...and some days the bear eats you, but not before catching you, playing 'clawsy' with your soft skin, and 'toothsy' with some of your bones.
That was kind of my day yesterday. First there was New Hampshire, the state of my ancestral home and a place I haven't visited in 40+ years. We - Mr. Trainer and me - had a load to drop way up in the White Mountains. Along the way, we passed names long-forgotten from my childhood: Lake Winnipesaukee. Franklin Notch. Tramway. The Old Man in the Mountain.
And we passed snow and open, active ski areas. It was chilly and there was a winter storm warning in effect for the area, something that was hard to believe considering that it was sunny and not that cold. But the next morning,mafter sleeping in the truck in a dirt lot across from our delivery location, we awoke to 6" of snow and a considerably colder temperature.
Untarping a load in the cold with wet gloves would prove not to be the worst part of my day, however, because New Haven, Connecticut, would be.
Many hours of driving later, we found ourselves on the outskirts of New Haven on I-91, headed for our fuel stop in New Jersey on I-95. Rush hour traffic was beginning to build and there were some blinking caution lights inside the cab - nothing urgent, just advisory - and I was driving in the #3 lane, as I almost always do, when I kind of heard some chatter on Mr. Trainer's CB radio about debris in the roadway. I was paying attention to the road and not the radio and aiming high when I saw a small car in front of me move away from what appeared to be a lawn chair in the middle of the travel lane.
Mind you, reader, I was carrying about 47,000 pounds of lumber and was probably close to my 80,000 pound gross weight at the time. Lumber is a very unstable load and moves easily, so moving quickly to avoid debris in the road during rush hour would have been unwise.
So I didn't. And couldn't have anyway, because of traffic to my left and behind me. Instead. I hit the "lawn chair" and instantly realized it wasn't a lawn chair. Steering became a challenge and there was a very loud grinding sound. My reactions were to control the vehicle first and slowly pull into the right-side breakdown lane, right under the "Emergency Stopping Only" sign because I surely had one.
Before I got out of the truck to survey the damage, I saw the rather large amount of green liquid accentuated with red liquid, flowing down the right side of the lane.
Diesel fuel and transmission fluid. Judging by the amount and speed, I figured I had severed a fuel line or something. Inspection, however, showed a very different scenario: what I thought was a lawn chair was a very substantial piece of heavy steel bracing, one leg of which was impaled deep into the driver side fuel tank through a 4" hole. It was from that hole that all 50 gallons of remaining fuel was leaving the truck.
There were no injuries and no property damage to anything but the truck, so the next six hours or so were a chaotic jumble of fire department, State Police, and State Department of Environmental Protection investigators and cleanup crews.
Mr. Trainer and I are in a hotel waiting for the truck to be fixed.
And to think I was so close to getting to our destination, our yard in Nashville, Tennessee, for me to test out and me finally getting off this truck and out on my own. We would have been there as I write this, but for a steel brace in a heavily travelled roadway on an Interstate highway near New York City...
So yeah. Today, near New Haven, Connecticut, became my worst day. But even in this badness, there is at least one good thing - at no time during this incident did any law enforcement officer ask me for my driver license, medical card, and load paperwork. So no citation or report.
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