RICHBURG --
The beer truck driver escaped unscathed.
The beer wasn't so lucky. The beer died. In a trickle, into red-clay dirt.
American Ale and Bud Light, thousands of dark brown bottles. Destroyed late Thursday when a 53-foot tractor-trailer fell on its side on Interstate 77 southbound in rural Chester County, in the construction zone where bridge repairs are being done.
Somewhere, "Bandit" Burt Reynolds cried under his mustache and cranked up that unforgettable black T-top Trans Am Firebird, and the late great Jerry Reed and his hound dog Fred howled in heaven.
When those guys raced across the country with Coors in "Smokey and the Bandit" movies, not a drop of the nectar of the gods was lost.
Yet this was a lonely death of 47,000 pounds of bottled beer, in the dark just before midnight Thursday at what used to be Exit 62. The truck in which the beer was riding - on its way to slake a thousand thirsts - turned over.
It took state crews with graders - and six volunteer firefighters who didn't find a single intact bottle left to cart home - hours to clean up the mess.
"We were washing off the highway and there wasn't a single bottle left unbroken," said a downcast John Agee, longtime chief of the Richburg Volunteer Fire Department.
"We washed plenty of beer, but there's not a fireman who was able to get a beer afterward. Smelled of beer, though."
Agee said it is the first beer cleanup in recent memory, but in the mid-1990s a truck of fertilizer broke down on I-77 near mile marker 60 just south of where the beer trickled away into dust, then another truck carrying a full load of women's panties smashed into the first truck.
"There was women's underwear all over the interstate," Agee recalled. "There wasn't a woman in Richburg that needed panties for many a year after that."
The southbound highway was temporarily closed for cleanup overnight,
and back open by the time the sun rose Friday. No panties, but plenty of beer carnage.
The dawn broke over that horrible burial mound of dead beer. I had to see for myself. Beer not drunk is like prayers not said. Plus, the firemen left after three hours of work and it was barely starting to turn daylight when they left. There might be a wounded beer looking for an ambulance.
At that Old Richburg Road exit - right in the construction area where the bridge in both directions is being replaced and traffic is diverted onto the exit ramps - the ruined cardboard cases holding the beloved beer were piled off the road into a burial mound waiting to be carted off forever.
The shards of glass, the torn labels, the longnecks snapped after whiplash. A few bottles and pieces lay under the guardrail like soldiers dead in a battle. In the pile there looked to be a few intact bottles that survived, but they were in a heap - too covered with muck and glass fragments to even think about trying a search and rescue.
I put my hand over my heart. I wailed a guttural moan. A guy in slow traffic yelled: "Get outta the road!" and saluted me with one finger not known for its grace.
I yelled back, "A beer truck wrecked! The beer spilled!"
The guy pulled his finger back in the window and yelled back: "Oh no!"
The smell of beer in the heat - the stench of death. Similar to a tailgating session about 12 hours into it, an hour before kickoff of the annual Carolina-Clemson football game. A soaring, stinking, sour smell.
And this time the smell wasn't the Carolina passing game, or the hot stinking air of blowhard Lou Holtz.
This spilled beer would not be the social lubricant of the working man, the payoff on a hot Friday afternoon after a week of management that counts beans instead of brains, of brutal 95 degree heat, of barking mothers-in-law who never go home.
This beer, cases and cases on a 53-foot truck, was spilled into the ground forever. So much beer lost. Terrible.
If it were wine, some manager named Smythe in an office covered with UNC Tar Heels pennants would turn off his James Taylor CD, call up a public TV or radio station and ask for a candlelight vigil or telethon, then demand more tax money.
