She Was Standing at Mile Marker 212 in Three Different States

Whoever's reading this, I'm going to talk to you the way I'd talk to a new codriver, because that's the only register I have left. Twenty years in a truck does that. You get in, you put your feet up on my dash and I will pull this rig over and put you out at the next exit, but other than that, ask me anything, and I'll tell you the truth even where the truth makes me look bad. There's some of that in here. I want it on the record up front that I know which parts make me look bad, so nobody has to write in and tell me.

My name doesn't matter much but it's Dana. I was forty-seven when this started, forty-eight now. I've been driving since 1995, the last nine of those years as an owner-operator, which means the truck is mine, the payments were mine, the repairs are mine, and when a broker decides not to pay me, that's mine too. We'll get to him. The truck is a 2006 Freightliner Columbia with a Detroit Series 60 in it, thirteen-speed, one point four million miles when this story starts, and I mean this with love, it is the least haunted object I have ever owned. It is a diesel engine bolted to a frame. Everything it has ever done wrong has had a part number attached. I want you to hold onto that, because the whole time I'm telling you the rest of this, I was sitting inside a machine that I understood down to the injector cups, and that mattered to me more than I can explain. Some people have churches. I have a Detroit that starts at eleven below if you plug the block heater in.

I pull a dry van, 53-foot Utility, 2009, roll-up door I keep meaning to convert to swing doors and never will now. Dry van freight is the bottom shelf of trucking glamour. No tanker endorsement drama, no oversize pilot cars, no reefer motor screaming behind your head all night. Boxes. Paper towels, pet food, tire assemblies, point-of-sale displays for stores that will throw them out in six weeks. In fall of 2015 I was pulling mostly off the load boards plus two brokers I trusted, and the math of my life was the same math it always is. The rate matters less than the deadhead. You can book a load at two-fifty a mile and it's garbage if you had to run two hundred empty miles to get under it, because empty miles cost you the same fuel and the same tires and pay you nothing. I keep a spiral notebook where every load gets a page, loaded miles, empty miles, fuel, tolls, what I actually cleared. My ex-husband used to say I ran the truck like a diner, every nickel written down. He wasn't wrong and the diner outlasted him, which I say with less bitterness than it probably reads.

The other thing you need to know about 2015 is that I was still on paper logs. The ELD rule, the electronic logging mandate, got published that December and everybody at every fuel island in America had an opinion about it, and I'm not going to give you mine because it doesn't matter anymore. What matters is that my hours were tracked in pencil, in a logbook, by me, and I was honest on it maybe ninety-two percent of the time, which made me one of the more honest people at any given fuel island. I'm telling you this because dates and times are going to matter in this story, and my source for them was a paper logbook I no longer have, because you only have to keep six months of logs and I didn't know yet that I'd want them. So when I say a thing happened on October 6th, understand that's me reconstructing from fuel receipts and memory, and memory is a broker too. It quotes you one thing and pays you another.

Here's the last piece of setup, and it's the part where some of you are going to decide things about me. I do not stop for people on the shoulder. Ever. I will call them in, I will slow down and move over like the law says, I will note the mile marker and give it to a dispatcher with my twenty and the direction of travel, and then I will keep driving. That is not because I don't care. It's arithmetic, same as the deadhead. I'm a woman who is five foot four, alone, in a vehicle that takes the length of a football field and a half to stop from highway speed. A staged breakdown is one of the oldest plays there is. You stop for the pretty stranded lady and her two friends come out of the ditch, and now you're beat half to death and your tractor's headed to a chop yard in another state. That happens to men who are six two. My CB handle, for what it's worth, is Switchback, from my flatbed years running the Colorado mountain routes, and a guy I ran team with back then, older guy, told me the rule plain the first month I drove. He said your rig stops for scales, for the law, and for nothing else that waves at you. Call everything in. Let the state come, that's what everybody's fuel tax is buying. I have followed that rule for twenty years and it has cost me some sleep and zero teeth, and I explained all of that to myself very calmly, twice, in October of 2015, and both times the explanation held. I want to be fair to the explanation. It's a good explanation. It's just that it was built for people, and I no longer think that what I was declining to stop for was a person, and there's a version of me that knew that the first night, at the speed of the skin on my arms, long before the rest of me was willing to do the paperwork on it.

I'll tell it in order. Order is the one thing I can still give it.

First week of October, 2015. The 6th, I believe, could have been the 7th. I had picked up a load of shelving components in Phoenix going to Oklahoma City, decent rate, terrible pickup, one of those shippers where your two o'clock appointment means they'll start thinking about you at four-thirty. I sat in that yard almost three hours past appointment, which matters, because it shoved my whole night east. I ran up through Flagstaff, fueled in Winslow, and by the time I was east of Albuquerque it was full dark and I was inside the last third of my fourteen-hour clock, doing that math you do where you know exactly which rest area you're going to die in, pardon, park in. I'd picked out Santa Rosa. There's a truck stop there I like because the showers are ugly but hot, and I want to say for the record that on a night like that the difference between a driver at hour three and a driver at hour eleven is real, and I'm going to hand that fact to the skeptics right now, free of charge. Hour eleven. Noted. Hold onto it, because it only explains the first one.

That stretch of I-40 east of Moriarty is high plateau, over six thousand feet, and at night it is nothing. I don't mean spooky nothing, I mean inventory nothing. Fence line, snow markers, the reflectors coming up out of the dark in their little rhythm, and every mile a green marker post doing its job. I read mile markers out loud when I'm tired. Have since my second year. It's not a superstition, it's a technique, same reason you crack the window or slap your cheek, the sound of your own voice is a tool for staying on the right side of the line. Two-oh-eight. Two-oh-nine. Not every marker, just when the eyelids get expensive. I've probably said ten thousand mile markers out loud in my life. I need you to know that habit existed long before any of this, because of what comes later.

So. Mile marker 212, I-40 eastbound, New Mexico. My lights picked up the marker post first, the way they do, that green flare, and then maybe forty yards past it, standing on the shoulder just off the fog line, a woman.

Not a shape I had to interpret. A woman. Sundress, pale, maybe yellow, hard to say under headlights because everything goes to grayscale at the edges. Standing still. And here's the thing that I keep having to say to people slowly, because they nod too fast: there was nothing strange about her. That's the entire point of her, if she has a point. Weight settled onto her left leg, hip out a little, the way you stand when you've been standing a while. Right arm straight down her side. Face turned away from the road, to the north, like she was looking at something out in the dark plateau, and turned just so far, not craned, not dramatic. It was the single most ordinary posture I have ever seen in my life. Bus stop posture. Waiting-for-the-microwave posture. If she'd been standing in a break room nobody on earth would have looked at her twice.

She was standing on the shoulder of an interstate at ten forty at night at six thousand feet in October in a sundress, and there was no car.

You process a shoulder scene fast at 62 miles an hour, but you do process it, it's the job. Disabled vehicle, debris, gator in the lane, guy walking with a gas can, you read it, you're already moving over. I read her twice in the maybe four seconds she was in my light. No car on the shoulder, no car on the median side, no flares, no phone in her hand lighting her face, no bag at her feet. Moriarty was eighteen miles behind me. Clines Corners was up ahead, and then a whole lot of nothing until Santa Rosa. I've said fifty miles from anything when I tell this out loud and people have corrected me, there's a travel plaza closer than that, fine, I'm telling you how it read from the seat. It read like the middle of a dark ocean, and a woman standing in it dressed for a farmers market.

I did what I do. Moved over a lane, kept my speed, and as I passed I looked down at her, because from up in the cab you look down at everybody, and she did not turn her head. Everyone turns their head. Four hundred fifty horsepower going by at highway speed moves air. Her dress moved. I saw the hem of it move in my wash. Her head didn't. Face stayed turned away, that exact civil amount, and then she was behind me, and the shoulder in my mirrors was black, and I got my heart to sit back down by doing the thing I'd trained it to do, which is procedure. I picked up the phone, called New Mexico non-emergency, which I have saved, along with six other states, and told the dispatcher I had a pedestrian on the eastbound shoulder of 40 at the 212, no vehicle visible, female, no apparent distress. The dispatcher took it the way they take everything, like I was ordering a sandwich. She asked if the pedestrian had signaled for help. I said no, ma'am, she was just standing there. She said they'd send a unit when one came available. I said thank you and hung up, and that was, formally speaking, the end of my obligations to that woman as I understood them.

I want to walk through the not-stopping honestly, because this is the part where a certain kind of person tells me they'd have stopped, and they say it with their chin, like the chin settles it. Okay. Here's what stopping is. It's me braking a loaded truck, 68,000 pounds that night, from 62, on a dark shoulder, which takes long enough that I'm now parked an eighth of a mile past her. It's me setting my brakes, climbing down, and walking back an eighth of a mile in the dark along a live traffic lane, toward a scene I do not understand, having already noted that the one thing the scene is missing is the vehicle that would explain it. It's my truck, my whole business, my house payments, sitting back there unlocked with the motor running, because you don't shut down on a shoulder. Or it's me opening my passenger door to a stranger and being five foot four. I have a hammer in the door pocket and I know what it's for, and I also know the truth, which is that if it ever comes to the hammer I've already lost. Every female driver I know runs this same calculus and lands the same place, and the ones who don't have stories, and some of the stories don't get told by them, they get told about them. So no. I don't stop, I call. If that had been your daughter out there, my calling was the best thing I had, and I gave it.

That's the speech. I believed the whole thing when I made it to myself that night, somewhere around the Clines Corners lights, and I mostly believe it now. What I noticed, though, and I noticed it the way you notice a low steer tire, something wrong in the feel before there's anything wrong on the gauge, was that my speech was answering a question nobody had asked. The question the night had actually put to me wasn't should you have stopped. It was: what was moving her dress, if the air I pushed at her didn't reach her head?

That's not a fair way to put it. The air obviously reached all of her. What I mean is she didn't react, and fabric doesn't have a choice. I chewed that all the way to Santa Rosa, showered it off, slept fine, honestly, hour eleven will do that, and in the morning it was a story. Odd thing on 40 last night. I told it at the fuel desk to a driver I half know, told it to my friend Renata on the phone that weekend, told my sister at Thanksgiving. Every version I told, and this is me being fair to what happened later, every version had the leg in it. The weight on the left leg. It was the detail that made the story tell right, that made her real to the listener instead of a smudge. Remember that I was telling it around, with that detail in it, in truck stops, on the phone, out loud. It's going to matter when we get to the radio.

Before the next one, let me lay in the ordinary misery of that fall, because it was all happening on the same calendar and my head did not have a separate shelf for spooky. In September I'd hauled a load of restaurant equipment from Joliet to Tulsa for a Chicago broker called Meridian Cartage Group, guy named Kevin on the phone, very warm, called me "my friend" a lot, which I have since added to my list of red flags right under a rate that's too good. Eighteen hundred and fifty dollars, net thirty. Thirty days came and went. I invoiced again. Kevin got harder to reach in stages, first he was at lunch, then he was traveling, then the woman answering the phone had never heard of him in a tone that suggested she was sitting next to him. By late October I'd filed on their broker bond, which is a process I could teach a class on now, and I was watching my notebook page for that load sit there unclosed like a sore. I don't factor my invoices. Factoring costs you three percent to make waiting somebody else's problem, and I'd always run lean enough to wait. That fall I learned what the three percent buys, which is not having to think about Kevin at two in the morning. Keep Kevin in mind. He's not part of the pattern, that's exactly why I'm including him. Half my nights that October I wasn't thinking about the woman at all, I was composing voicemails to a man in Chicago. Real life doesn't clear the stage for these things. It keeps playing all its dumb music at the same time.

Also that month: my clutch brake started making itself known, my sister's marriage was coming apart in weekly phone installments that I will not detail except to say the word "kayak" figured in it more than you'd think possible, and the little TV in my sleeper died and I never replaced it. None of those go anywhere either. That's the point of them. You want to know what a year is actually like, it's that. Noise with a signal buried in it, and you only find out later which was which.

Three weeks after New Mexico, so end of October, and I've gone back and forth on this, it might have been closer to four weeks, I've told it both ways and I genuinely don't know anymore, my fuel receipts from that stretch are gone. Call it three and a half. I was eastbound on I-40 again, but Oklahoma this time, night again but earlier, maybe nine, hauling a load of boxed furniture out of Amarillo going to Fort Smith. East of Shawnee the interstate runs through low wooded hills, completely different country from that New Mexico plateau, oaks right up near the fence line, more traffic, you're never far from an exit with a gas station. I was fresh, hour four, coffee still working, radio on low. I want the conditions on the record because they were the opposite conditions. Different state, different terrain, different hour of my clock, different weather, it was mild and damp that night, and I was not reading markers out loud because I didn't need to.

I clocked the 210 without thinking about it, the way you register any number, and something in the back of my head sat up anyway. I remember being annoyed at myself. Genuinely annoyed, like, we're not doing this, we're not going to get weird about a number for the next thousand miles of our life. And then the 212 post came up in the lights and there she was.

Same side. Shoulder, just off the fog line, maybe forty yards past the post, and I know it was about forty yards because it was the same forty yards. Weight on the left leg. Right arm straight down. Face turned away, north again, which on that road meant toward the trees, and turned exactly as far. Not about as far. I've hung doors, I've backed forty-foot boxes into docks with nine inches a side, I have a protractor in my eye, and that head was rotated the identical number of degrees off the road as the head in New Mexico. The dress I couldn't swear to the color of, pale, but the shape of it was the same shape, loose, above the knee. No car. No bag. Nothing in her hands, and her hands are a thing I noticed that time, they were just hands, relaxed, fingers soft, nobody stands that relaxed on the shoulder of an interstate, your body knows better even when you don't.

I did not move over as smooth that time. I heard my own load shift in the box, that's how I know. I went by her at 65 and I looked, because you look, God help me you look, and her face was turned away, and I remember with my whole body the certainty that the reason her face was turned away exactly that far was so that I could not see it, and that the amount was calibrated. Somebody had figured out the maximum amount of turned-away that still reads as casual, and was using it.

Now. You're going to say I could not possibly have measured a head angle at 65 miles an hour at night from a moving truck, twice, three weeks apart, and matched them. You're right. I couldn't have. I did anyway. That's the most honest sentence in this whole account and I'm aware of how it sounds. There are things the body does that the eyes then get blamed for. I'd have flunked any test you put me to, show me silhouettes, pick the angle out of a lineup, I'd flunk it. And I would also stake the truck on it being the same, and both of those are true at once, and if you've never held a pair like that you've had a nicer life than me.

I didn't call Oklahoma. There's the confession, since I made such a parade of procedure earlier. I drove nine more miles to a Love's, parked it, sat in my bunk with the curtain shut and the engine off, and did math instead. Here's the math, and I still think it's good math, as far as it goes. Every mile of interstate has a marker. I-40 alone is over 2,500 miles long and crosses eight states, and most of those states are wide enough to have a mile 212. So does I-80, I-70, I-10, I-90, most of the two-digit system. There are, conservatively, dozens of mile marker 212s in this country, and I drive a hundred and ten, hundred and twenty thousand miles a year, which means I pass a couple hundred thousand mile markers a year, which means I pass some 212 or another damn near every working day of my life and have for twenty years. People stand on shoulders. Cars get abandoned, people walk to exits, people wander out of their lives in every state I run. Given all of it, the strange thing, statistically, would be to never see anybody standing near a 212. Two women, three weeks apart, in the two thousand miles between them, standing in the single most common posture a tired human being has? That's not a haunting, that's a base rate. I wrote something almost exactly like that in my notebook that night, in the margin next to Kevin's unclosed page. I'd tell you I wish I still believed it, but that's not even it. I do still believe it. It's correct. It just turned out to be correct about a different world than the one I was driving in.

The part the math never covered, the part I kept off the page: the same forty yards past the post. Both times, the woman was not at the marker. She was placed after it, downstream, at the exact distance where your lights finish with the green sign and pick her up next. Like the marker was there to tell you what you were looking at. Like a caption.

The radio thing happened the first week of November, and I can place it better than the sightings because it was the same day I got the letter about Meridian's bond, the surety company acknowledging my claim, which I have kept, so, November 4th. I was westbound on 40 deadheading back toward Amarillo to grab a load of insulation, which tells you how the freight was that week, I was eating 300 empty miles to get under anything at all. Channel 19 through the Texas panhandle in 2015 was mostly dead air and mostly garbage when it wasn't, the CB's been dying for years, everybody's on cell phones, but I keep mine on low out of habit because it's still the fastest wreck report there is. Somewhere around Shamrock a couple of guys were passing the time, one of them complaining about the parking situation in terms I'd describe as traditional, and it was easy, forgettable radio, and I don't know exactly why I keyed up. Loneliness, probably, if I'm being paid to be honest. I'd been carrying the thing for a week and my sister was all kayak that fall and Renata had gotten tired of it, she's a nurse, she triaged my story as "tired driver" and moved on, which stung in a small way I didn't examine.

So I keyed up and said something like, y'all run 40 through here regular? Anybody else ever see the gal that stands out by the mile markers at night, no car, no nothing, I've seen her twice now in two states, same,

and I was going to say same stance. I had not said the word leg. I had not described one thing about her yet except no car. And a voice came over the top of me, stepped right on my transmission, which is rude, old radio guys don't do it unless it's a wreck, and this was an old radio voice, that dry panhandle sand in it, older than the two who'd been talking, and it said,

weight on her left leg. Right arm hanging straight down. Face turned away from you, just so far and not one hair farther.

And then nothing. The two guys who'd been complaining about parking had gone quiet, the way a room goes. I got my thumb working and said, who's this, and after a second the voice came back and gave a handle, Drybones, and I know how that reads in a story like this, I'd roll my eyes too, but handles are like that, half the men out there are Grim Reaper or Boneyard or Roadkill, it's a whole genre, at the time it registered as nothing. I said, Drybones, I'm Switchback, where'd you see her, and he didn't answer that. What he said, and I'm going to give it to you as close to verbatim as I can because I have gone over it in my head enough times to have worn a groove, was:

You've been calling her in. Quit calling her in. Doesn't hurt her, doesn't help you, just puts your voice on a tape with her in it. And then he said, listen, and there was a pause like he was moving his mouth closer to the mic, the sound got warmer, and he said: You don't wave at her, you don't flash your brights at her, and you don't count out loud. Not on that stretch. You keep your numbers in your head, driver.

I said, count what out loud. I already knew. My whole scalp already knew, but I asked anyway, the way you press on a tooth just to be sure it's the one, and there was no answer. I said his handle twice more. One of the parking guys keyed up and said something like, well that was different, nervous-jokey, and the other one laughed too loud, and normal radio noise closed over the hole where the old man had been like water over a dropped wrench, and that was all. Fourteen seconds of transmission, maybe. I've stretched it to an hour in the retelling of it to myself.

Let me do the debunk myself, so you know I did it then too, that same afternoon, at a fuel island in Amarillo, standing with the nozzle in my hand for so long past the click that the guy behind me honked. One: I had told the story out loud, with the leg detail, at that very fuel desk in Amarillo three weeks earlier, plus to a driver at the Santa Rosa stop, plus on the phone in public places more than once. Truck stops are a small town strung out along four thousand miles. Stories move. A bored old-timer with a good ear hears a story secondhand, then hears a woman on 19 winding up to tell it, and steps on her punchline for the pure art of it. That is a completely available explanation. Drivers do bits. There is a man out there somewhere who has been doing a fake Yankee dispatcher voice on 19 for thirty years for no reason anyone knows. Two: the detail he'd have needed for the trick was exactly the detail I'd been broadcasting, the leg, the arm, the face. I had, without meaning to, published the script. And three, the part that doesn't fit in the box with one and two, and I've tried: nobody I told the story to had heard the rules. The rules were new. No waving, no brights, no counting out loud. I hadn't told a single person about my mile marker habit, because it had never once occurred to me that it was worth telling, it would be like mentioning that I blink. There is no version of my story, as it circulated, that contained the information that the woman driving it counts markers out loud when she's tired. And that was the piece he had. That was the piece he leaned into the mic for.

I know. Cold reading. Lots of drivers talk to themselves, it's a fair guess, he threw it and it stuck. I've run that one too. I run all of them, that's the whole rest of this story, me running explanations like load boards, taking the best rate available even when the rate is bad.

November went by. I stayed off 40 for most of it, not on purpose, or ten percent on purpose, freight just pulled me north. I ran a couple of Denver turns, did a stupid cheap load to Boise because it repositioned me for a good one out of Ontario, Oregon, that fell through while I was still deadheading to it, thank you, load boards, and I spent Thanksgiving at my sister's outside Springfield listening to the kayak material live and in person. Somewhere in there the surety company sent a second letter saying Meridian's bond had more claims against it than bond, which is how I learned I'd be splitting $75,000 with every other driver Kevin had called my friend that year. I'd like to tell you the woman on the shoulder was eating at me the whole month. Mostly Kevin was. Fear is like freight, it doesn't run steady, it surges and slumps, and that month the boards were slow and my fear ran mostly financial.

One night at the Petro in Oklahoma City, and I'm putting this in even though it goes nowhere, because it's the kind of thing that happens out here and I want you to have the texture of it, somebody knocked on my cab at eleven forty at night. Three soft knocks. Now, a knock on your door at a truck stop at night is, in order of likelihood: somebody working, in the oldest sense, somebody selling DVDs or cologne, somebody stealing fuel who wants to know if you're in there, or somebody about to ruin your night in a more creative way. You do not open the door. I cracked the window vent and said, occupied, wrong truck, in my flattest voice, and a voice came back that was young and cracking and said something like, ma'am, I'm sorry, I'm trying to find the Greyhound, my phone's dead, everybody else's curtains are shut. I looked out. Kid maybe nineteen, hoodie, holding a phone charger in his hand like a dead fish, cable hanging, and an Army duffel at his feet, and everything about him was wrong for every category of knock I know. I kept the door shut, I'm not new, but I talked him down the road, the station's on the far side, past the scales, you can see the sign from the exit ramp, and then, because his face did a thing when I said how far, I passed a twenty out the window vent folded the long way. He took it like it might be a trick. He said his grandma was in Fort Smith. I said, tell her hey from Switchback, which confused him, and he walked off between the rows of idling trucks, and that's it, that's the whole story. He was fine. I assume he was fine. I bring him up because when I tell people I don't open my door at night, they picture me hard, and I want it understood that the same policy that kept my door shut on him is the policy that kept my wheels rolling past her, and the policy doesn't know the difference. That's what a policy is. It's a thing you build so you don't have to be smart at midnight, and its whole cost is that sometimes you weren't.