Story Time With Uncle Fred

I talked to my brother Fred on the phone last week while I was waiting in the Minneapolis airport for my flight to Portland. He is a truck driver with a limitless supply of stories that come out at the oddest moments, often for the first time years after they actually happened. Like this one:

There was a big construction project going on in Denver and they needed this huge 6-foot pipe, which is no problem to haul. But I was hauling two pipe elbows from Salt Lake to Denver, and they were kind of side by side, so I had a wide load, which was no problem out in the wide-open areas, but getting into Denver there’s all this rigamarole you have to go through with a wide load.

Well, I had this 20-year-old map of Colorado that showed all the gravel roads down to little goat trails, and also I used to harvest wheat in that area years ago, so I was kind of familiar with the area. So I decided to drive into Denver the back way, at night, and if I did it right I could get right up to the construction site without hitting any main roads.

Oh, yeah, and this was about two months after 9-11.

So I’m going along this gravel road and I noticed something odd, and that was that there was grass growing in the road. Well, that’s strange. But I kept going, and then after a while here was a chain-link fence across the road in front of me. So I stopped of course.

About that time there were these incredibly bright lights to my left, up a ways, and I realized that that was a runway up ahead, and a plane was about to land right in front of me. And those landing lights are bright, I mean, you could read a newspaper 20 miles away, just about.

So I cut the lights on the truck and decided to watch the plane land, but all of a sudden it wasn’t there any more. I mean, it was just gone, no lights, nothing. And after a few minutes I saw what must have been the same plane land on this other runway about five miles away.

Oh well, ok, whatever. There was pasture all around me so I got the truck turned around and headed back. And after about a mile the vehicles started appearing and I had cop cars all around me.

It didn’t take them too long to figure out that I was exactly what I appeared to be—a dumb Oklahoma truck driver with a 20-year-old map trying to sneak into Denver at night with a wide load, who didn’t realize they’d built the Denver airport in the meantime.

So they were like, Just leave. Just get out of here.

So I did.

Quote of the Day:
"You should be the one with a blog or a newspaper column. I mean, stuff actually happens to you!"
--me, to Fred