The First Real Week

I work an 8 day on 6 day off schedule, and this is my first full off-shift in the truck. It has mostly been very fine an uneventful, with a couple of exceptions. On my second night in the truck I got into Moab late, around 10 p.m. I’ve never camped out around here because this is where I used to sleep in a house, but I do know that there is plenty of BLM land about, which you can (generally) camp on for free. I started looking for a spot down by the river, but every time I got out of the truck I was engulfed in an avalanche of mosquitoes and other bugs. So, eventually I found myself a few miles out of town, randomly turning down dirt roads looking for a reasonably flat spot to pull the truck off the road.

This is where I started to freak myself out. Suddenly, quite far from any other sign of civilization, a group of trucks and trailers came looming out of the darkness. In the picture below you can see it is just a construction site, but that is with the benefit of daylight, and to my mind at the time it was some sort of abandoned ghost truck stop.

The worst part about the ghost truck stop was the weird and extremely bright flashing X. See below. I have no idea what real purpose this thing could serve, but if it is for freaking people right the fuck out, then success.

I continued to turn randomly down roads, and although I got no closer to any viable campsite, I did get very thoroughly lost and outside of cell reception. Eventually I came upon a spot in the road that clearly a lot of people had used to turn around; I took this as a sign of the shittyness of the road ahead and decided to stop. I pulled over in the turn-about and got in the bed of the truck to sleep.

“This is fine”, I said to myself, while the horizon off to my right was periodically lit by the creepy X. It was just as I was inwardly praising myself on my bravery that I saw it. Headlights, I thought at first, very far away off to the left. But no, it was not moving fast enough to be a car, so it must be a headlamp. A person. A random person, facing directly towards me was wandering about in the dead of night, probably headed towards the ghost truck stop.

I got out my knife, and my keys, because apparently even my fight or flight response is indecisive. For maybe 5 entire minutes, I sat in the bed of my truck fixated by this light. Then, some small rational voice managed to fight its way to the forefront in my brain. “Um”, it said, “sorry to interrupt, but don’t you think that guy with the headlamp is standing awfully close to Orion?”