I had a very weird experience driving home late one night. It had never happened to me before, nor has it happened ever since.
It occurred almost six months ago, near the end of March.
I was driving home from my friend Kyle’s down in Swift Current. I try to get down there to see him every few months or so, particularly when his work keeps him around ‘Speedy Creek’ and he’s unable to drive up to Outlook to stay with his folks.
It’s a drive I’ve made dozens of times in the last decade or so, and I can’t say I’d ever experienced what I went through on this particular night.
I should pre-face this by saying that the drive home from Swift is a particularly lonely drive, so much so that depending on the time of year, I sometimes feel like I’m the only one cruising up an abandoned Highway 4. Of course, one such factor is that we’re talking about a 2.5-hour drive that doesn’t begin until sometime after midnight.
What can I say, I like the calm and ghost-like solitude of a lengthy late-night drive!
So I’m driving back from Swift and everything is as it should be; the familiar lights and surroundings in the villages of Kyle and Elrose, the odd wildlife popping up to say hello and force me to tap the brakes, you know, the usual. I arrived at the turnoff onto Highway 15 near the town of Rosetown at a fair time, so much so that I decided to drive into town for a quick stop at Tim Horton’s.
Gotta love that ‘Open 24/7’ policy, am I right?
Back on the road a few minutes later. I’m driving, nothing interesting so far, here comes Milden and those rusted-up fuel tanks that everyone wishes someone would paint over. I’m in the home stretch now because I just saw the turnoff to drive down to my uncle Dale’s farm. I should see the first turnoff into Conquest by way of that reflector tape stuck onto the power pole.
Suddenly, I find myself driving up over the hill, and I see the lights of the Co-op fuel tanks located just off Highway 15, and I see that I’m just a few moments away from arriving at the turnoff onto Highway 45.
Whoa.
Wait a minute.
Hold up now.
I’m almost in Outlook?
That wasn’t the plan!
It turns out that not only did I fail to see the first turnoff going into Conquest, I also missed the main access one, and I had gone so far down Highway 15 that I was minutes away from arriving in Outlook.
Here’s the thing though, folks – I don’t remember seeing any of it, nor do I even remember any of the familiar markings registering with me. I was driving normally and anticipating my turnoff, and it just felt like BAM, I was suddenly 6-7 kilometers further east and entering Outlook territory. The second I saw those fuel tanks lit up, I knew I’d come way too far.
I can’t explain it, and to this day I have no clue how it happened. I was fully awake, and I knew that once I’d hit the Bounty area, I was only about two or three minutes away from the grid road into Conquest. But I’m telling you, it just felt like I blinked and then I was suddenly farther down the highway than I wanted to be.
I don’t know if I was perhaps momentarily distracted by something that caused me to miss both turnoffs into town, but if I was, shouldn’t I have crashed my SUV in a spectacular accident? I pride myself on being a safe driver and fully aware of my surroundings, but I just can’t explain what happened on that cool, late March night.
If we want to theorize, there is a strange phenomenon out there that’s called “Lost/Missing Time”. It describes a little bit of what I experienced – in one place on moment, suddenly at another in almost the blink of an eye – but most cases that I’ve heard of involve people who, ahem, claim to have been abducted by aliens. However, there are a few stories I’ve read that drew similarities to my interesting night drive; people who’ve seen their own road markers knowing their destination was close, and suddenly found themselves far away from where they wanted to go.
Missing Time is described by one website as a gap in your conscious memory; it means that despite being awake and conscious, you can’t remember a certain amount of time. Others believe that astral projection can explain Missing Time. Astral projection is a state when the spirit leaves the body and has its own experiences.
Call it what you want, but all I know is it felt very strange failing to miss TWO turnoffs on a clear night.
Hmmm, maybe those aliens DID take a special interest in me that night…
For this week, that’s been the Ruttle Report.
