Truck Stop Samaritans

Another Journ 105 assignment.

            We did it every year with no problem.  The ride took longer some years than others, but we always made it none the worse for wear, aside from minor leg cramps and the irritability that invariably accompanies a four-hour car ride with a family of four and a small, flustered dog (which was absent this particular year, something we would be very grateful for later).  It was Christmas Eve of 2000 and we had left South Bend around eight in the morning in our eleven-year-old Ford Aerostar for my dad’s parents’ house in Fraser, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, where they had lived and we had traveled to since before I could remember.  Our plan was to make it in time for a late-ish lunch, but this year, we wouldn’t arrive at our destination until around ten that night.

            The roads had been slick for the past few days, but we thought they looked drivable enough.  Our thoughts quickly changed as we hit a patch of black ice and began a short, rapid, and not-so-graceful dance across the slippery roadway.  Our van swerved violently as my dad struggled to regain control of our renegade vehicle until we flew off the road and rolled about four times down a forty-foot hill before finally coming to a stop on our side in the snow. 

The car wasn’t the only thing that had flown.  Of everyone in the car, I was the only one who managed to extricate herself from her seatbelt and was tossed across the van, landing on the miraculously unbroken window of what could now be considered the floor of the van.  My brother, three-years-old at the time, was, understandably, screaming like a banshee from his position in his car seat, which was still firmly attached to the seat of the car, causing him to dangle sideways above me.  I don’t know exactly how he landed, but when I looked up at my dad, he was standing on the side of the passenger seat, opening the driver’s side door like the hatch on a submarine, pushing my mom onto the side/top of the van.  The people in the car that had been driving behind us had pulled over and a man had run down the embankment and began helping us out of the car.  He ushered us to his Wrangler, which was sitting safely on the side of the road right behind an obviously peeved state trooper.  Apparently, he had almost joined us at the bottom of the hill in his squad car and was more than annoyed that the salt trucks were not out doing their job.

The state trooper packed the four of us into his car and drove us to a nearby Mobile truck stop, where we would spend much of the day waiting for my grandparents to drive down from Detroit to pick us up.  The wait staff at the restaurant told us they had seen the accident from the wall of windows in the dining room.   We were given the star treatment, with lunch on the house and multiple waitresses, who doted on my little brother like he was the lost Linbergh baby.  They listened attentively as he recounted the story of the accident again and again in toddler-speak and brought him at least two slices of the chocolate cake he had been asking for since he noticed it on the menu long before he was forced into eating an actual entrée. 

The Broadway show Irving Berlin’s White Christmas features a song called “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep,” taking about when worries abound and sleep becomes elusive, people should count their blessings to ease their minds.   It was certainly a Christmas that, despite the slight detour, had its blessings.  We made it to my grandparents’ house before Santa did with only minor bumps and bruises.  We were helped by a family who had taken the time to see if another family they had never met was OK instead of simply driving on to wherever they were going.  We were treated like family by a group of waitresses who had also never met us and who went out of their way to make life easier for us while we were in their restaurant.  And, despite what many would remember, these memories – the pink- and white-clad waitresses laughing at the part of the story where my brother mentioned how the car died and came back to life when the tow truck pulled it out of the ditch; the feeling of warmth that crept back into you after the first half an hour in a warm restaurant – the good ones, were the ones we were left with.

It was a Christmas we’ve never forgotten, partly because my brother still won’t stop bringing it up after all these years, but also because it’s a great picture of how the human race hasn’t completely lost its humanity.  There are still strangers out there who aren’t in some Red Cross-like organization – just random people living their lives just like everyone else – who care for others and are willing to go out of their way to help people in trouble simply because they are in trouble. 

And for someone as cynical as I can be sometimes, that’s good to know.