Ryder crossed the checkered floor of the diner to the wall behind the register, and the whole room watched him go. He stopped in front of the big framed photograph in the middle, a black and white picture of a woman in a plaid coat standing on the step of a long cab Peterbilt, squinting into the wind. He bent and read the brass plate aloud, and his voice came apart halfway through. “Lorraine Voss. First woman to drive one million safe miles on Interstate Eighty. Wyoming Trucking Association, nineteen ninety two.” I am Lorraine Voss, seventy eight years old, and I sat on stool number six with my black coffee and my little gold steering wheel pin, while the snow began to hit the windows.
In 1970, I was twenty two years old and I drove a grain truck for my father because no one else would. Within a year, I held a commercial license, and I spent the next twenty two years hauling freight across Wyoming in every kind of weather, with a thermos and a CB radio. Men in this very diner told me a woman could not drive a rig over Elk Mountain in January. I did it three hundred times. When the Association gave me the million mile pin in 1992, I hung the photograph on this wall myself and took a job running a laundromat, because my back had decided I was done.
The gray haired driver at the end of the counter, Big Walt Pruitt, finally put down his fork and got to his feet. “Lorraine,” he said, in a voice that rumbled like a diesel, “I rode your tail light over Elk Mountain in the winter of eighty one. I would not be alive but for you.” The three drivers in reflective vests had gone quiet. Peg, the waitress, set the coffeepot down on the counter with a clatter and put her hand over her mouth. Outside, the wind screamed, and the highway patrol radio on the shelf crackled out the first closure of Interstate Eighty.
A gold steering wheel pin on a worn jacket gave one retired trucker the length of a blizzard night to bring a young driver back to the road in Rawlins.
I gave my terms while Ryder was still standing at the wall. “Young man, I am not going to tell your dispatcher. You are twenty nine, you drive hard, and you thought you were defending the counter for the men who earn it. But I want three things. The blizzard is going to close this road within the hour, and there are forty trucks stranded between here and Laramie. I want you to sit down beside me at that CB radio and help me bring them in. I want you to read that plate to every new driver who walks in here. And I want you to take your cap off to Peg.”
Ryder took his cap off, turned it in his hands, and came back across the diner like a boy walking to the principal. “Mrs. Voss,” he said, “my mother drove a school bus in Casper for thirty years. She used to tell me about a woman who drove over Elk Mountain. I thought she was making it up.” His chin shook. “I told you to move down. I told you your bus left without you. I told a woman who has more miles than I will ever see to sit somewhere else.” He wiped his eyes with a sleeve. “I do not even deserve the stool next to yours.”
But shame makes a young man foolish. Ryder lunged forward in the same moment, snatched the little gold pin from my jacket, and ran for the door of the diner, shouting that he had to compare the number with the logbook in his rig. He had his hand on the door when Peg swung across the entrance with the coffeepot held high like a club. Big Walt stepped in front of the second door, arms folded, and the three drivers in reflective vests closed the gap behind him, shoulder to shoulder. The wind rattled the glass.
Ryder stood at the door with the pin in his fist and the entire truck stop watching him, and the snow beyond the windows grew thicker by the second. Big Walt spoke without any heat at all. “Boy, you have two minutes to decide what kind of driver you are,” he said. “A driver who runs from a mistake, or a driver who turns around.” Ryder looked at the little steering wheel in his hand, at the number worn almost smooth. Then he turned, crossed the checkered floor, and pressed it into my palm, and said, “Mrs. Voss, please. Tell me what to do.”
The consequences were a long cold night and a good one. We sat at the CB radio in the back of the diner for eleven hours, and I talked forty four trucks off the road and into the lot one at a time, the way I had done it in 1978, reading the drift of the snow by the sound in their voices. Ryder poured coffee and drove his own rig to the entrance with the lights on to guide them in. By morning, every driver was safe, and the highway patrol sent a plain thank you note signed by the captain.
In the name of my husband Hank, who passed in 2018, I started the Hank Voss Fund. It pays for commercial driver training for young people who cannot afford it and for emergency lodging and meals for stranded drivers and families in blizzards, in Carbon, Sweetwater and Albany counties. In the first year we trained twenty nine new drivers and housed three hundred and ten travelers in the storms of one winter. One was a young single mother from Rock Springs, thirty one years old, who took the wheel of her first rig and told me she was doing it for her little girl.
In January, I sat on stool number six with my black coffee, and a new driver came through the door, fresh out of school, stamping the snow from his boots. Ryder was behind the register, in a clean apron he had earned working weekends. He pointed at the wall. “Son,” he said, “before you sit down, go read the plate under that picture.” The boy squinted at it, then at me, and his mouth fell open. Ryder smiled and set a cup of coffee in front of the stool next to mine. “She likes company,” he said.
