The Log Truck

Omelia Rushing in 1939.

The Piney Woods cover more than 50,000 square miles, from the hills of Oklahoma and Arkansas down to the lowlands of Texas and Louisiana. Log trucks, a common sight on local highways, deliver tall pine and hardwood logs to factories and paper mills across the region.

My grandmother, Omelia Rushing, encountered one of these trucks in 1937 and barely survived to tell the story. Omelia was a single mother with two young daughters living near Fouke, Arkansas, just south of Texarkana. One evening, she and her girls were driving down Highway 71 with her father, William Calvin Rushing, and one or more of Omelia's siblings. She was the oldest of eight--six girls and two boys--and time has obscured the memory of who exactly was in the car that night.

Highway 71 is a narrow, two-lane road that runs north-south through western Arkansas. Omelia was behind the wheel of her father's car when a log truck passed her coming the other direction. Next thing she knew, her car was spinning out of control. The car crashed and she ended up in the hospital with life-threatening injuries.

She told me the story many years ago: "It was dark and the guy was coming in with a load of logs and the logs had shifted and he didn't know it. And one of the logs was hanging over to the side." When the vehicles passed each other, a log caught the door handle and spun the car around, causing it to crash. Omelia was the only one who was seriously injured. Her father had minor cuts from broken glass, but everyone else was unhurt. 

The log truck driver, unaware of the accident, didn't stop. "He just kept going and went on to the mill and unloaded his logs and said he didn't know that anything ever happened." Another car did stop and took Omelia and her passengers to the hospital.

Logging truck. Public domain image
from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"The doctor got in and saw me and he told Papa that I wouldn't live till daylight. So he got somebody here--I don't know, one of my aunts or somebody--to go get Mama and bring her up there. And the doctor talked to both of them and told them that there was just no way that I was going to make it." The doctors were so sure that she wouldn't make it, they didn't bother to operate. Omelia asked her mother to take care of her girls, and then, resigned to her fate, waited for the end to come. "And the doctor was real surprised the next day that I was still living. And I don't know how--I just happened to be tough and young or I wouldn't have lived."

After a long stay in the hospital, Omelia went home with lots of bandages--"I was bound as tight as a drum and had to stay strictly in bed for the longest time"--and eventually recovered. In 1939, she married my grandfather, Terry Lee Burns, and in 1940 my father, Terry Patrick Burns, was born.

After the accident, the police tracked down the truck, the driver, and the mill where he unloaded his logs. Omelia said that when the driver found out what happened, he went to her father and apologized, but there were no lawsuits and no repercussions for the driver or his company.

If there had been a lawsuit, the evidence would have been pretty solid. At the mill, the police checked the logs that had been on the truck. There, in the end of one of the logs, they found Omelia's door handle.

More:

• Piney Woods, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piney_Woods
• Arkansas Timber Industry, The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture: http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=2143