flu's blog: "world tour"

i was in iowa the other day. my dispatcher had been telling me he was gonna try to send me on a load taking me south to get out of the 'artic circle' or w/e the newsman is calling it. so when i opened the email and found a load to florida, with a drop in georgia, i smiled. good lookin' out bro! a couple hours later, i was in a truckstop, as i walked past a television display and the newschannel was on the tv. i had to do a double take and then walk back to believe my eyes. snow? SNOW?? in georgia? GEORGIA??? LMFAOOOO those poor bastards. they have no idea wut to do with snow. haha!!

so yesterday, my dispatcher calls me and says 'dude. u be fucking CAREFUL when u get to georgia!' i assured him that i can handle myself, lol'ing @ him.

'no. dude. u don't understand. i'm watching the news. there's a thousand cars parked on the side of the interstate. folks up'n got the fuck out and walked away from their cars!'

'hahhaha.. i love it. don't worry. i'll be fine. u know i can drive in the snow!'

'yeah well.. srsly. be fucking careful'

/eyeroll 'yeah yeah.. i got this'

so today.. as i neared atlanta.. traffic came to a sudden crawl. omg here it is, the next day, and shit is still all fuckered up. lol. poor bastards. i can't wait to see all these cars beside the road!

well..

the reason the traffic was crawling was because of a wreck, and more directly because of all the folks that had to slow down to just look at the other side of the highway. i didn't know this. all i could see was the miles of nearly stand-still traffic in front of me. i crept along for a quite while before i could finally see ahead that traffic was totally free after a certain point. a minute later i could see why. there was the accident. wreckers. flashing lights. workers.

as i got closer, i could see that a big rig had wrecked. all i could see was the trailer on it's side. they had cut open the top of it to go in with forklifts to remove the cargo so that they could then work with wreckage itself. i couldn't see the truck that had pulled the trailer tho. i assumed it had been towed off already.

wrong.

a minute later as i went under the overpass that the trailer was resting in front of, on it's side.. the truck came into view on the other side of the overpass.

sorta.

wut actually came into view was wut was left of the truck. the truck and trailer were completely separated. a feat that i can assure you, is highly engineered against ever happening. the remnants of the truck were at the base of the giant pillars in the median of the interstate, that hold up the overpass i was rolling under. it was a very sobering scene. one that turned my stomach. as hard as i tried, i could imagine no way a human could have lived thru that sort of carnage. i imagined the truck and trailer sliding sideways on the ice, as the nose went into the median with the overpass pillars rapidly approaching, when probably, the whole thing turned over on it's side. the top of the sleeper impacting the concrete pillars, stopping instantly the truck. so suddenly did the truck stop at the pillars, that the trailer was ripped apart from it's coupling and continued to slide under the overpass and come to rest on the other side of it, whipped to the side of the road and out of the path of travel.

these trucks aren't built like the cars that y'all drive. no intensive crash testing. no crumple zones. not that it would do much good. with 48,000+ lbs of cargo behind you on the trailer, there isn't much chance of surviving many wrecks. if u run into a brick wall, the load behind you would most likely crush you no matter how well engineered that cab that ur riding in was designed.

so here sits a completely mangled and exploded truck cab. with no possible way the driver could have survived.

it was then that the strangest thing happened.

i cried.

please never tell anyone. cuz i'll deny it.