Mile 47 Wants You to Slow Down

There's a stretch on our regular freight route — call it mile 47, a long downhill sweep into a bend that has killed more trucks than anyone likes to count — and among the drivers who run it at night, there's a thing we don't advertise to the office. The radio talks to you there.

Not always. Not everyone. But often enough that it's part of the informal handover, the way you tell a new driver where the good diner is: 'Coming down to 47, if your CB says easy now, you listen.' Because that's what it says. A calm, level, older man's voice, cutting across whatever channel you're on or no channel at all, low in the speakers: 'easy now, easy.' Twice, usually. Right at the top of the descent, before you've even thought about your speed.

I've heard it four times in six years. Each time I was fine, running sensibly, and each time I still eased off another notch, because you do, because the voice has the tone of someone who has seen the thing you haven't seen yet. And on two of those four nights, there was a reason lower down — once a car stopped dead in the lane with no lights, once a patch of black ice the gritters had missed. I came onto both slow enough. I might have anyway. I'll never know, and that not-knowing is exactly why every driver on this route treats the voice as gospel.

The reason we treat it as gospel is the other list. Three drivers, over the years I've been told about, who mentioned afterward — or whose cab recorders caught them saying — that they'd heard 'easy now' at 47 and laughed it off, sped up, made the joke. All three came to grief on that bend. Not the same night. But that bend, that descent, ignored voice, and gone.

Old-timers say it's a driver who went off there decades back, in the days before the barrier, and who has apparently decided that his own bad night is going to be the last one on his watch if he can help it. I don't know about that. I know that when the speakers say 'easy now, easy,' every trucker I respect takes their foot off the pedal and says, out loud, into the cab, 'thank you.' And so do I.