This is the time of the year I spend a lot of time on the road, and usually with large loads.
I've been processing it since, but about a week ago I was heading down the road with a load full of soybeans. The road outside the farm my parents live on is a flat, straight stretch of state highway. I had just got up to road speed when I noticed a Nissan leaf drifting into my lane heading my way, coming out of town. It fully entered my lane. I flashed my brights and laid on my horn and hit my brakes. They didn't swerve. I hit my Jake brake, and I think that startled them into paying attention. I got stopped just before them, and they swerved past close enough that they knocked their mirror backwards.
That scared me.
It was a local girl heading in to high school for the day, and said that they had been distracted by someone's snap chat on their phone.
They thought they were on an easy stretch of road.
It reminds me of a few other stories from this year.
I've already listed here the story of someone from a movie being shot here that turned around in the road.
Additionally :
Earlier, Ellen and I were heading to a charity event for dogs when someone came left of center in a nearby larger town and removed our rear bumper. They were very emphatic that they were not texting and driving. They had simply reached for their phone which had fallen to the floor so that she could turn off the alarm telling her to take her anti seizure medication.
In the words of the very amused responding police officer, you can't make this shit up.
The last one was this summer. Again, flat stretch outside of mom and dad's. There was an f-150 heading in to town. I was working on fence maybe 200m from the road.
The young man driving received a text, checked it, went into the shoulder on the other side of the road, over corrected and went into our field. He rolled his truck seven times and took out three fence posts before coming to rest on the truck's side. Miraculously, he was uninjured. He just needed to be freed from his seat belt.
So it seems to me that what the army taught me was true : complacency kills.
Be safe out there.
