Song Of The Day 5/18/2016: Dick Curless – “A Tombstone Every Mile”

To Trucker With Love – Another thing truckers do is die. Sometimes the death is from natural causes, like old age or the croup. Other times it's the result of an accident, like stray lightning bolts or collateral damage from a domestic dispute next door. The bummer about death is that you don't get to choose your method of earthly departure (unless you're really proactive about it). Truckers have methods of death specific to the hazards and risks of their trade. You could go careening off a hill. You could mistake a gearshift for a drinking straw. You could follow your GPS straight into a ravine or a living room. Or, as Dick Curless points out, you could be stuck in Northern Maine.

The second SOTD in a row to address potato truckers, "Tombstone Every Mile" chronicles the fatal final journeys of those hauling the goods through the Haynesville Woods on U.S. Route 2A, a snow-cursed byway of the Pine Tree State. The 2A spurs off from the 2 outside Houlton, Maine, about five miles west of the Canadian border. Then it's a 44-mile tango with transience as you gut out some severe twists (one is supposedly a stark 90-degree curve) until you land outside Macwahoc Plantation. The northeastern-most corner of Maine is yet another hotbed of potato farming, so truckers would have to cross down the 2A to get their products out to the rest of the world. Although this map I'm looking at right now shows that they could take Interstate 95 and not go too far out of their way. In fact, that looks like the most logical route to the rest of New England. I don't know what's wrong with those truckers. Haynesville can't be so enticing that they have to risk their lives on the 2A. What's the deal, is there a really good haberdashery or something?

Since there have been so many casualties on the 2A and it's in the nearly disconnected state of Maine, of course parts of the Haynesville Woods highway are thought to be haunted. It's a minefield of paranormal activity. One of the most popular ghosts is a young newlywed woman looking for a ride because her husband has been injured in a car accident. She gets in your car, starts jawing about I don't know what, then vanishes without notice once you're at the end of the Woods. There's another ghost who's supposed to be a ten-year-old girl who was killed by a tractor trailer in 1967. Throw on top of that all the truckers with their demon spuds losing their way amidst the foggy death, that there's one escalator to men's wear I'd rather not squat upon, cowboy.