Crimson Highway

ran his cordless shaver over his face. He didn’t care much for the grizzled, five-day-beard-look that many truck drivers sported.
He ate a quick bowl of cereal, and was good to go.
He performed his pre-trip in the dark, cranked up the 450hp Cummins diesel, checked that his truck-specific GPS was set for his destination, and then pulled out of the truck stop. He pointed his late-model Freightliner Cascadia northbound on Highway 395—destination, Burley, Idaho, about seven hundred twenty miles.
Northbound traffic traveling out to the desert from Victorville was sparse, well spread out, and moving along at a good clip. He was glad that he wasn’t in the bumper-to-bumper line of traffic going south—forced to drive his big rig among thousands of early-morning, daily commuters going to jobs in the LA Basin area.
Today was shaping up to be one of his good days. Occasionally, things just came together well, and he was having a real good feeling about his job, his relationship with people, traffic ... even the weather, which was clear and sunny across the Western states for the foreseeable future.
He called it being in the groove.
He always felt it was a pleasure to be on the road just as the sun was coming up, the rising crimson sun lightening the horizon in stages dimming the headlights from on-coming cars.
He felt good. His driver’s seat was comfortable. The sound of the powerful diesel engine was a pleasant melodious rumble in his ears. Traffic was cooperative. They, his truck and he, blended smoothly with the early-morning highway traffic ... kind of a harmonious choreography of movement. No stress. Comfortable.
He wasn’t sure last night that it would be that way today. He thought back to picking up his load in Victorville.
There were some potential issues with weight.
He was heavy.
That was not a statement of his physical condition. He was trim and fit for his thirty-six years. His body mass index for his 6’2” frame was in the above average healthy range. Truck driving was not the completely sedentary occupation that many people thought it was. So, he appreciated that he had kept the agility and muscle tone that he had enjoyed as a young Marine.
It was his truck and trailer combination that was heavy. It was right at 79,980 pounds, within 20 pounds of being just at the legal maximum 80,000 pounds.
His load consisted of pallets of canned food. He had carefully watched the loading, knowing that canned food makes for a heavy load. It all depended on the skill of the loaders whether the fifty-three-foot enclosed trailer would be overweight.
Government regulations limited trucks to maximum weights on each of the three sets of axles. Also, and more importantly, there was a maximum gross weight for the tractor and trailer combination that absolutely must not be exceeded.
The loading had looked efficient and smart to him. Some loaders were good about that, others could care less and didn’t mind leaving drivers with illegal weights.
He knew he’d be parking for the night before heading out in the morning to his delivery destination in southern Idaho two days from now, so he planned to stop at a nearby truck plaza. He scaled out as soon as he got there, and was satisfied that he was legal.
So, there he was early the next day, doing what he loved to do—driving down the early-morning crimson-hued highway.
He passed bedroom communities that eventually gave way to true desert as he continued up Highway 395.
Next civilization of any kind was the crossroads with Highway 58 at Kramer Junction. This truck stop, ringed with tourist trap museums and shops as it was, was not one of Hugh’s favorite places. Noisy, crowded, hemmed in with a vast network of power lines overhead, this junction was one that Hugh liked to just drive on through without stopping.
Once past the crossroads, he aimed his truck ever northward through the desert. He had to slow down to twenty-five miles an hour several times to go through the small, picturesque towns interspersed along the highway—towns that acted as gateways for those seeking recreation on the steep eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
He was almost religious about observing the speed limits in these small towns because he knew that speeding tickets were a major source of income for these communities—and large trucks barreling through, scaring tourists, were particularly targeted by the local law.
At Bishop, the largest of these towns, Hugh split off of Highway 395 onto Highway 6. As much as the route to this point was sparsely populated with towns, the almost six-hundred miles remaining of his journey up the eastern length of Nevada to southern Idaho was virtually devoid of civilization. Tonopah, Ely, and Wells were the only towns of note along the whole route.
To Hugh, a devoted reader of Western novels, this route up Highway 6 was like a throwback to the old Western days.
His stomach told him, more than the clock did, that it was time to pull over somewhere and have a brew and bite to eat. Nevada rest areas along this route were worthless to truckers because they were little more than a pull-out with picnic tables, with no space for trucks to park.
So Hugh kept his eyes open for a wide spot in the road to pull over. About halfway to Tonopah he spotted one.
As he had done countless times before, Hugh plugged in his hot pot to heat up water for his coffee. He fitted a filter into a coffee cone, poured in a good portion of coffee grounds that he had ground himself from coffee beans, and waited for the water to heat. In the meantime, he reached inside his fridge to take out sandwich fixings.
All this was accomplished without having to get up from his seat on the bottom bunk of his condo sleeper. It was an efficient setup, but