12/12/2025
Most folks figure towing is simple. Hook-N-Haulin, done. They never see the part that happens before anyone else shows up.
It’s not the cables or the gear that stay with you. It’s the moments you carry long after the scene is cleared.
Like the night you eased up to a flipped SUV, its frame crushed into the pavement. You already knew, before you even stepped out, that it was too quiet. Turning that vehicle upright was work your hands understood, but the silence inside it… that’s something you never get used to.
There’s a person still in there. Someone who didn’t make it home. You treat that moment with care because it matters, even if no one else sees you do it.
And then there are the calls where someone is alive, barely, calling for help through broken glass. Snow blowing sideways. No sirens yet. No cameras. Just you, doing what you can until EMS arrives.
You talk to them. You hold their head so their airway stays open. You check a pulse with hands that learned long ago how to work through fear.
People think you get used to seeing death.
You don’t. What happens is it settles into you, becomes a familiar weight. You learn to keep moving, but you don’t forget the faces or the way the air felt in those moments. Some accidents stay with you for good.
Drivers pass by thinking you’re just clearing a wreck. They don’t see you sit in the truck afterward, staring at your gloves because you’re not ready to take them off yet.
There’s no credit for this part.
No pat on the back. You finish the call, clean up your tools, and head out again because someone else is waiting.
And sometimes, the call that breaks you is the one where it isn’t a stranger.
It’s someone from your own industry.
Someone who wore the same boots, ran the same roads, answered the same late night dispatch. Those losses hit the hardest. They remind you how thin the line really is out here.
That’s why every added precaution matters. Every layer of protection counts.
In Kentucky, we need every measure we can get to keep the people working on these highways alive while they help others in their worst moments.
Troy’s Law is one more layer.
One more chance to protect the men and women who stand between danger and the rest of the world.
This is tow work.
Quiet. Unseen.
And it deserves every safeguard we can give it.
