Radio Silence on Highway 50

🕐10 min read

The Loneliest Road in America

Highway 50 across Nevada has been called the loneliest road in America since a Life magazine article in 1986 described it as having no visible attractions and recommended against it for travelers who weren’t experienced in survival techniques. That description is only a mild exaggeration. Four hundred and fourteen miles from Fernley in the west to the Utah border in the east, crossing seven mountain ranges and five valleys, passing through five small towns whose combined population wouldn’t fill a high school gymnasium. The gas stations are forty to eighty miles apart and some of them close at eight PM. The cell service goes away around Fallon and doesn’t come back consistently until you’re past Ely. At night, you can go an hour without seeing another vehicle. For more listening ideas, check out our horror audiobooks for night shifts.

I’ve run Highway 50 maybe thirty times in five years of driving. I know it the way you know a road you’ve spent a lot of hours on — the particular feel of the grade on Austin Summit, the way the long flat approaches to Eureka can create optical illusions of vehicles that aren’t there, the specific quality of dark in the valleys where there’s no ambient light from any town. It’s not a road that surprises me. I’ve run it in every condition: summer heat, winter ice, spring winds that come off the ranges at angles that can walk a fully loaded rig into the shoulder if you’re not paying attention.

The run I’m going to tell you about was in November. Westbound, heading toward Fallon with a partial load, running overnight to make the morning delivery window. I crossed into Nevada from Utah around 9 PM and I had the whole night ahead of me.

Mile Marker 196

Around midnight I was approaching the stretch between Eureka and Austin — the longest gap between towns on the highway, about seventy miles. This is the emptiest part of the road. The valley here is broad and flat and the mountains on both sides are dark and the sky has so many stars that the horizon is hard to distinguish when there’s no moon, which there wasn’t that night.

I came over a small rise around mile marker 196 and my headlights picked up an object in the westbound lane. A vehicle — I had maybe two and a half seconds to register what I was seeing and react. An older pickup truck, black or very dark, no lights, sitting in the lane, driver’s side door open. I don’t know if it was stopped or moving very slowly or what. I got the wheel hard right and went onto the shoulder, gravel and then scrub, and I had the rig under control again within about a hundred feet. I came to a stop on the shoulder and sat there breathing for a while.

When I got my breath back I went through the post-incident procedure I’ve developed over five years of driving: check mirrors, check rig condition, log the mile marker. I pulled my notebook and wrote: MM 196, approximate time 0011, near-collision with unlit vehicle in lane, no contact, rig and cargo intact. I watched my mirrors. The highway behind me was empty. The truck — or whatever it was — was gone. Not passed me, not visible anywhere. Just gone from the road as if it had never been there.

I sat on the shoulder for fifteen minutes to make sure I was in the right state to keep driving, because that kind of thing dumps adrenaline and you need to let it metabolize before you trust your reaction time again. Then I pulled back onto 50 and kept going west.

The Broadcast

I run the radio on overnight hauls partly for company and partly to stay awake. On Highway 50 through central Nevada the commercial radio fades out and I usually switch to satellite radio, but my satellite receiver had been giving me trouble — cutting out every few minutes — so I was scanning AM frequencies looking for whatever would come in. AM propagates long distances at night, bouncing off the ionosphere, and you can pick up stations from hundreds of miles away if conditions are right. I’d been finding bits of stations from Salt Lake, a country station from Reno that kept fading, a talk program that was mostly static.

Around mile marker 187, about fourteen miles past where the near-miss had happened, I got a station that came in clear. Very clear — cleaner than I expected for AM at that hour. A male voice, the kind of measured baritone that announcers trained to in the 1950s and 1960s, reading what sounded like a news bulletin:

I’ll give you the gist because I don’t remember every word verbatim, and this is something I want to be careful about — I’m not going to embellish. The broadcast was describing, in present-tense news-report language, an accident on Highway 50 at mile marker 196. A westbound truck, the bulletin said, had swerved to avoid an obstacle in the roadway. The truck had gone onto the shoulder. The driver was not injured. The report gave what I understood to be a description of road conditions and visibility at the time of the incident.

It was describing what had happened to me, approximately three hours and change earlier.

I reached over and turned the radio up. The broadcast continued for another thirty seconds — more detail about the stretch of highway, a reference to the mile marker, a description that matched my rig in general terms: a heavy transport vehicle, westbound, single driver. And then a sign-off: this was, the voice said, KNX-something — the call letters were garbled — broadcasting from Ely, Nevada, reminding listeners to drive safely on the nighttime roads. Stay with us for the next update.

And then static.

I drove the next two miles with my hand hovering near the radio dial. Nothing came back on that frequency. I wrote down the frequency in my notebook — it was somewhere around 1150 kHz on the AM dial, I wasn’t watching exactly when it came in.

What I Found When I Looked It Up

When I got to Fallon and made my delivery and had a few hours before my next run, I sat in the truck stop with my phone and looked up radio stations in Ely, Nevada. Ely is a small mining and ranching town about a hundred and fifty miles east of where I’d picked up the signal. It has a population of around four thousand people. There are a few radio stations associated with it, all low-power.

There had been a medium-wave AM station in Ely with a call sign beginning with the letters I thought I’d heard. I found it in an FCC license archive that a radio history enthusiast had compiled. The station had held a license at approximately 1150 kHz. It had gone dark — license surrendered, transmitter decommissioned — in 1973. Fifty years before the night I was driving Highway 50.

The enthusiast’s archive had a brief note about the station: it had been a local news and music format, serving the Ely area and the highway communities. It had included regular highway condition updates, the archive noted, because a significant portion of its audience were truckers and travelers on Route 50.

I sat with my coffee and read this and thought about it for a while.

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The Broadcast’s Details

Here is the thing that I keep coming back to. The broadcast described the near-miss correctly — westbound truck, MM 196, driver uninjured. I had just experienced that event. But the broadcast described it in present tense, as a current event. Not past tense. Not “earlier tonight a truck driver reported.” Present: a truck has swerved onto the shoulder. The driver is uninjured.

The event had happened three hours before I received the broadcast.

I’ve tried to construct a scenario in which this makes sense. A HAM operator somewhere monitoring my channel and relaying a report? I hadn’t called it in — I’d logged it in my notebook and kept driving. Nobody knew about it except me. The cell service was out. I hadn’t talked to anyone.

A strange coincidence, a broadcast from some other station describing a different incident that happened to share details with mine? That’s possible. The description was general in some ways — I’m not going to tell you the broadcast included my specific license plate or my given name. It described the class of vehicle and the mile marker and the basic facts. Maybe those basic facts matched something else that happened that night at that location and I was reading my own situation into a coincidental report.

Except: I was the westbound truck on Highway 50 at MM 196 that night. I know what happened. The broadcast matched it.

There’s a certain type of experience that night shift drivers talk about on the long empty roads — a category of perception that the isolation and the hours produce. I’ve heard truckers on other lonely stretches describe receiving transmissions from stations that shouldn’t exist. A lighthouse technician I talked to once described finding documents that seemed to know his location and activities better than they should have been able to — logs that described his daily work as if someone had been watching. There’s something about being alone on a long night in an empty place that opens up the possibility of these things, or opens up your willingness to receive them, or maybe they happen everywhere and only in the silence can you hear them.

The Rest of the Run

I’ve run Highway 50 six times since that November. I scan through 1150 kHz on every run, in both directions, through the central Nevada stretch. I’ve picked up nothing unusual — occasional distant AM interference, the kind of skip propagation that’s normal at night. Whatever I received on that frequency that night has not repeated.

Mile marker 196 is a wide flat stretch of road with good visibility in conditions without an unlit vehicle stopped in the lane. I come over the small rise and I can see two miles ahead in my headlights. I haven’t seen anything in the road there since.

But I always slow down a little at 196. Not dramatically. Just: I take my foot off the accelerator and let the speed come down to something I could stop from quickly if I needed to. Old reflex now. The notebook note is still in the truck, in the glove compartment with the other incident logs, and sometimes I read it: MM 196, approximate time 0011, near-collision with unlit vehicle in lane, no contact, rig and cargo intact.

True when I wrote it. Still true now. The cargo reached Fallon on time. The rig is fine. The driver is uninjured.

Like the man on the radio said.

More from the Night Shift

• The Rest Stop on I-90
• Dispatch Log: Call from Marker 71
• Taxi Driver 3AM Fare

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