March 30, 1981

     Smoke would rise, not fall.  I would have known that if I had been thinking.

     But I didn’t think well hanging upside down. 

     It was March 30, 1981.  I can be sure of the date because I spent all day listening to the breaking news events on the radio.  It would be a day that changed things for everyone in America. 

     Only two months earlier I had listened in similar fashion to routine accounts of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration turn exciting when the radicals in Iran announced that the American hostages they had been holding were being freed.  That January day, the news would keep me awake on my trip in the Outback.  Why had the riffraff chosen Reagan’s Inauguration day to make the release?  Were they rubbing salt in Jimmy Carter’s wounds?  Was it a goodwill gesture towards a new regime in the United States? 

     On March 30, 1981, James Brady would take his last steps on his own two feet.  For the rest of his life (he died in 2014) he would be confined to a wheel chair.  John Hinckley Jr. would spend a year in jail and several years in a psychiatric hospital.  He is currently on highly supervised release.  As a result of his sentence, the “Innocent by reason of insanity” defense would be changed to “Guilty by reason of insanity” in most jurisdictions.

     President Ronald Reagan suffered a bullet wound to the chest, apparently a ricochet that struck the presidential limousine before hitting him.  The country would wait to hear if the curse of the president elected in a year ending in “0” would be perpetuated.  I was listening.

     Reagan’s wound turned out to be non-life-threatening, and he took it pretty well.  Not as well as Theodore Roosevelt, who sat on the dais, arose and gave a speech before allowing anyone to attend his bullet wound.  Well enough, though, and friend and foe both were happy that America had avoided another presidential assassination.

      Concern for President Regan would take a back seat to my own predicament.  The radio I was listening to would come to a screeching halt, probably because the antenna on top of the truck cab was wiped out.

      It was a weird weather day, too.  At my home base in Kansas, it was overcast but dry.  Further west, it had rained and snowed, snowed so hard that I 70 east of Denver was closed on March 29, opening on the morning of the 30th.    

     The folks had gone to Denver for some reason on Sunday.  They spent the night in the Bennet Fire House with several other folks when they had to get off I-70.  They weren’t surprised that it was muddy in Eastern Colorado.

     In Kansas, people were a little skeptical when I blamed muddy roads for my accident.

     I was on the “Colorado Route.”  I had hired on with the local cheese plant.  They got milk from three routes, two fairly local ones, and the Colorado Route.  Two truck drivers hauled the milk from the dairy farms to the cheese factory.  Gene drove the local routes, two days on, one day off.  I drove the longer route, one day on two days off.  We used the same truck, a recent model Ford, single axle with a Cat diesel engine. 

     My route had one dairy in Kansas near Goodland.  The rest were all in eastern Colorado.  I could go a couple of different ways, but usually I would go to Goodland, then Burlington on I-70 and make a stop.  From Burlington, I would go south to Cheyenne Wells for a pickup, then west to a farm near Eads.  Those stops were all reached by paved highway with gravel roads out to the farms.

     The area north of the Arkansas River is pretty barren and deserty in eastern Colorado.  Two things kept life interesting.  A military base somewhere used the area for practicing air maneuvers.  Most days, I could watch aircraft of some type, fighters, bombers, cargo carriers, stealth spies, crossing the area.

     The other pastime was imaginary.  Erase the fence and utility poles from view, and the land looked just like it must have centuries ago, sand, sage, grass, antelope and deer.  It was cattle country with few cultivated fields.  From the hilltops on the road, I could see forever, the tips of the Rockies pinpricking the horizon to the west, the sky meeting uninterrupted earth in the other three quadrants.

     From Eads, I headed back north on unpaved county roads, making two stops near Flagler, one on each side of I-70.  The eastern and southern portions of my territory were relatively dry.  As I approached I-70, the roads showed signs of recent moisture. 

     After taking on milk from the producer south of Flagler, I would stop and fuel in Flagler.  The biggest milk producer was north of Flagler.   By the time I reached Flagler, I had put in a fair day, but I wasn’t done.  I headed back east for three more stops, two south of I-70 and one north.

      Going south out of Seibert, I had paved road all the way to the farm.   For the next stop, I left the pavement and travelled east on graveled road.  Except after six miles, I crossed an intersection and two miles of dirt road, no gravel, lay ahead of me.  I only made a few hundred yards of those two miles.

     As I crossed over and left the gravel, I soon appreciated how much moisture had fallen in this area.  I hit ruts still muddy and wet.  I slowed down considerably, but not enough as it turned out.   

     Now when I dream about what happened, a voice in my head trills, “Stay in the ruts, stay in the ruts!”  Because of course, I didn’t stay in the ruts.

     The ruts had some kinks in them.  Like a boxcar on railroad tracks, the milk truck followed the doughy trail.  Left and right motion of the truck churned the milk in the unbaffled tank and shifted me and all the loose objects in the cab left and right.  I thought I could make better time outside the ruts.     

     I didn’t.  Once out of the ruts, the rear end of the truck went towards the right ditch.  I turned the steering wheel to the left, trying to get back into the ruts.  Wrong move.  I should have turned the wheels right, into the skid, to get in line with the rear end.  I knew that would put me in the right ditch.  I didn’t want that. 

     I turned left.  The rear wheels swung further right.  I was crossways in the road.  I was still going east, but I was headed north.  The right rear wheels caught in the ridge separating the road from the ditch.  They stopped.  The left rear wheels wanted to keep going.  So did the milk in the tank.

     The tank was about two thirds full, just right so I could feel it every time I changed directions or put on the brakes.  I felt it now as it wanted to keep going east. 

      Whump!  The truck rolled onto its right side. 

      Whump!  I was upside down.  The seat belt did its job.  I was suspended upside down.  I hadn’t been going fast maybe 10 or 15 miles per hour, but it was fast enough.

      What I had mistaken for smoke was dust floating around after having fallen from the floorboards to the ceiling.  The engine was still running.  I reached down, no up, and switched off the ignition.  I rolled down the window, released the seat belt with one hand and let myself down to the truck cab’s ceiling with the other.  I wasted no time crawling out of the window.

      Well, there it was, rear end in the right ditch, cab still in the road.  I was in shock.  Had I really done this thing?  I walked a mile and a half to the place where I was to pick up more milk.

     Nobody was home, at least so I thought.  I had to call the boss at the cheese plant.  Of course I couldn’t remember the number, or much else.  I managed to find a Kansas phone book and made the call.  Later, I found there was an old sick guy in a bedroom who heard me knock several times, but he couldn’t get up or even answer.  He heard me entering and making the call. 

    I walked back to the truck.  A farmer from a place located near the intersection of the road came up in his little Versatile tractor.  His adult son was lying down in the scoop (not enough room in the tractor cab for a passenger).  The son had seen the truck lying in the road and they decided they had better investigate.  They declined to attempt up righting the truck.  They thought the best thing to do was notify the sheriff’s office.  I agreed and they returned to their work.

      Why didn’t I walk the few hundred yards back to their place instead of the mile and a half to the dairy farm?  Thinking clearly wasn’t something I was doing on that day.

       Eventually a deputy sheriff showed up and filled out a report.  He observed from the tracks, now hardened in the afternoon sun, that I had not been going very fast at all.  I didn’t get a citation.  A few months later, I would run into a college roommate living in Burlington.  He would entertain me with his account of the newspaper story about my accident compiled from the deputy's report.

     The deputy called a wrecker from Vona, which showed up an hour or two before dark.  The wrecker man insisted on draining the milk before trying to roll the truck back to its wheels.  The cheese plant boss wasn’t too happy about that.

     Sometime about 8 o’clock, the truck, the wrecker, and I were in Vona and the boss arrived to take me home.  He didn’t fire me.  He wanted to take me to a hospital to see for sure I was all right.  I convinced him not to do that.

      I did get to run the Colorado route for another month using an old International truck.  It was not nearly as nice as the Ford.  Then we had a GMC.  Finally, the Ford came back.  It had to have the dents taken out of the stainless steel tank, the right side had to have bodywork where the right mirror dented the door as it rolled on its side, plus a dent on top of the cab where the radio aerial had been mounted had to be repaired.  The Cat engine had to be overhauled, something about a head gasket leaking caused by running upside down.  It was an expensive repair bill.

     Gene, the other driver, called me when the Ford came into the factory.  Come help him get it set up.  We had to mount hose, sample case, sanitizing equipment, a few other details.  When we were done, he said, “See if you can keep it on its wheels.”

     We both laughed, but it wasn’t funny.  I endured a lot of ribbing as the story spread.  Since it never rained at all at home, many accused me of fabricating the muddy road story.  At that time, the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post were still available in the community.  Their stories on the closing of I-70 corroborated my story.

      I survived the accident.  The dent in my ego would eventually scar over.  Thirty-three years old and not know enough to keep a mil truck on its wheels?

    Good friend Earle, a former dairyman, consoled me.  He said there are only two kinds of people in the world.  Those who have never driven a milk truck, or those who have rolled a milk truck.  Did all those others in my category mistake floorboard dust for smoke?