his chin. I’m guessing he was somewhere between 18 and 30 years old and dressed in only a sweatshirt over his jeans, no other coat. I didn’t notice him until I had deemed the crossroad as clear as it was going to appear and was hurrying across it like the previous crossing.
This was in the heyday of the citizens band (CB) radio craze. Almost all trucks had one, and most of the law enforcement cars also added a CB to the other radio gear. Mine was equivalent to the Cobra 29 radio. It hadn’t been “tuned up,” but I had a good antenna and decent range.
I called for any “law and order” who could hear me. I had a nice lady answer who sounded like she had a slightly more powerful “base station,” and from the background chatter, I think I had connected with either city or county dispatch.
I relayed what we’d just passed in the middle of the intersection. I heard the nice lady relay it over another radio to what sounded like an officer in a car. She clarified to the officer that the subject was not in a vehicle. As I “listened between the lines” to the chatter, it sounded like the local officer knew just who would be sitting in the middle of an intersection during the worst fog we’d seen for years.
Nothing was mentioned of the incident in the local news, so I’m hopeful that whoever it was got successfully corralled back to safety.
My preferred combination for hay hauling was a truck and a full trailer. That gave me an advantage on ice and snow because I could put more weight on the axles that moved everything up the road.
Traveling toward Jordan Valley, Oregon, on a snowy winter day, I approached a sweeping curve ahead. Ahead of me was a set of doubles – a freight truck. As the doubles started into the curve, they slowed, and I thought, “This is not going to be fun.” It was a wide curve, and I could see no opposing traffic ahead. The curve was at the base of a hill, and I knew I’d need all the momentum I had to make it without spinning out. The curve was banked, and there was the very real possibility of sliding downhill into the other truck, so I held mine high on the left side, which was the upper side of the curve.
We made it around the slower truck without incident, and halfway up the hill the icy pavement became bare.
My brother, noticing my white knuckles and “uh-oh expression,” said, “You can breathe now!”
