PART 2
I want to tell you who Caleb Whitmore was before he was the man who waited.
Caleb grew up in Surgoinsville, Tennessee, about twenty miles northwest of where my house is now, in the early 1980s and 90s. His father had been a long-haul trucker for the Wilson Trucking Company who was on the road for two-week stretches and home for four-day stretches for the entire first sixteen years of Caleb’s life. His mother had been a checker at the Piggly Wiggly on Highway 11W until she passed of pancreatic cancer in 1989 at the age of thirty-eight.
Caleb was fifteen years old when his mother passed.
His father — by Caleb’s own quiet account at my kitchen table the following Sunday afternoon, where I am writing this from — his father had not handled the loss of his wife well. The next year was, in Caleb’s own description, a bad one.
He did not tell me what made it bad. He did not need to.
When Caleb was sixteen years old, on a Friday night in October of 1990, he had a fight with his father at the kitchen table of a small two-bedroom rental house on Surgoinsville Boulevard. The fight involved the bottle of Wild Turkey his father had been working on since five p.m. The fight involved a closed fist. The fight involved a sixteen-year-old standing up from a kitchen table and walking out the front door.
Caleb left the house at seven-thirty that Friday night.
He walked east on Surgoinsville Boulevard. He cut through the small wooded lot behind the Citgo. He came out on the shoulder of U.S. Highway 11W heading southwest toward Kingsport.
He walked for seven hours.
The temperature that night was forty-one degrees.
He had on a thin denim jacket and a t-shirt and old Converse sneakers.
He did not have a destination. He did not have a phone. He did not have money. He did not have a plan. He was sixteen years old and his mother was dead and his father had hit him and he was walking south on a Tennessee highway at thirty-eight degrees with his hands in his pockets and his head down.
In seven hours of walking on a state highway in upper east Tennessee on a Friday night in October of 1990, between the hours of seven-thirty p.m. and two thirty-five a.m., approximately fourteen hundred vehicles passed Caleb Whitmore in both directions.
None of them stopped.
By two thirty-five a.m. he had reached the outskirts of Kingsport. He had walked twenty-one miles. He had blisters on both feet that he could feel through his Converse sneakers. He was shivering so hard he could not unclench his teeth.
He sat down on the curb in the parking lot of a Quick Stop gas station off Stone Drive.
A long-haul trucker pulling into the lot to refuel at two forty-one a.m. — a forty-eight-year-old white man named Earl Renfro driving a Peterbilt for the Wilson Trucking Company who had known Caleb’s father from the depot in Knoxville — Earl recognized him.
Earl bought him a coffee.
Earl drove him to his sister’s house in Mount Carmel at three-fifteen a.m.
Earl did not lecture him on the way.
Earl said three sentences to Caleb in the cab of his Peterbilt.
He said: “Son. You ain’t the first sixteen-year-old to do this. You won’t be the last. Tonight you sleep at your aunt’s. Tomorrow you figure out what tomorrow is.”
Caleb went on to live with his aunt Mary in Mount Carmel for the next two years until he graduated from high school.
He has, by his own count over thirty-five years, told the story of that seven-hour walk to exactly four people in his life.
The first was the wife he married in 1998 — his old lady Diane, now fifty-one, who works at the Eastman Chemical plant in Kingsport.
The second was his charter Reverend in 2005.
The third was a sixteen-year-old prospect named Dakota who patched in 2017 and who Caleb sponsors.
The fourth was my thirteen-year-old daughter on the gravel shoulder of U.S. Highway 11W on a Friday night in October of last year.
