By Douglas V. Gibbs
As a trucker, my CB Radio is an important tool that I use often throughout my day. Without it I would be unable to communicate with loader operators in the quarries, other drivers on the road over conditions of traffic, and so on and so forth. I bounce between half a dozen channels depending on who I am talking to, and where I am at. Sometimes, outside parties are on our channels, and the signal bounce can even carry these messages over great distances. Sometimes they are just chatter, and sometimes you pick up on one side of a conversation that is downright interesting.
The other day I picked up a ghost signal that came in quite clear, and the old guy talking was a trucker for many years, going back to before I was even born. At one point in his conversation he discussed how during the sixties he was an over-the-road driver and often found himself in The South, which was a lot different back then, he said, than it is now.
"One time in Mississippi," he said, "I was on this long, two lane road. It was much like the roads going to nowhere in Tennessee and Kentucky, 'cept this one didn't have cotton up against the short fences along the roadway. When you travel these roads at night, when the fireflies are out, it almost looks like a scene from a space cowboy move. Anyway, on this particular day up the road standing right in the middle of my lane was a lone sheep with a deer-in-the-headlights look on its calm little face. I was fully loaded, and with forty tons of big rig barreling down the highway, it'd take a quarter mile to come to a stop, and this little sheep was much closer than that. A car was on the other side of the road and looked to meet me right about where the sheep was, so I couldn't swerve into the next lane. The shoulder was too small, and soft. My eighty thousand pounds would have no doubt gottten stuck in that soft dirt. I had no choice but to tear into the poor little sheep.
"I still slowed down as much as I could, hopin' that maybe the little guy could survive if I'd slowed down, or perhaps he'd have more time to get out of the way. I blew my horn too, hopin' to scare the fluffy animal out of the way. Unfortunately, I still hit him at a high speed, and he didn't even try to get out of the way.
"When I finally came to a stop, I got out to take a look at what damage the thing caused my truck, plus to see if I was gonna hafta wash off his blood and guts from my truck. But when I got up front, it looked like I had knocked him clear out of his skin. There was no blood, guts, or bones. All that remained of the little guy was stuck to my grill. I pulled it off and was amazed. He turned out to be a mighty fine wool coat."
I let out a quick chuckle. I'd hate to hear him tell a story about driving on the ice roads of Alaska.
-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
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