The Rustling of Angel Feathers

In the summer of 1995, I left with my dad to pick up a load of hay for our cattle about 20 miles from our farm. I had chosen to drive my pickup with a trailer, as we were hauling the 1500-pound round bales of hay. He had decided to take one of the dump trucks. At the last minute, we decided that I would drive my brother's Louisville Ford grain truck.

The truck was relatively new, compared to our other farm trucks. We had just purchased it for use as a bedding and sawdust hauler for the family business. My brother, Gary Jr., had just finished fabricating special sideboards from a laminated wood that works really well for hauling sawdust. It is slippery and allows the sawdust to slide out easier. It was a really nice truck. I had been driving these big rigs since I was old enough to reach the pedals.

There was nothing really unique about this particular truck except that it was the only diesel powered truck we had. On the way to pick up the hay, we were traveling down a two-lane, and very narrow, back road about five miles from our destination. My dad drove in front of me, as was usually the case, and we stayed in contact by CB radio. Dad radioed that there was a cement truck coming down the road towards him rather fast for the road we were on.

This was one of those extra-long, 16-wheeled `caterpillar' looking machines with the steel framed cab sitting right up front in the center of the truck, huge balloon tires and dragging the diesel engine along behind. The enormous barrel of the cement truck was angled up over the cab with the chute positioned directly over the driver. There isn't much `body' to the vehicle, it is mostly steel framework. It looked as if someone built the framework of a semi and never put a `body' on it.

As the truck throttled closer, dad called me again to say it seemed that the truck was `bouncing' on its balloon tires. That generally indicates that someone is driving pretty fast for the road conditions. It also means that the truck had some weight in its cement barrel.

When it passed him, dad was about a quarter mile ahead of me. Dad radioed again warning that the massive concrete hauler seemed to be going left of center now and again as it whizzed past him. We were only moving at about 40 miles per hour as it was, that was just how dad tends to drive on those back roads. I down shifted again and reduced my speed to about 35, making sure I was hugging the ditch line to give the cement truck plenty of room to pass.

Since I'd first learned to drive these big machines, I had a habit of driving with one hand on the wheel and the other on the gearshift if I was expecting to be in a tight situation, since that was your only way to stop if you lost the brakes for some reason. I had been driving with my arm out the window and kind of holding onto the mirror frame outside, but, as by nature, I took hold of the shifter with one hand and the wheel with the other and took back a gear. Before I knew it, the cement truck was upon me.

He was indeed bouncing as he hurtled down the narrow country road. As his cab neared mine, I looked the driver directly in the eye. Then without warning, the horrific sound of shattering glass, twisting metal and exploding tires rang through my head. I fought hard to hold the steering wheel and shifter, desperately trying to see through the flying debris of shattered mirror glass, dirt, and shards of steel.

The truck shook hard as I felt it nose down into the asphalt below. Both my feet were planted firmly in the brake and clutch pedals hopelessly trying to slow the motion of the crippled machine and bring it to a halt before the fuel tanks were struck by some airborne piece of steel and ignited. With the sounds of grinding metal and violent shaking of the truck, I could hear dad calling me on the radio asking if I was OK. He'd seen the cement truck strike my truck head on and had to watch it all helplessly in the rear view mirror.

For what seemed like an eternity the truck rattled and bucked. Finally, the violence ceased. The truck had stopped its forward motion and the dust and glass were starting to settle. Pieces of debris could still be seen and heard falling all around the mangled wreck, but somehow, I was uninjured.

Through some miracle, I was intact. I had been driving these vehicles for years and all of the badgering my dad and brother had done over the years while riding with me suddenly became useful. Gasoline! The fuel tanks were on the outside of the vehicle, just behind the cab. If I'd been struck the way I thought I had, the heavy steel containers were likely to have been pierced and leaking fuel somewhere near an extremely hot engine.

The driver's side door was mangled and the mirrors were gone.All I could think about was following the mental checklist to shut down the electrical systems and expel important items from the truck - mainly my whip and me. The other driver must be injured. I could see nothing behind me. It was the early days of small, practical cell phones and mine had no internal battery, so, plugged into the cigarette lighter, I called 911 to report what had happened.

As I dialed, dad came running up to the truck. It was as if he hadn't even let his truck stop rolling before he got out coming to my aid. Though I still in the truck at this point, I appeared to be unhurt, I told him to go check on the other driver. There was no way he came through such an impact unscathed with the minimal protection he was offered by the steel frame of his cab. I finished with my call to the 911 dispatcher and threw my phone into my backpack and heaved the bag out the window onto the grass nearby.

Now it was time for me to go too. What was left of the truck's door wouldn't open. I leaned back in the glass-covered seat and kicked hard at the door. Finally it fell away from the frame and swung open enough for me to climb out. As I started to step out of the cab, I nearly fell as the running boards were gone. Everything on that side of the cab and hood of the truck was gone. I jumped off the ledge of the door frame and down to the marked up pavement below.

I still couldn't see where dad had gone. I got away from the truck and finally turned to look at it. What was once a shiny, strong, vehicle was now reminiscent of a shipwreck and resting in the middle of a country road. I circled the machine surveying the damage from a safe distance. Only then did it occur to me that this truck wasn't gas at all, but diesel. The risk of fire was still there, but minimal for any kind of explosion at this point. That was something good anyway. Only now could I see the extent of the damage and how serious the situation had been for the entire blink of an eye that it lasted.

The cement truck had sort of telegraphed down the side of my truck following the initial impact. We apparently hit left front tire to left front tire, and since his truck was mainly angle steel, it sliced up the fiberglass nose of my truck and mangled the door. The front axle of my truck had been ripped completely from its shackles and thrown back under the cab of the truck, shearing off the 2-inch hardened steel steering shaft to a polished flat surface. It was as if someone cut it with a saw then neatly polished the sawed edge. It would have taken thousands of pounds of instant impact to have sheared off such a solid piece of steel. That relates to the excessive speed of the cement truck on such a narrow and winding road.

The nose of the truck was destroyed, and of course, as the axle disappeared, the truck nosed down into the pavement like a boat run aground in sand. The undercarriage was several inches down into the pavement and the engine oil pan was resting on the road. As the cement truck bounced off and onto the side of my truck as it passed, it bent the framework all along the bed. In one final heavy impact, the cement truck's framing tore and bend the bud-rim wheel of the back duels and tore the rear axle from its shackles folding it backwards as well.

At this point I could also see that once the cement truck finished pounding my truck to death it sped off out of control behind my truck across the oncoming lane and cut down a power pole from the ground up to a point just below a live transformer. I learned later that the driver was not wearing a seat belt so once we hit together he was out of the seat and being bounced all over the small cab. The truck was rolling powered and out of control and by then at least 4 of the 16 tires of the mixer had blown out.

The skid marks left by my truck were about 30 feet long. You could see the exact point of impact on the road as it sheared off all of my brake and steering lines spilling the vital fluids of the vehicle all over the street. The power lines held the transformer and the remainder of the power pole suspended in mid-air with the live wires lying over the wooden sideboards of my truck. The irony of that was that if we'd taken my father's other grain truck the sides would have been metal and I would have had a totally different problem- electrocution and most likely a fuel fire.

In case you're wondering, the other driver walked away with some bruised ribs and a citation for speeding and traveling left of center. In fact, the photos of the scene show that my truck, in all of the disaster of that moment, never left the right lane. It came to rest between the lines of the proper lane followed by streaks of rubber and the smears of the spinning balloon tires of the cement truck as it went past me.

While I would like to think that the training my dad and brother did with me over the years are what saved me from a more serious fate that day, the truck itself helped as well. The type of truck I was driving had an electric braking system on the rear brakes designed to activate if the hydraulic brake pressure is lost. The electric backup did its job and we came to rest relatively quickly thanks to the back brakes locking. I was franticly holding the wheel and gearshift, not to mention that my ankles hurt after the wreck from holding down the pedals. But, I had no idea at the time that there was nothing connected to any of the controls. No steering, no brakes, no gearing.

I was in the hands of fate at that point. I heard the call of fate and the rustling of angel feathers in the impact noise between the two trucks.

The photo is a picture of the truck as it came to rest. It doesn't quite do it justice. Some people think I am overprotective, or play it safe a lot when it comes to foolish drinking, drugs, partying, dangerous driving or extreme sports and other stunts that risk life unnecessarily. Now you know one of the reasons why.