La Junta
There are two bits of wisdom Steve Palencia would like to share with us in case we ever get trapped for 28 hours inside the cab of an 18-wheel truck during a raging blizzard.
1) When you eventually have to lurch outside for a bathroom break as the snow is moving sideways at 60 mph and the chill factor is down around minus 20, that high-pitched screaming noise you hear could be the wind. But it’s probably you.
2) Fear is normal in such a situation. For example, after the 20th hour of nonstop whiteout snow that left drifts piled up to the windows of his massive truck, Steve says he became frightened by the sight of his deodorant.
“It’s white,” he explained. “It started to look like snow. I think at that point I might have been starting to lose it.”
Oh, and there is this astute observation: You know 2007 is off to a bit of a rocky start when the first person who says “Happy New Year” to you is wearing a National Guard snowmobile suit and has something frozen hanging out of his nose.
It was supposed to be a routine 880-mile blast from Denver to Dallas for Palencia, a trucker who lives in San Antonio. It was late Friday night, Dec. 29, and his rig had just been loaded with 43,000 pounds of flour. His route would take him south to Pueblo, east on U.S. 50 to Lamar and then south through Oklahoma and into Dallas.
Palencia figured it would take 15 hours. It took 171.
“It started snowing when I got to the town of, uh, I think it was Wink,” said Palencia, who meant the town of Swink, east of La Junta. “But it wasn’t bad.”
Ten minutes later, as he cruised into La Junta, it was more than bad. Palencia’s radio crackled a warning that U.S. 50 was closed as a storm began to ravage the prairie. Palencia knew Dallas would have to wait. He spotted a Wal-Mart parking lot where other truckers had begun holing up to ride out the storm. He tried to join them but in the now-blinding snow he missed the turn into the lot.
The next turn sent him south on narrow Colorado 109. He figured he could find a place to turn around and get back to the Wal-Mart lot. He figured wrong.
“In just a few minutes it was a whiteout blizzard and the truck slid off the road and into the ditch,” he said. “It was 3:15 a.m. on Saturday.”
As he told the story, he leaned back in the driver’s seat, scratched the hair under his baseball cap and sighed. Five days had gone by since the pounding storm nearly swallowed his 78,000-pound truck with the load of flour.
He had been rescued from the storm early New Year’s Day and spent nights in a La Junta motel. But each day he returned to his rig to await a tow truck that finally showed up Jan. 3.
He had plenty of food and water. And his cab is equipped with bunk beds, a TV and a DVD player. Palencia had movies, too. He enjoyed the 1974 film “Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry,” starring Peter Fonda, and howled at Johnny Depp in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.” Clint Eastwood was magnificent, he said, in the 1976 classic “The Outlaw Josey Wales.”
And then there was Jack Black in the 2006 not-a-classic, “Nacho Libre.”
“Even when you’re stranded in a blizzard alone in your truck for a few days, ‘Nacho Libre’ is hard to watch,” Palencia said.
In that ditch alongside the Comanche National Grassland in a monstrous blanket of snow, Palencia missed the biggest day of his year. More than 60 relatives from Texas and California and Virginia had converged on his mother’s home in San Antonio for a gigantic New Year’s Eve party. He had not seen most of them in years, he said. He didn’t see them this year, either.
His truck was finally tugged from the snow by a gigantic tow truck at nightfall Jan. 3. He crept along until he hit the dry roads of Oklahoma and eventually delivered the load of flour in Dallas.
Then, at 2 a.m. Saturday, a week after the Colorado blizzard swallowed him, he pulled up in front of his mother’s house in San Antonio.
“My mom cried when she saw me,” he said.
And how is the deodorant thing working out?
“I swear it still looks like snow,” he said. “I think I’ll switch to something clear.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
