The Drive That Changed Everything
I don't drive I-70 at night anymore. Not since I met the man who's been waiting there for forty-three years with my father's quarter.
It started as a simple trip back from Denver. My sister's wedding had run late, and I'd volunteered to drive the rental car back to Kansas City rather than fly. The interstate was empty except for the occasional trucker, and I was making good time until I hit that stretch of road about thirty miles east of Limon.
Photo: Kansas City, via c8.alamy.com
That's where I found the toll booth that shouldn't exist.
The Collector
Colorado doesn't have toll roads on I-70. Everyone knows that. But there it was, a single lane with orange cones funneling traffic toward a small wooden booth that looked like it belonged in the 1970s. A hand-painted sign read "State Maintenance Fee - 25 cents."
The operator was maybe sixty, wearing a faded Colorado Department of Transportation vest that had seen better decades. What caught my attention wasn't his appearance—it was what he was doing with his hands.
He was flipping a quarter. Over and over, catch and flip, catch and flip. The motion was hypnotic in the harsh fluorescent light of the booth.
"Evening," he said as I rolled down my window. His voice had the quality of someone who'd been talking to himself for a very long time. "Just the quarter tonight."
I handed him my change, but he shook his head. "Got to be this one," he said, holding up the quarter he'd been flipping. "Been saving it for the right person."
The Recognition
That's when I saw the date: 1965. The same year as the quarter my father had been obsessed with, the one he'd flip when he was nervous or thinking. The one that disappeared with him the night he died on this exact stretch of highway.
"Where did you get that?" I asked.
The operator smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Fella gave it to me years back. Said he'd be sending someone to pick it up eventually." He paused his flipping. "You look just like him, you know. Same eyes."
My hands started shaking on the steering wheel. "What was his name?"
"David Henley. Drove a blue Buick, license plate..." He rattled off my father's exact plate number from 1978. "Nice fellow. Bit distracted, though. Kept looking in his rearview mirror like something was chasing him."
The Impossible Conversation
I should have driven away. Every rational part of my brain was screaming at me to put the car in gear and get back on the highway. Instead, I found myself asking, "What did he say to you?"
The operator's expression grew distant. "Said he'd been driving this road for hours, but his gas gauge never moved. Said the mile markers kept repeating. Asked me if I knew how to get home."
Those were almost the exact words my mother said dad had used in his last phone call to her. The call that came from this stretch of highway just before his accident.
"I told him the same thing I tell everyone," the operator continued. "Road only goes one direction from here. But he seemed to understand something I didn't. Said he needed to pay his toll first, make sure someone else wouldn't have to."
The Logbook
The operator reached into his booth and pulled out a weathered composition notebook. "He signed the logbook. Most folks don't bother anymore."
He opened it to a page near the middle and turned it toward my headlights. There, in my father's unmistakable handwriting, was an entry dated the night he died:
David Henley - Blue Buick - Paid in full for family.
Underneath, in different ink, someone had written: Son collected 11/15/2021.
That was tonight's date.
The Truth in the Rearview
The operator placed the quarter in my palm, and it was warm like it had been sitting in sunlight. "He wanted you to have this back," he said. "Said you'd understand what it means."
I looked down at the coin, then back at the booth. The operator was gone. The entire structure was gone. I was sitting in the middle of the highway with my hazards on, holding a quarter that had been missing for forty-three years.
In my rearview mirror, I could see headlights approaching. A blue Buick with a license plate I recognized. It pulled alongside me, and I could see my father behind the wheel, looking exactly as he had the night he died. He was younger than I am now.
He nodded once, then drove past me heading west, back toward the mountains. I watched his taillights disappear into the darkness, and I knew he wouldn't be making that drive again.
What I Can't Explain
I still have the quarter. It sits on my desk at work, and sometimes I catch myself flipping it when I'm nervous. The motion feels familiar, inherited.
I've driven I-70 a dozen times since that night, always during the day. I've never seen the toll booth again, and according to the Colorado Department of Transportation, there has never been a toll collection point on that stretch of highway.
But sometimes, late at night when I'm flipping that quarter, I think about what my father wrote in that logbook. Paid in full for family. I wonder what kind of debt requires a man to drive the same stretch of highway for four decades, and I wonder if someday my own son will find himself on I-70 at midnight, looking for something he doesn't understand.
The quarter lands heads every time now. I've stopped trying to make it come up tails.
