I wish I could tell you which truck stop. I can't. That's not a failure of memory so much as an accurate report of how many there were -- Flying Js and Pilots and no-name gravel lots with a single pump and a light that buzzed all night, New Mexico bleeding into Arizona bleeding into some stretch of Texas that didn't feel like it belonged to any state at all.
And what I remember isn't a place, fundamentally. It's a pattern. Every few hundred miles, a dog. Alone. Sometimes trotting the shoulder like it had somewhere to be and knew better than to trust that feeling. Sometimes just lying in the gravel at the edge of a lot, not sleeping, just conserving whatever it had left.
Wasted and worn, the way the desert gets wasted and worn, scoured down to the parts that could survive.
And every single time, with every single dog, my Australian co-driver Kalen went quiet.
I want to be precise about what kind of quiet, because it wasn't sadness exactly, or not only that.
Kalen didn't do quiet easily. This is a man who narrated the entire state of California like it had personally wronged him, who gave every load we hauled a pet name involving the B-word epithet but delivered like a compliment, who could turn a blown tire into a 15-minute bit about the failures of American infrastructure and somehow make it funny.
Queensland drawl, mate this and that, 40 tons of freight and an opinion about all of it. That was Kalen at full volume, which was most of the time.
But a dog on the shoulder, or curled up by the dumpsters behind a truck stop diner, and something in him just dropped out of the bit.
Mid-sentence sometimes. He'd be complaining about the GPS or dispatch or the coffee, and then his eyes would catch something in the ditch, and the sentence would just stop being finished. He wouldn't point it out. Wouldn't say look at that. He'd just go somewhere else for a minute, still sitting right there in the cab.
I learned to leave him in it.
I knew part of why, because he'd told me once, flat, the way you report a fact instead of a wound. Divorced after 22 years, she shot his dog out of spite on the way out the door. He said it once and never elaborated, and I never asked him to. That's not the kind of thing a man like Kalen explains twice.
For a long time I thought that was the whole of it, and I just watched him do it, witness to his particular grief. Kalen, recognizing a creature that had been someone's, once, and now wasn't anyone's, standing in the wreckage with no way to explain what happened.
But that's not honest, and I've been turning it over long enough now to say the truer thing.
We were the strays, too. Fifty-two and sixty-one, rolling in a cab that smelled like diesel and old coffee, both of us a few thousand miles and a couple decades removed from whatever we'd have once called home.
Kalen ran with those 22 years gone and a dog shot out of spite for a going-away present.
I trucked with a marriage I hadn't technically ended, an ex-wife grooming other people's dogs in her 50s to cover bills I should've been covering. My body now kept a ledger separate from what I told it to do, and a restlessness I'd been running from since I was young enough to still believe running worked.
We weren't driving through the wreckage. We were the wreckage, upright and moving at 70 mph, mistaken for men with somewhere to be.
That's why neither of us could say it out loud. You don't point at the mirror and call it a dog.
I never once saw Kalen get out of the truck to help one of them. That's not a knock on him. What were we going to do, two strays with a deadline and no room in the cab and a thousand miles left on the clock?
You can't stop for every alone dog on I-40. If you did, you'd never make Barstow, and there'd always be another one past Barstow, anyway.
That's the particular cruelty of it -- the problem is too big and too constant to fix from a truck's cab. We knew it, and neither of us said it, and Kalen went quiet anyway because knowing you can't help doesn't turn off the part of you that wants to.
Doesn't turn off the part of you that recognizes, either.
I thought about Rosie, more than once, watching him. My first dog, an Irish setter from when I was a boy, before any of the wreckage that came later, back when a dog was just a dog and not yet a stand-in for everything a man loses and can't get back.
I hadn't thought about her in years, not really, not with any weight to it.
But something about two strays sitting in a truck cab going quiet over a third one on the shoulder dragged her back up out of wherever she'd been sitting.
I don't fully understand why grief works that way, borrowing one loss to help you feel another, but it does.
We never talked about any of this directly, him and me. That's not how we operate, mostly. But I like to think we both understood the dogs on the shoulder weren't really the subject.
I don't know what happened to any of the dogs. I never will. I can't dress it up. Some things you carry precisely because you never finished them.
You see the dog. You feel the thing you feel. You keep driving.
That's the shape of it, over and over, until you've done it so many times it starts to feel less like an event and more like a condition of the road itself. You carry it alongside the diesel smoke and the logbooks and the ache in your lower back from sitting too long in a seat never intended for men who'd already lost what once made them feel found.
[Related: The future at 70 mph: AI trucks, because they can, not that we should]
The author of this story, Michael Singleton, told the story of his longest career in information technology, before he went out trucking, in a July edition of Overdrive Radio. Listen via this link, below, or wherever you get podcasts.
