Have you ever listened to that old radio broadcaster Paul Harvey? To me he is and will probably always will be, ‘the rest of the story’ guy. When he was just about to the end of his show, he would pause for a breath and then say in his firm deep voice, ‘And now, for the rest of the story.’ Then he would wrap up the story that he had started earlier on in the show. Sometimes the ‘rest of the story’ would reveal that his tale belonged to a rather unexpected person. It would come across as this deep dramatic finish to his show. Then sometimes, at the very end, he would say ‘And now you know, the rest of the story.’ I tell you this because, that is how I feel about the tale I have to share with you today. The first part of this story I shared on this blog almost five years ago. The story begins….
You ever listen to that song Third rock from the sun? In the song there is a lyric that incudes, “He leaves the motor running he’ll only be a minute….” Yeah, I think this guy may have stopped by my house today. This morning my daughter comes to me and tells me there is a truck sitting outside our house not moving. I go and take a look and right on the corner, facing the wrong way is a truck, engine still running, windows dark, no signs of life. I think to myself, ok maybe they have stopped to send a text…on the wrong side of the road…..in the middle of an intersection. However not wanting to overreact I decide to wait awhile. I kind of, forgot, for maybe a half hour, and I take a peek, the truck was still there. Still running. Now its getting weird. I grudgingly make a call to the authorities unsure of what else to do. Officer comes out, relatively quickly I might add, and takes a look. Empty. So, a truck, sitting in the intersection, running, with no one in it, no one near it, no signs of footprints in the mud, so the officer tells me after knocking on my door. Twilight zone moment. By this time over an hour at least has gone by. Still no signs of the driver. What in the world? The officer I guess figured out who the owner is, but not where the owner is. And so the officer called for a tow and they ended up hauling the truck away. Mystery unsolved. For now…….
And now, for the rest of the story…..
Almost four years had gone by from the day with that empty truck. Almost four years of wondering about the rest of that story. Almost four years of trying to fit together scenarios that could explain the how and why an empty truck got abandoned, while running, in the middle of essentially nowhere. Years of speculating. Was the driver kidnapped? Did something happen and they got confused and wandered off somewhere? Were they ok? Was it someone who had been drinking and they pulled over to pee or something and then forgot that they had been driving and just wandered off down the road? Was it something else? What happened?! It’s like watching a tv show that you are totally into and there, right at the end of the season finale, they just leave you there, hanging, waiting, not knowing what is going to happen. And then, out of the blue, before the new season kicks off, you find out that the show has been canceled and you will now NEVER know what was going to happen. It’s enough to make you just a little bit crazy, wondering about all of the possibilities. That’s where I was; left with a mystery that I was unlikely to ever find out the ending. But then one day….
This part of the story begins with the wheel of my van passing me on the road. I was headed off to town, it was February 2023. We had gotten some snow, the week before that I think, and it had slowly been melting away, but the slush had caused hard, dirt encrusted buildup spots behind all of the tires. I was just coming up on my turn when I realized that the road I was about to turn onto was under construction. Immediately, my brain was like, ‘Oh heck, no.’ I quickly merged back out of the turning lane so that I could find an alternate route. I had already been hearing the low vibration sound coming from the van, but after I so quickly changed lanes, the vibrations suddenly got much stronger and louder. Very shortly after the sound escalated from loud vibrations to this awful vibrating rattle. Because I knew I had this ice buildup, naturally I thought that’s what the sound was. The ice breaking loose and hitting up inside the wheel well. Deciding I wasn’t willing to listen to that very long, I began to slow down so that I could pull off to the side of the road. ‘No big deal’, I thought. ‘I will just kick the ice loose, and be on my way.’ The van had come nearly to a stop when out of the side of my eye, I see a wheel come a rolling by me. It passed right on by the van, down the road and continued out into a cornfield. Somewhere around that same moment, the van shifted and came to a stop. (I couldn’t tell you exactly, since my brain was still struggling to process to rolling wheel.) I sat there for a moment; just absolutely dumbfounded. Then I called for a tow.
While waiting for the tow, I got out of my van to see how bad the damages were. As I was expected, seeing as how there had been no other traffic around, my van was missing a wheel. All the little pins that are supposed to hold my wheel on, gone. I stood there for a moment silently, then out loud said, ‘Well, the wheel is not going back on that.’
I then got to trek down the road, in my high heeled boots, past the tire, until I came to a spot where the shoulder of the road wasn’t quite as big a drop so that I could get into the field where my tire lay. Then came the lovely trek across the field to get to the place where my brand new tire and wheel were resting on the ground. That was some kind of not fun. Trekking through a somewhat squishy field in heels to a wheel that I am not strong enough to carry. Then having to roll that tire back across the field, shove it up onto the shoulder and then clamor up after it. So that I can then roll it back down the road to my van.
Finally, I’m standing there, at the back of my van, wheezing, since my reactive asthma decided to join the fray, and I open the hatch…. Only to realize that the wood pellets I had purchased on my previous trip to town were all still in the back of my van. Now, I get to try and heave this wheel up off the ground, to the bumper and then attempt to get it up high enough to put on top of all of these bags of pellets. After a few attempts, I get the wheel into the van. Collapsing back behind the steering wheel, I dig for my inhaler so that I can, you know, breathe.
By now, you might be wondering what this could possibly have to do with the mystery truck. Well, it’s a long story. One that I couldn’t do justice to if I had to cut it real short. This is the edited version, believe it or not.
Originally, the tow company had told me it might be 2-3 hours before they got somebody out there. To which I was like, ‘What?! Seriously?!’ Thankfully, however, it didn’t actually take that long before the tow actually arrived. I get out of my van and the driver of the tow truck climbs out, stands on the running board and says to me, ‘You know, it works better with four wheels.’ In that instant I realized, I knew this guy. He was friends with one of our boys when they were both in their young teens, about 10 years ago. I hadn’t seen him in probably 5 years or more. He hadn’t changed much though. Just as skinny, with dark tousled hair, a ball cap and a crooked grin.
We chatted and caught up a bit as he got things situated and got the van up on the back of the truck. Turned out that he had moved and lived just a few miles away from us. ‘Small world’. I thought. (I had no idea yet just how small.) After the van was loaded up we climbed up into the tow truck and were on our way.
As we were going along, Jeff (We’ll call him Jeff for privacy purposes. That’s not his name.) asks me, ‘Did Doug (my husband) get that package I dropped off a few weeks ago?’ And I was like, ‘Uh…’ In my brain I was thinking, ‘What package?’ I feel like I would have remembered if Doug had told me that Jeff had dropped off a package. Jeff continued, ‘It was just a little package. It might have been a couple of months ago.’ He then proceeds to tell me how he found this random package behind some steps at his house with Doug’s name on it. He knew who Doug was of course, since Doug had taken the boys out hunting a few times together. He knew where we lived and so just figured that he would swing by and drop it off.
As he was talking, I began to getting this little niggling feeling that maybe I did know what package he was talking about. A package that we received notice that it was delivered weeks before. Only it wasn’t delivered to our house. The photo confirmation was confirmation of that. I described some of the things in the picture we had been sent and sure enough, it was that same package. I had just figured that the delivery company had finally found it and dropped it off at our house. But no, Jeff found it and dropped it off at my house. That was probably almost three weeks after it was supposed to have arrived. Doug and I had wondered whose house it had been left at. It had been a little mystery niggling in our minds. ‘Well, that is one mystery solved.’ I said. ‘Now, if you could only solve my other mystery for me, wouldn’t that just be something.’
I then launched into my tale about the mystery truck from a few years ago that was packed in the intersection outside my house. About how it was kind of on the wrong side of the road. How it was running but there was no one in it. How I waited 45 minutes before I called the authorities because I didn’t know what was going on. Jeff listened to my story and then began to question me about the truck. Was it an older truck? (Which to him apparently means less than twenty years old. I had to clarify that because I was thinking like from the eighties or something.) Then he asked if it was a specific make. I’m just sitting there like, ‘Dude, I don’t know. It was just a great big truck.’ But to get to the punchline here, he tells me, it was him! He was the guy who left the truck running, in the middle of the intersection, outside of my house! At this point I’m just sitting there, mouth hanging open, eyeballs probably bugging out of my head, so stupefied that all I can do is say, ‘You left the truck running?!’ He then looks at me like I’m the crazy one in this situation and says, ‘Yeah.?’ Apparently he was driving along and right outside my house the driveshaft broke. A friend of his had been following him, so he just stopped the truck, hopped into his buddy’s vehicle and they took off back to his house to get a replacement part. He left it running because he was ‘just going up the road’ and that when he got back his truck was gone. I must have repeated the phrase, ‘And you left it running?’ At least two or three times along the way. Then my brain started to catch up a little bit and I said, ‘I had no idea whose truck it was. It was just sitting there running with nobody around. I had no idea what was going on or why it was there.’ Which I then followed up with, ‘Next time it happens, come up to the house and let me know, hey my vehicles out here, I just gotta run up the road and I will be back!’
I gotta say, out of all of the things I imagined, out of all of the scenarios that ran through my head as to what happened with that truck, I never considered that it would be someone I knew, or that the person would have intentionally have just gone off and intentionally left the motor running. Like, seriously, with the price of gas, who is just going to wander off and leave a vehicle running, in nice weather no less, for an extended period of time like that? Apparently Jeff. That’s who. And now you know, the rest of the story.
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