🐍 The Giant Snake

Submitted by Ron “Red” MacLeod — Kenora, Ontario I’ve been off the road for a long time now, but there’s one trip I still think about. And not for good reasons. It was the winter of 1986. I was running solo out of my home terminal in Sudbury, westbound on Highway 17, heading toward Thunder Bay. I was pulling a 53-foot dry van loaded with general freight. Back then, trucking was a different world. No GPS in the cab. No cell phone in my pocket. No electronic logs. I had a road atlas on the passenger seat, a paper logbook beside me, and the CB radio crackling whenever another driver was nearby. I knew Highway 17 pretty well. I'd spent years running it. I'd seen plenty along that highway, too. I hit a moose once. Tore up the front of the truck and scared the hell out of me. Another winter, I came around a bend and found a tractor-trailer jackknifed across the highway. I got stopped just in time and spent part of the night helping another driver get clear. That's how it was back then. You looked after yourself, but you also looked after the guy beside you. That night, though, I was having a rough one. I'd been dealing with depression and anxiety. I wasn't sleeping much, and my mind was heavy. I'd been using a little cannabis when I was parked to take the edge off, but I'd run out the night before. When I pulled into Nairn Centre, a small community along Highway 17 about 40 kilometres west of Sudbury, I wasn't looking for fuel. I was looking for something to calm me down. Nairn Centre is still there today, along the same highway. It's now part of the Township of Nairn and Hyman. But back then, to the truckers running Highway 17, it was simply Nairn Centre. I asked around behind a diner and eventually found a guy who sold me a joint. It looked rough. Smelled worse. But I was tired, stressed and wasn't thinking clearly. I smoked it, climbed back into the cab and headed west. About twenty minutes later, everything went sideways. It wasn't the calm I was expecting. It was panic. Cold sweat. Tunnel vision. My hands started shaking on the steering wheel. I turned the CB down and tried to concentrate on the road. Then I looked in my mirror. And that's when I saw it. A snake. No joke. It looked as long as my trailer. Pitch black. Sliding through the snow. And it had two red, glowing eyes. It was moving fast. Straight toward the back of my trailer. I blinked. Still there. I looked again. Still coming. I pushed the throttle down. The damn thing kept coming. At that point, I didn't know what was real anymore. Maybe it was the weed. Maybe it was exhaustion. Maybe it was something else. I didn't stick around to find out. I cut onto a snow-covered turnout, killed the lights and sat there in the darkness with both hands locked around the steering wheel. I didn't move. Didn't say a word. I just stared into the bush. Nothing. I looked in the mirror. Nothing. The snake was gone. Or maybe it had never been there in the first place. I sat there for a long time before finally getting back onto Highway 17. I never touched weed again. I finished a few more years behind the wheel, running the Northern Ontario highways I'd known for years. Eventually, though, I parked the truck for good. These days, I'm retired in Kenora. Life is a lot slower now. Most mornings start with coffee. In the summer, I'll take my old boat out on the lake and fish for a few hours. Come fall, a couple of the old boys and I still head into the bush. Winter means ice fishing, working around the garage and watching the snow pile up outside. No dispatch. No deadlines. No paper logs. No alarm clock telling me it's time to climb back into a truck. Sometimes I still miss it, though. Not the long hours. Not the breakdowns. Not the nights when you couldn't see ten feet past your headlights. I miss the road. I miss the CB. I miss seeing the same drivers at the same truck stops and knowing exactly who was going to be on the other end of the radio. And every once in a while, I'll take my pickup down Highway 17. When I pass through Nairn Centre, I think about that night. Then the road gets quiet. The trees stop moving. And without even thinking about it... I check the mirror. Just in case.