The Rest Stop on I-90

🕐12 min read

Submitted by a contributor who drove long-haul routes through the northern Midwest for twelve years. Details have been edited to protect identity. The route, the mileage markers, and the timeline are presented as the contributor recorded them in a journal entry written the morning after the incident.

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I have driven Interstate 90 through South Dakota more times than I could count if I had the rest of my life to count them. Sioux Falls to Rapid City, Rapid City back east, sometimes the full stretch from the Minnesota line all the way to Wyoming and beyond. At night. Always at night, because that was how the dispatching worked out, and after a while you stop minding it. The dark is just the dark. The highway is the same highway it was at noon.

I know that road. I know where the wind picks up between Kadoka and Murdo. I know which weigh stations run three a.m. checks and which ones you can roll past with your lights off in the cab. I know the rest stops. There are not that many of them. You learn them the way you learn anything you depend on — without thinking about it, the way you know where the light switch is in your own bathroom.

The one I am going to tell you about was not on my list.

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The Night in Question

It was mid-October. I had picked up a load of agricultural equipment in Mitchell and I was running west toward Rapid City. The load was routine. The night was routine. Temperature around thirty-four degrees, overcast, no moon. I had been driving since nine in the evening. By three in the morning I was somewhere in the dead stretch between Chamberlain and Murdo, which is about ninety miles of nothing in particular — rolling grassland, some butte formations in the distance, the kind of road where you can go twenty minutes without seeing another set of headlights.

My GPS unit at the time was a Garmin mounted on the dash. I did not use it much for the main routes because I knew them, but I had it running because I liked seeing my speed and estimated arrival time. I happened to glance at it and saw it showing an exit coming up in four miles. It had a small icon that the unit used for rest areas — the blue square with the little figure and the picnic table.

I thought nothing of it immediately. Four miles, rest area. I had been on the road six hours. I needed to use the facilities and I was starting to feel the particular kind of tiredness where your eyes are open but your processing is starting to lag. A stop made sense.

The exit ramp came up where the Garmin said it would. It was a standard exit — the kind of low-speed curve that peels off the interstate and loops around. I followed it. The rest stop was there. Parking lot, a long low building with the standard architecture they all have, the brown or gray cinder block, the overhang over the entrance doors, the flagpole with no flag on it because it was October and late and dark.

I parked in the truck lot on the far right side. This is where I first noticed something, though I did not register it as a problem yet. The lot was empty. No other trucks. No passenger cars in the car section either. That is not unusual at three in the morning, but the lot was also clean. Not just empty — there was nothing. No oil stains on the pavement, no cigarette remnants near the curb, none of the usual accumulation that any high-traffic rest stop picks up over years of use. The pavement looked like it had been poured recently. It had that texture. But the building looked old.

I sat in the cab for a moment with the engine running. I am not a man who gets feelings about things. I have never been that way. But I remember sitting there and doing nothing for maybe thirty seconds, which is not something I normally do.

Then I needed to use the bathroom, and practical needs override everything, so I climbed down and went in.

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The Building

The lights inside were fluorescent and they were very bright. Not flickering, not the dim yellow you get in a facility that hasn’t had bulbs replaced in a while. Bright white and steady. The kind of brightness that feels like too much attention.

The floor was clean. The walls were clean. There was a hand-dryer of a model I did not recognize — not any brand I could name, which is a strange thing to notice, but I am telling you what I noticed. The sinks were clean. The mirrors were there.

I looked at the mirrors and I looked away. I will come back to the mirrors.

There were vending machines in the alcove between the men’s and women’s sides. Three of them: one for snacks, one for drinks, one that sold travel items — eye drops, earbuds, that kind of thing. All three machines were fully stocked. Not half-stocked, not running low on the popular slots. Every row was full. You could see it through the glass, all those packages lined up perfectly. But none of the machines had power. The displays were dark. There was no hum from the refrigeration unit in the drink machine, and those units are always humming, always — you can hear them the moment you walk into any rest stop in America. These were silent. The drinks inside — I remember seeing what looked like orange juice, water, cola — were not cold. You could tell from how the condensation wasn’t forming on the inside of the glass.

I used the facilities. The soap dispenser was the push-pump kind, mounted on the wall above the sink. I pressed it and the substance that came out was not soap. It was the right color — that pale translucent yellow you get with institutional liquid soap — and it was the right consistency. But it did not lather. I rubbed it between my hands for what felt like a long time and it did not produce any foam at all. It absorbed into my skin or evaporated. I am not certain which. When I rinsed my hands, there was nothing to rinse away. My hands were clean, or they felt clean, but there was no residue of whatever the substance had been.

I dried my hands with the dryer, which did work. Hot air. Normal sound.

Then I looked at the mirrors again.

They were the long mirrors you see in institutional bathrooms, extending the full length of the sink counter. They were clean — no smudges, no water spots. But the reflections were slightly wrong. Not dramatically wrong. Not the kind of wrong that would make you cry out. Just wrong enough that it took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. The mirrors were very slightly concave. Curved inward, the way a spoon is curved, but so subtly that you would not know unless you looked at a reflection you were certain of. My reflection was almost right. But the proportions of the room behind me in the glass were just slightly compressed toward the center. The far wall in the reflection looked perhaps six inches closer than it should have been.

I turned around. The wall was where it always had been.

I turned back to the mirror. The reflection showed it closer.

I left the building.

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Outside, and After

I walked to my truck. The parking lot was still empty. The lot was still clean. The lights on the exterior of the building were on — the kind of floodlights that illuminate the walking area between the building and the trucks — and they were the same quality as the interior lights. Too bright. Too white. Like a stage.

I got into the cab and I checked my phone. It was 3:07 AM. My phone showed I had received a dispatch message at 3:04 — just a routine check-in request, nothing urgent. So my phone’s timestamp put me at that rest stop for approximately three minutes, maybe four.

My dash clock showed 3:52 AM.

I looked at my phone again. 3:07. I looked at the dash clock. 3:52. I checked my Qualcomm — the onboard system the trucking company uses for dispatch communication — and it also showed 3:07, synchronized to network time.

The dash clock is internal. It runs on the truck’s system. I had set it manually about a week before when the battery had been replaced. It is the only clock in that cab that is not connected to anything external.

I sat with that for a moment. Then I started the truck and I got back on the highway.

I did not look in my mirrors at the rest stop as I pulled away. I am aware that this is a strange choice. I made it deliberately.

For the remainder of the drive to Rapid City, which was about three hours, I ran the radio at a volume I do not normally use. I kept the cab lights on at their lowest setting, just enough ambient light to know where things were. I did not stop again.

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The Return Trip

I drove the same route again eight days later, eastbound this time. I was paying attention.

I knew approximately where the exit should be. I watched the mile markers. I watched the Garmin. The Garmin showed no rest stop in that stretch of road. The exit was not there. There was no exit ramp, no loop road, no building, no lot. Just the median grass on one side and the prairie on the other, and the highway running straight and dark.

I pulled over on the shoulder and got out of the truck. The night was cold and I stood there for a while looking at the area where the exit should have been. There was grass. There was the slight rise of the embankment. There was nothing else.

I got back in the truck and drove.

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The Other Accounts

I mentioned it on the CB about a month later. I did not go into detail. I said something like: I saw a rest stop on I-90 around the 220 marker that I had never seen before and couldn’t find on a return trip. Does anyone else know what I’m talking about.

There was a pause of maybe a minute. Then a driver who went by a handle I recognized — I had talked to him before, he ran the northern plains routes for a refrigerated carrier — came back and said: yeah.

That was all he said.

I asked him if he had stopped.

He said he had stopped once. He said he didn’t stop again after that.

I asked him what he had seen inside and he said he didn’t want to talk about it on an open channel and when I tried to reach him on a different frequency he didn’t answer.

The second account came about two months later, second-hand. A driver I knew from the Sioux Falls terminal mentioned that her regular partner — she ran with a co-driver on the longer hauls — had told her about a rest stop that appeared once between Chamberlain and Murdo and then was never there again. She did not know the details of what he had seen. He had told her the story and then asked her not to ask him about it again, and she had respected that. She told me because she thought I would know what to do with the information. I did not know what to do with it. I wrote it down. I am writing it down now.

There are things on the night routes that do not require an explanation. They require only the understanding that the road is very long and the dark is very complete and the instruments we use to measure time and distance are accurate only within the conditions for which they were designed.

What conditions existed at that rest stop on that October night, I cannot tell you. I can tell you what I saw. I can tell you what the clocks showed. I can tell you that the soap did not lather and the machines were stocked but silent and the mirrors bent the room toward their centers.

I drove long-haul for four more years after that night. I have not found the rest stop again. I have not been back to that stretch of I-90 in two years now, because I am no longer driving and the routes are someone else’s to learn.

I hope they learn them well. I hope they know where all the rest stops are supposed to be.

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NightShiftTales publishes first-person accounts from workers on overnight shifts — truckers, nurses, warehouse staff, dispatchers, emergency responders, security personnel, and anyone else who keeps the world running between midnight and dawn. If you have experienced something on the night shift that you have not been able to explain, and you want it on record, contact us through the submission form. We edit for length and to protect identity. We do not editorialize. We believe the accounts are more powerful without interpretation.

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