Running The Scales

About 40 years ago I was driving a truck making weekly trips from Iowa to Utah with a load of pork for a wholesale meat company. I would get the truck unloaded and then go up to Washington to get a load of apples to take back to the mid-west.

The load of apples usually weighed significantly more than was legally allowed and required me to circumvent the truck scales on the way back. Loading the extra weight didn't pay extra, but I enjoyed  the challenge of getting away with it.

There was a truck scale on I-15 in Utah that I had to get around to successfully accomplish my chicanery. I found a small state road that more or less paralleled I-15 that allowed me to bypass the whole thing. This road went through a small town at the end of my scale bypass gambit and had a connector road back to the Interstate.

I was quite pleased with myself for figuring this out and made this detour almost every week for several months. One week in the winter it had been snowing recently and the roads were slippery.  I was loaded legally this time so I just went right down I-15 instead of taking my alternate route.

Just before the exit to the small town on my regular detour, I saw a car that had slid off the road into the ditch. It looked like the car wasn't damaged, but there appeared to still be people in it.

I stopped to check it out and found it was a nice middle aged couple who happened to live in the same town I had been going through almost every week. I helped them up into the truck and we had a nice conversation while I took them back into town.

I stopped in front of the general store on main street and as I was helping them out of the truck, a couple of old guys came out of the store. They thanked me for helping their neighbors and told me they'd get the local tow truck operator to tow the car in.

One of the guys commented on what a nice looking truck I was driving. He said, "We see you coming through here all the time running the scales. Why don't you stop in and say hello next time?"