COLUMBIA, N.J. — Somewhere in this random, run-of-the-mill truck stop full of things truckers need, like CB radios and corned beef hash, and stuff no one needs, like dragon sculptures or New Jersey-themed shot glasses, a local tanker driver found something he wasn’t looking for: God.
Mike Eurich was so sure that a higher power touched him at the TA Travel Center, just east of the Delaware River in rural, mountainous Warren County, that he asked to be baptized there, with a bowl, behind the kitchen.
“When it happened, I felt it instantly, and I knew,” Eurich, 63, said at the counter of the truck stop’s Country Pride restaurant.
Rev. Sherry Blackman, the official chaplain of the TA Travel Center, officiated a wedding at the truck stop — the restaurant gave the couple surf and turf on the house — and presided over a funeral too. She wasn’t about to fill a salad or mixing bowl with divine waters for Eurich’s baptism, though, so she grabbed something official from the Presbyterian Church of the Mountain, across the river in Delaware Water Gap, Pa. It’s a church known for feeding and housing hikers on the nearby Appalachian Trail but Blackman, who’s been pastor there since 2014, has also turned this Jersey truck stop into a holy ground of sorts with her weekly Bible study classes.