FATHER'S DAY 2026--

Another trucker's holiday on the road.

The Pattersonville Travel Plaza on the New York State Thruway, westbound side. The parking lot is big enough to easily accommodate my double tractor-trailer set. And with its excellent coffee, clean bathrooms, and proximity to our Amsterdam switching yard, it is my personal oasis between shifts.

June 21st-- the longest day of the year, the official beginning of summer... and, in 2026, Father's Day. No big deal; I went about my daily routine as usual and then parked at Pattersonville to rest up for my next assignment.

I've been trucking for sixteen years now, and I've seen a lot of stuff while spending the majority of my existence on the road... stuff both good and bad. And at highway service plazas-- like Pattersonville-- one regularly bears witness to both sides of American culture in concentrated form. Happy young families traveling for holidays or vacations regularly stop at service plazas for the bathrooms and fast food. And yet so do society's evil-doers, who are often on the move either fleeing their last misdeed or headed to their next one. Bad guys seem to thrive on our highway systems just as rats invisibly flourish in urban sewers.

We road warriors survive in part by developing a sharp awareness of our surroundings, an observant eye for both beauty and its opposite. We learn to physically sense even the possibility of danger before our brains logically process its presence. And because one sees such a broad slice of humanity in service plazas, it seems there's always the chance of something nefarious afoot. For instance, children left unattended even for mere minutes are especially vulnerable to the sickos who would harm them. And so when I exited the men's room and noticed a skinny little eight-year-old girl all alone and leaning against the wall in the passageway connecting the bathrooms, my internal alarms instantly went off. My skin prickled with reptile-brain awareness of danger as I quickly scanned the area for her parents. Nothing. I asked her if her parents were nearby. No words; she looked at me for an instant and then gazed down at her feet. I took that as a "yes." So I told her that I would stand right where I was until they came for her.

Stranger kidnappings are relatively rare in America, but they happen. As I stood guard, I figured that someone would have already had enough time to whisk this child out the door and into a van, and then to the nearby exit to that post-industrial hell-hole of a city and then to a horrible fate that would destroy multiple generations of her family. I avoided eye contact with her and instead greeted every passerby with a brief but intense stare, letting them know that I was observing everyone and everything. I stood there for maybe seven full minutes... the kind of seven minutes that one later recalls as fifteen or more. Then the mother finally arrived. I knew it was the mother before she said or did anything. "Are you her mother?" I asked. "Yes," she said, with alarms of her own suddenly going off. I explained that many of us truckers are fathers who don't get to see enough of our own children, and so we react protectively whenever we spot an unattended child and sense the possibility of danger.

I chatted briefly with her and her husband, who was sitting with their two other young children... not all that far away, really, but still too far. This wasn't my first rodeo. In the past I have protectively stood guard in travel plazas over numerous children in similar situations, over devout Muslims who needed to roll out their prayer rugs and face Mecca at sunset, and once for an orthodox Jewish family observing their kosher mealtime rituals in a Pennsylvania Turnpike plaza.

But it was kind of special that this particular instance occurred on Father's Day.