I Spent Twenty-Two Years on I-80 Convinced That Channel 19 Was the Only Honest Way to Talk to a Stranger. Then It Went Quiet.

I drive a Peterbilt out of Lima, Ohio, and I have been pulling a dry van up and down Interstate 80 for twenty-two years, which works out to a little over two million miles if you count the early years when I ran team and never bothered to write the odometer down. For most of that time I held an opinion about people who talk to strangers on the internet, and the opinion was not generous. I thought it was something you did if you had never had the real version of it, the way a person who grew up on margarine will defend it to you because they have nothing honest to compare it against. The real version, as far as I was concerned, lived on the CB radio, on channel 19, and you could not explain it to anyone who had not spent a night crawling through a Wyoming whiteout listening to a few other drivers they would never meet talk each other safely through it.

What I believed about channel 19 was that it was honest in a way almost nothing else in my life managed to be, and I still think I was mostly right about that. You talk to a voice in the dark who is three trucks ahead of you and dropping back fast, and in twenty minutes the two of you will be out of range of each other forever, and that single fact does something to a conversation that no amount of good intentions can fake. Nobody is building anything that has to last. There is no reputation to keep up because you are a handle and a region and a load rather than a name, and the next time your paths happen to cross, if they ever do, neither of you will have any way of knowing it. I told my daughter once that channel 19 was the most honest room in America precisely because everybody in it was already on their way out of it, and she gave me a look that I now understand was her deciding not to argue the point with me just yet.

The trouble is that the channel got quiet, and then it got worse than quiet. Somewhere in the last decade the radio filled up with men who only keyed the mic to be cruel to each other, the drivers who had used it the old way mostly drifted off it, and a frequency that once felt like a fire burning in a cold field started to feel instead like an empty parking lot with one angry man yelling across it. I kept my radio on out of loyalty more than out of any real use I was getting from it. Without ever admitting it to myself I had become a man defending a thing that had already left the building, which is a particular kind of lonely that I would not wish on anyone, and one that I was far too stubborn to call by its actual name until a snowed-in night outside Rawlins this past February finally forced the issue on me.

I was parked at a Love’s with the interstate closed ahead of me and eleven hours to kill, the radio handing me nothing but static and that one furious stranger, and months earlier my daughter had quietly put something on my phone and made me promise to try it once before I died of being right about everything. It was called Knotchat, and the way she had described it annoyed me at the time because it sounded exactly like the internet nonsense I had spent two decades looking down on from the cab. You get connected to one stranger at a time, you talk for as long as the thing holds its own weight, and then it ends and you have no way to reach that person ever again. I opened it that night mostly so that I could honestly tell her I had, and the first thing I felt was the very specific discomfort of a man being shown that the thing he loved best had a living version of itself that he had been too proud to go look at.

Because it was channel 19. It was channel 19 the way it had actually been before it died, except that it had simply moved somewhere I had been too proud to follow it. The entire premise of an anonymous chat app like that one turned out to be the same premise I had been preaching from behind the wheel for twenty-two years, which is that you are a voice about to go out of range talking to another voice about to go out of range, and that the leaving is not a flaw in the arrangement but the whole reason anyone in it bothers to tell the truth. The first person I matched with was a night-shift nurse in Duluth who could not get herself to sleep after a bad run of patients, and we talked for the better part of an hour about nothing that would have survived being written down anywhere, and I logged off and sat in my dark cab and felt, for the first time in a long while, like I had keyed up into the night and somebody decent had answered.

I have done it a few nights a week ever since, mostly on the long shutdowns when the lot is full of sleeping trucks and there is nobody awake to talk to, and the conversations themselves have been the part I would never have predicted. I argued with a retired ferry captain in Tasmania for the better part of an hour about whether a person can genuinely love a job and resent it at the very same time, and he talked me most of the way over to his side of it, and I told him as much, which is not a thing I tend to say easily to anyone. A woman in Lisbon who restores old tiled walls for her living wanted to know whether it was foolish to spend an entire life on work that the next earthquake might simply erase, and I found myself telling a stranger on the far side of an ocean the truest thing I have come to believe about my own two million miles, which is that the leaving is exactly what makes the talking matter, and that I had wasted ten years grieving a radio channel for teaching me precisely that and then somehow letting myself forget it. If you have ever sat in a quiet cab at two in the morning genuinely wanting one honest voice, you already understand why something like https://knot.chat works the way it does, and why a man who swore by his CB for two decades could end up there without feeling like he had betrayed a single thing he believed in.

I still keep the radio on. Channel 19 is still mostly the one angry man and a long wash of static, and I have finally stopped expecting it to turn back into what it used to be, the way you eventually stop waiting for an old friend who changed on you to change back. But I no longer believe the honest room closed down for good. It turned out that the thing I had always loved about it was never the hardware bolted under my dash, it was the leaving, and the leaving travels better than I ever gave it credit for. I am twenty-two years into this life and I was flatly wrong about the one thing I was surest of, which my daughter has been gracious enough never to say to my face, and which I am setting down here, on a kind of record, for some stranger I will never meet to read through once and then drive on past.