Black Dog?

I was driving down I40 in NM when a car passed me. I looked down and there wasn't a driver. I figured that I just hadn't noticed the driver. When the car got in front of me I looked through the rear window and didn't see a head. It was at the end of my 10 hr shift so I figured I was imagining things. There was a driver about a quarter mile in front of me. I hollered at him on the squawk box to check out the car and see if he could see a driver. He didn't see one either. He was just starting his shift and had been on the road maybe a half hour. I pulled over at the next exit and went to bed. I figured if I was seeing cars that were driving themselves then it was time for me to go to bed.

 

Black dog was a good movie but while we are talking movies i have question. has there been any real situations like dual with dennis weaver going against a evil big rig driver?

 

I've seen overpasses that weren't there, and some bushes that looked like animals, but those were tricks of light more than fatigue.

Fatigue, now...For a few months I drove five or six nights a week between Minneapolis and Milwaukee (one way one night, back the next). I struggled to stay awake, even well rested, because there's just something about me and the sun. If I don't see it sometime during the shift, I can't get oriented around how wakeful I should be. So one night, westbound toward Minneapolis, on I94 about the 105 or so, there's a bunch of fog. It's not fog-bank fog, but the kind that sits in troughs of land and hovers over fields...you know the stuff, you see it mostly when it's humid and it's been raining lately.

Well, I was fighting the fight, like I had for a couple of weeks, trying to last those last 120 miles. But this night, I got the shivers in the spine, and the watery eyes and the stomach dropping through the shoes. That fog was creeping out of the low spots and wafting over the road, curling over road signs, snaking out from the trees. It was all real, and just doing what fog does, but that night it was Death himself reaching out for me, hanging out by the shoulder, waiting...draping his hand over me as I passed by.

It was just fog, of course, and a part of my mind knew it then, and when I woke up the next afternoon, I knew my fear was self-instilled...but ###### if that didn't strike me stone cold when I was driving through it. I went another two weeks on the account and said "Screw it, let me go back to what I was doing before."

 

i was doing a undercover run from bangor me one night after working all day i was driving down a 2 lane back road since they didnt let over 80k gross on I95 after exit 113 it was 3 am i started at 2 am the day before i was almost back to where i could get on the highway i was feeling pretty tired when all of a sudden a 4 wheeler comes out of nowhere and cuts me off and slows down i instintly woke up and then the car just disappears in to thin air i couldent believe my eyes right then and there i seen a pull off spot i pulled in and slept for 11.5 hours havent made a run like that since scared the shiznit out of me

 

I'm not a driver, but I have seen "shadow animals" before. After 2 sleep deprived nights of teenager-y bullcrud, my friends and I went to Kings Island to ride some coasters. We got back to my friends's place late, and I had my dad pick me up. On the way home, I saw a raccoon scurry in front of our car, but it disappeared right before we would have hit it. A few more minutes down the road, we went around a curve and I thought I saw a white bunny hop across the road, but it disappeared before it finished crossing.

 

Couple years ago I was out hunting in the mountains of PA. I was in the woods by 4am and it was a bitter cold day. I had my t-plate dually dump truck and had taken my 4 wheeler out. Well I didn't get back to the truck until after dark. By the time I got loaded and ready to head home I was exhausted. I should have stayed at a friends house on the mountain but the wife (now ex for obvious reasons) was complaining so I headed home. I was driving down a dark winding stretch of blacktop that anyone who lives in PA would know about. Didn't see another vehicle the whole way. Trees were close on both sides of the road and the headlights made a tunnel effect. At one point, between awake and asleep, I started hallucinating that the trees were actually buildings on the side of the road leaning in and falling on me. I have taken hallucinogens in my time and this was far more frightening than any chemical trip I was ever on.

But no I never saw a black dog.

 

I started driving in the Canadian oil patch when we didn't have to run logs. After a typically long day spent in the shop (12-ish hours) and just as I was getting ready for bed, I got a call to go get a load of nitrogen and be on location at first light. About 150 miles to get loaded and then 200 miles to location and 8 hours to get it all done in truck that maxed out at 55 mph. About 6 hours into the trip I almost ran into an elephant coming out of the ditch onto the road... in northern Alberta ... in the winter.

Time for more coffee.

It is truly miraculous that more of us didn't end up dead or permanently maimed. Sometimes would wake up at the card lock, fuel nozzles in the tanks and no idea how or when I got there. And I worked for a (multi-national) company that had one of the better safety departments and records. But we worked a 15/5 schedule (15 days on, 5 days off), and for those 15 on, we were on-call 24/7. Sleep? That's what the 5 off were for. It was not at all uncommon to be working on a couple of hours sleep a day for 3-4 days straight. Crazy stuff.

 

I'm pretty sure I have a guardian angel named Pablo that sits on my shoulder. Problem is he speaks spanish and I'm not fluent yet so most of what he says I don't understand. I think he picks on me a lot....matter of fact he may not be an angel....think I'm gonna learn spanish and ask him....

 

That'll come in handy with all the lumpers, too.

 

I have yet to deal with lumpers but I'm sure the time is coming. I *ahem* 'aquired' the rosetta stone software along with a dozen languages and in my downtime I think I'm going to brush up on my espanol....maybe I'll learn cantonese too so I can mess with folks on the cb lol