The Cattle Guard Ate Twenty Minutes Of My Life

I drive the same forty miles of county road twice a week to check my father's water tanks, and I know that road the way you know a hallway in your own house. There is one cattle guard on it. It bangs. You feel it in your teeth.

I hit the cattle guard at 11:04 at night. I remember, because my dash clock is two minutes fast and I do that stupid subtraction every single time.

The next thing I have is 11:26. My hazard lights were on. My truck was stopped, engine running, facing back the way I had come, in the middle of a road with no room to turn around. My phone was in the cup holder, and I never put it in the cup holder — I hate the rattle.

I want to be clear about what I did not see. I saw no lights. No craft, no beings, none of the things you are supposed to see. I saw a road, my own headlights, and dust hanging in them, which means something had been moving there very recently.

What I had was a smell in the cab, like a hot toaster. And a taste, metallic, at the back of my molars, that lasted two days.

I drove home. I did not tell my wife for six months. When I finally did, she asked the only useful question anybody has asked me since: did I check the fuel? I had not. I checked the log the next week — I keep a mileage book for the tax man — and the numbers were fine. Whatever those twenty-two minutes were, they did not cost me any diesel.

I have told this to exactly four people. Two of them said sleep apnea. One said a small stroke, and I did go and get checked, and I am boringly healthy. The fourth was my father, who listened all the way through, then said that in 1979 he lost an afternoon on that same stretch and never once mentioned it because his boss would have taken his licence.

He would not say another word about it. He got up and went out to the tanks.

I still drive it. I just do not stop.