A few times each year I need to take big junk to our local recycling center. Metal stuff – old fencing, pipe, or a tank or the like. Either in the truck, or on this occasion, I needed my large trailer to haul the stuff. Going to the recycling center is always a great chance to catch up on the most local of news – what’s going on in our township. The exit heading out of the recycling center is wide open from a visibility standpoint, level, two driveways, allowing for entering and exiting vehicles to each have a space, and you can see way up and down the road in front easily. Ideal, really. I pulled up to the stop sign at the exit, looked left, looked right, and was putting my foot on the gas to pull out when I felt a hand on my shoulder again, urgently pulling me back, and this time I heard a loud “Look left again!” I slammed on my brakes at the sound and the feeling, and there on my left was a big Harley or GoldWing, full speed just a few car-lengths from my truck and trailer.
Someone was watching out for me that day. And the motorcycle driver.
October 11, 2002. Early that morning, my wife and I packed up our things and we were headed for Milwaukee. We left before breakfast, thinking that we would eat once we got further down the road. We were going to babysit our grandkids while our son and daughter-in-law flew out on a short trip. We were on a tight schedule, coordinated so that they could leave for the airport in plenty of time. Just before we got on the interstate, I insisted that I just needed a quick donut from the convenience store, even though she didn’t want me to delay us. As we got on the interstate, there was more low fog, as I-43 runs along Lake Michigan’s coastline pretty tight in some areas. A few miles south of Sheboygan, the fog really started getting heavy, we slowed down a lot, and I had to hit my brakes hard as I saw a vehicle in front of me pull over hard and the driver jumped out – turned out he was a local volunteer fireman that had been directed to divert traffic off the interstate. He frantically waved us to get off the highway at the exit ramp. I rolled down the window to ask what was up and he just screamed “Get off the highway! There’s a huge pileup just ahead! Get off now!” We took a meandering parallel way on back roads south and got back on I-43 a few miles later. One of the kids called us, as they knew our morning schedule, and they wanted to know if we had seen the big pile-up. We had not. They said it was all over the news, that there was a big pileup in the fog near Oostburg. People who experienced it said it was suddenly a “wall of fog”, and we can attest to that. In the end, there were ~40 vehicles involved, 10 deaths, and 39 injured in the deadliest traffic incident in Wisconsin’s history. The first responder who waved us off the highway turned out to be our lifesaver that day, but the donut played a part, too. Had I not stopped for the donut, we would have been at that spot 2-3 minutes sooner, and never have seen the first responder.