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"Shower number two-three-nine is now ready. Shower number two- three-nine is now ready." Elizabeth glanced up at the monitor to see a four next to her shower number. She wearily picked up her gear and headed off in that direction. Punching in the five digit code she was rewarded with a click and opened the door to step inside closing the door behind her with her foot. Throwing her bag on the counter, she immediately began to un-braid her hair, shaking it out to it's full length. Fluffing the waist length hair with her fingers she looked into the mirror at her reflection and at the older woman staring back at her. When had she started to look so old, she wondered and tried to imagine herself as she had once been. She turned her face first one way and then the other but saw only the faintest glimpse of the person she remembered being. She looked deeply into the ancient eyes as if seeking some answer as to why she was still out here. At sixty eight, she was older than she had ever imagined being and quite certain to have at least been retired by now if by some chance she did manage to live this long. Faced with the idea of retirement there remained only one problem. Where would she go and what would she do when at last she arrived there? Elizabeth had plenty of opportunities to make a better life for herself, but for one reason or another she had forsaken them all. Here lately she had begun to second guess herself and the idea of harboring regrets about this life did not sit well with her. Slowly she unpacked her shower bag and arranged each item neatly along the counter top as she would need them. She took the shampoo and soap dish into the shower and turned the water on in order to give it a chance to warm up. She undressed and stepped into the shower still thinking about the idea of getting out of the industry while she could still enjoy life, or what was left of it. Elizabeth had spent her entire adult life in the trucking industry first as a truckers wife, then as a driver in her own right. She had been driving so long that the job had, in essence, become her identity. Being able to drive a semi set the standard by which she gauged life and her place in it. She was born in Rochester, Minnesota in nineteen thirty four, the first of seven children to a factory worker and his wife. Elizabeth helped raise her siblings alongside of her mother while the two of them worked the small plot of land they called a farm. Together they managed to coax out of the land the food they would need to keep the family fed. Having grown weary of raising children, Elizabeth took the first opportunity to leave home and make a better life for herself. It came in the form of a young truck driver whose name was Earl McPherson. Earl had a dedicated run delivering goods from the factory where her father worked, to the rail yard in Omaha, Nebraska, three hundred and seventy-five miles to the south west. Elizabeth had seen him several times a week when she went to the factory to bring her father his lunch every afternoon. It seemed to Elizabeth as though the two men spent a great deal of time talking to one another. Earl was a constant presence in her life from the time she was twelve and when he asked her father for permission to marry Elizabeth, it was given almost without hesitation. They were married in 1951, four days after her seventeenth birthday. From that time on and without ever looking back, she spend all of her days and most of her nights on the truck, singing or reading to Earl to keep him awake on the long run to Omaha. After three years of her continuously pestering him, Earl finally taught her to drive the truck in 1954. Together they made more money than Elizabeth had ever thought possible and they used this hard earned money to buy a new truck several years later. It was a Kenworth, twin stick, sixteen speed suicide shift and back then it was, to Lizzy at least, a marvel of engineering. They spent the next eleven years tooling around the country, watching as the interstate system grew and matured into a network of highways that crossed the nation. More likely than not it was a wonderful experience for a young couple but there were times when it proved to be an extremely dangerous way to make a living. They drove during the union uprisings that became so much a part of the trucking industries history. "Growing pains" was what Earl called them, and perhaps he was right. In March of nineteen sixty-six, at the age of forty, Earl suffered a massive stroke and was hospitalized. Lizzy, at Earls insistence, continued to drive in order to make the payments on the truck that were due every month. In his heart, Earl believed he would be able to return to work but was afraid that if they lost the truck, it would be the end of his career. The shippers and receivers they had spent the last eleven years working with were sympathetic to Earl's condition and having always known Elizabeth to be a hard worker, allowed her to continue running the freight alone until he could come back. She assured them it was a temporary situation and that Earl would be back on the truck in no time. But within six weeks, Earl, suffering a second massive stroke, died, leaving Lizzy adrift with nothing but the truck to fall back on. Elizabeth attended her husbands funeral in Minneapolis surrounded by the family she had long ago outgrown. She was alone now and knew she would be so for as long as she lived. She would soon discover that she had become at peace in her own world. It was a world of her own choosing. With no idea of how else to earn a living, Lizzy continued to drive and not just for herself but for Earl and for the life she felt she could never give him. She was known for making all of her appointments on time and never missing so much as one day after they buried her husband. Since then, she found solace in her work, driving harder and longer than when she and Earl had been together. Now in her forty-ninth year of driving a semi, with over four million miles accident free she had come to a point in her life where it was time to stop driving. Elizabeth had spent the past few days examining her feelings concerning the prospect and realized that it was not so frightening as she might once have thought. After showering, she went into the restaurant to get something to eat and ended up sitting at the counter conversing with another female driver there. They spoke for the better part of an hour and discovered they were both going to Baltimore Maryland for Monday morning. They agreed to run together for a spell and in unison, got up and went up to pay their respective bills. Elizabeth and Stacy left the truck stop and drove east through the rest of Ohio, West Virginia and on into Pennsylvania. The two women chatted on channel forty as they drove and picked up the Pennsylvania turnpike in New Stanton. They drove out to the Breezewood exit, where I-70 continued east at an angle through Pennsylvania, and down into Maryland. Elizabeth stopped to fuel at the TA, filled her coffee mug and got caught up on her paperwork before heading into Baltimore. Stacy however, kept going, saying something about wanting to get on the other side of the Maryland scales before they opened. Elizabeth also wanted to get across the scales but if she didn't get fuel she would have to push the load to Baltimore. And this was something she was not willing to do, not even for a dispatcher she liked. They bid each other a goodbye knowing they might not ever see one another again. But this was the way of the road and a given among those brave enough to call it home. Brave or crazy, Lizzy thought to herself as she slowed down for the turn into the truck stop. A scant half hour later, Elizabeth pulled out of the truck stop and turned left onto the road that was interstate 70. She turned her CB back to channel nineteen and asked what the weather was like up on the hill. The report she received had pretty much been expected and Elizabeth knew that for the next hour or so at least, it would be a tense ride. A heavy blanket of fog was covering the mountain and the visibility was near zero. Turning the radio back to channel forty, she called for Stacy knowing the other woman was probably out of range by now, but tried nonetheless. She received nothing but static and turned the squelch up until the sound of it became lost in the background noise of the truck. Dropping another gear she continued the long and steady assent up the hill which sucked at her RPMs like quicksand. She thought she had seen someone on the westbound side flashing their high beams at her but she wasn't sure. She continued on into the eerie all consuming fog feeling slightly disoriented. It felt as if the fog was moving towards her instead of the other way around. Elizabeth had been moving at a near crawl when she saw something vague and indistinct flashing redly through the mist. She already had her four ways on and briefly wondered if this was nothing more than a reflection of her own four ways bouncing back at her. She turned her CB down to channel nineteen and immediately heard someone frantically screaming "Back it down eastbound, back it down! There's one hell of an accident ahead of you. Multiple vehicles. People are just walking around. Back it down!" To be continued..........
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