Guardians of the Highway

Sorry, but I've been just so busy lately that I haven't had much free time to post, and or my schedule has been so tight on my legal driving hours that I've been having to spend the night in shippers and receivers parking lots because I didn't have time to get to a truck stop.  I get internet access at the truck stops, so I haven't been able to post anything because of the places where I've been parking to sleep.

When you spend your life on the road you see so many things that all the interesting stuff just starts to become a blur.  Thus you forget so much of the stuff that others might find interesting, so you forget to tell them about it.  Well here's something interesting that happened about four days ago.  I was westbound for Colorado out of Nebraska when this took place:

I was cruising down the road @ 65 mph when another truck passes me in the hammer lane (sorry, that's truck driver speak for the left hand lane), swerves into my lane, and would have hit me had I not swerved onto the shoulder. He continues down the road and I'm noticing he's all over the place - he can't seem to maintain his lane. I think about calling the highway patrol and then I just blow it off thinking he's probably trying to find his atlas, or spilled hot coffee, or something like that. About ten minutes later I see a patrolman flying by me and I think, oh no, that guys had an accident up ahead. Well eventually I see the patrolman's lights flashing and as I get up closer I see that three other truck drivers have their flashers on and they have boxed this guy in on the right hand lane. One is in front of him, one behind him, and the other beside him. They slowed him down and kept him from getting away until the law showed up.

I don't know what the issue was, but it was really cool to see some professional drivers doing what they could to protect the general public from danger, and other truck drivers from the things that give us such a bad image.

I really don't know what the problem was, but I did see him getting out of his truck to talk to the highway patrolman and he seemed somewhat disoriented.  I almost think he was having some sort of a medical issue going on, but I just couldn't tell.  I think it highly unlikely that he was drunk, because it would mean the complete end of his career, and most drivers are not willing to give that up so foolishly.