A beautiful day in Cascade Locks. The sky is blue, with a smattering of clouds. It’s noon on a Wednesday so the traffic on I-84 is not exactly light, but it’s moving, lanes not overstuffed with campers full of frantic families trying to get away from it all for 32 hours.
It’s a rare windless moment on this stretch of road. This is the long section of the Gorge where even on a clear day, the cumulative humidity in the air creates a haze into which cars disappear half a mile ahead of you.
A white Ford F-250 catches my peripheral vision at 2 o’clock as I prepare to pass it on the left. It’s moving oddly. Just a little wiggle. A big hunk of schoolbus yellow metal - a 1930s-era truck, I think - sits on the trailer the Ford is hauling. It’s wiggling, too. That seems…bad. I see the driver struggling with his steering wheel, having overcorrected for the wiggle.
I slow down, to watch - not for entertainment, but for threat assessment. Can he pull it out?
It certainly doesn’t seem to be safe to pass, as the Ford and the trailer engage in an increasingly erratic samba across first the width of the right lane, then the right lane and the right shoulder, then the right lane and the shoulder and the right lane and the lane divider, then the right lane and the left lane and the left shoulder, then abruptly back to the right lane.
One third of a tire flies right past my windshield, into the median. You always wonder what you’re going to say in extremely dangerous situations and I’m sad to report that in my case, I couldn’t come up with anything more creative than whoa, whoa, whoa, whoaaaaaa over and over again.
All cars around us are slowing to a relative crawl, attentively keeping space for the F250, like family members around a hospice bed. As if to communicate: This is your journey, but we are here with you. We are all praying the same prayer, for once.
I can’t very well slam on my brakes, can I? In my rearview mirror, up the hill behind us, hundreds of cars have slowed as well. Are all of those drivers also saucer-eyed? Probably not. Probably just annoyed. One of them is probably saying, UGGGH, why are we slowing down for no reason? And when they get up to the spot where the truck has finally managed to pull over, they will turn to their travelling companion and say, See? No reason.
A mile later, I have returned to my regular 80mph, catching up with drivers I haven’t seen yet. None of these people have any idea. For them, this trip has maybe been smooth sailing. Or maybe they’ve had their own near accidents themselves. I’ll never know.
I spend the next 20 miles imagining the conversation, had I pulled off the road to offer assistance to the driver of the F250: me saying You are safe, you recovered from the fishtail, good job, you’ll need at least one new tire, do you need help getting roadside assistance? Can I call a friend for you? You are not alone. We’re so glad you’re okay.
But I hadn’t stopped, because it didn’t feel safe. But I wanted to. Maybe that counts for something…but not for much, in my book. I hope somebody stopped for him. I hope the right person stopped for him.
I pull into the Starbucks in Hood River for something decaffeinated. The person working the register chirps, “How are you doing?”
“Doing okay,” I lie, “How are you?”
An AI-generated image of a modern white truck hauling a vintage yellow truck on a trailer. Obviously I did not stop to take photos of this situation.