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A Favor Returned
Then suddenly Gonzales could see more of the highway. Was it over? Whether I'm through it or not, he thought, I've got to get out of this truck. Hitting the air brakes, he swung his rig to the edge of the interstate, turned off the engine and flung open the door. The handle seared his palm like a cattle brand. Ignoring the pain, he jumped to the hot pavement and ran full speed through the haze in his thin T-shirt and shorts. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that the entire cab of his truck was now ablaze.Gonzales was coughing ash when a brown minivan with California plates screeched to a stop next to him. A man rolled down his window. "Hurry, get in!" he told Gonzales. Two small children sat in the backseat, their eyes wide with fear. Their mother was at the steering wheel, trembling.
"Climb in back with the kids, ma'am. I'm a truck driver," Gonzales said. "I can get us out of here." He hurried to the driver's side, jumped in and floored it. He drove 65 mph through the smoke, which once again showed no sign of letting up. After about 12 miles, Gonzales saw police lights flashing at the junction of I-15 and I-70 ahead. He pulled to the side of the road, and Trooper McWilliams rushed over with his flashlight. "You've got to keep moving!" the officer barked.
Gonzales got out and explained that his truck was behind in the blazing fire. The trooper agreed to let him stay put. "But you'd better get back on the road," McWilliams told the couple.
After he thanked the pair and they pulled away, Gonzales realized they hadn't exchanged names. He wished they had. In his years on the road, he'd stopped plenty of times to help stranded motorists who'd been in accidents or were caught in bad weather. "Thank God somebody cared enough to stop for me," he told McWilliams.
The fire was now concentrated on the left side of the interstate, but McWilliams realized there might be other motorists trapped between closures, unable to drive through the smoke. Gonzales offered to help direct traffic while the trooper drove his patrol car into the haze, eventually escorting several people to safety, including the couple who'd stopped their motor home in front of Gonzales. They'd taken refuge under an overpass to ride out the flames. Others weren't so lucky: Farther up the road, Rex Redmon, 68, and his wife, Mary Ann, 65, of Rowland Heights, California, were hit and killed on their motorcycle by a driver who couldn't see them in the smoke.
Later that afternoon, McWilliams took Gonzales to see the still-smoking remains of his truck. The $40,000 Peterbilt, with its custom massaging-action seat, was a complete loss. Thankfully, he had two other rigs at home, "but this one was my favorite," he says. After checking into a motel room in Beaver, the exhausted trucker collapsed on the bed in his sooty clothes and phoned his wife.
Two weeks later, Gonzales again traveled through central Utah, this time in his 2002 Freightliner. As he approached the steep grade outside Fillmore, he was struck by the charred fields and trees stretching for miles. At the curve in the road where his cab had caught fire, the interstate was streaked with black ash. Turning down the comedy channel, he drove up the hill in silence, just grateful for another day on the highway.
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