Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 31, 1991                   TAG: 9103310021
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: BOONES MILL                                 LENGTH: Medium

TRAVELER GETS RUDE AWAKENING

But she sure snapped to attention when she heard someone pounding on her door in the middle of the night.

That is not a welcome sound when you're a woman with kids and you live hard by U.S. 220 - a busy highway - just a dozen miles outside of Roanoke.

It is, says Mrs. Ruth, close enough to town to be accessible to the crazies; far enough out that they could do lots of damage before anybody ever found out about it.

And now at 2:30 a.m. there's a man rapping on the door.

He wants Mrs. Ruth to call the police. A gasoline tanker truck has plowed into the pottery shed at the Boones Mill Exxon station, he is saying. A man is hurt.

Mrs. Ruth's telephone is on the blink that night. She looks out the window and she can see no truck across the road at the Exxon station. She would hear a truck, wouldn't she?

Mrs. Ruth is a palm reader. A psychic. She's filling in for her sister, Mrs. Marie, who's vacationing.

Mrs. Ruth has lived in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. She figures Boones Mill will soothe her jagged urban nerves for a while.

The barefoot man runs to the next house. Mrs. Ruth, peering out the window, sees two men carrying a third away from the Exxon station.

Within a few hours, by dawn Thursday, Mrs. Ruth is being told to evacuate her house. The 8,700 gallons of gasoline in that tanker could turn Boones Mill and its suburbs into an ashy pit and a sweet memory if it blows up. Mrs. Ruth is at ground zero, so she gathers up the kids and makes tracks. Now she believes.

Every lunch-stool investigator in Boones Mill has opined a cause for the wreck.

The Exxon station is a local institution, and a lodestar for travelers on U.S. 220.

Concrete lawn ornaments (including the late donkey), stick furniture, terra cotta pots, fireworks, Georgia pecans, sourwood honey, molasses and rebel flags are sold at the filling station, the undisputed kitsch capital of Dixie.

Spared was the giant, wooden, bearded hillbilly with the pinwheel arms that move like the hands of a clock when the wind pushes them. A divine hand spared that landmark.

By Friday, much of the ex-merchandise was being scooped into the bed of a dump truck. The station was closed. The truck had not blown up. Mrs. Ruth has lived to tell about it.

At the Easy Street Cafe, talk shifted from the tanker accident to the tornado warning and the rising waters of the churning Maggodee Creek, which rushes just beneath the cash register.

And Mrs. Ruth, who has come from the big city to escape stress and read palms for her sister, is reeling from a gasoline tanker crash, a flood and a tornado threat packed into 36 hours in sleepy Boones Mill.

But her psychic powers are intact. Everybody else in town may have a theory about the crash. Only Mrs. Ruth knows the truth about why that truck driver, now recuperating from his injuries, drove into the Exxon station.

Watch, says Mrs. Ruth. You'll see I'm right.