Sky Show

This is an older one too, but one of my favorite road stories. From 2010.

As I drove south out of Chicago toward home this weekend, I was treated to the perfect end to this nearly perfect weekend. Almost as soon as I was on the interstate, the sky began to do some amazing tricks, seemingly just for my enjoyment. The relative flatness of northern Illinois is the perfect place to watch things happen in the sky, and this trip home was one spectacular picture postcard after another. For the next four hours, I saw clouds of every variety. The sun provided the perfect lighting for some astoundingly beautiful natural works of art.

We had had nothing but high thin clouds and rain for most of the day. But as I entered the highway, storm clouds appeared directly in front of me. Then a part of the sky cleared to the right and the sun lit up the solid deep blue-purple of the storm and the fresh leafy greenness of the fields and woods below it. I love the way colors of the landscape are so beautifully saturated before a storm. As I drove south, lightning put on a display right through my front windshield.

Clouds lowered around me as I drove into the storm, then random huge drops of rain, then a downpour for a minute or so. As the rain cleared, I saw almost every type of cloud imaginable from low scudding puffs to towering thunderheads. White clouds that grew from little cotton balls to huge fluffy monsters. Sheer bands of dark clouds that colored the clouds behind them unnatural hues. Streaks and curlicues and feathers. Sunbeams poked through on my right, and a double rainbow arched over the left.

As the sun moved from late afternoon brightness to evening glow, clouds were lit from every angle. Every single moment was more spectacular than the last. I saw every color in the sky tonight, and a thousand shades of each. Deep golds, bright yellows, firey oranges and reds, deep purples, lavenders, rosy pinks, turquoise sky between the clouds and robin's egg blue at the horizon. Yes, even greens. Not angry stormy greens, but pretty light greens where the sunlight turned the sheerest of clouds a warm gold and the blue of the sky was turned, for an instant, to green.

The giant red ball of the sun fell below the horizon just as I reached the eastern outskirts of St. Louis. By the time I drove across the downtown bridge, the evening star was shining brightly and the tiniest sliver of new moon was rising in the twilight, again directly in front of me.

Just for a moment, I thought of wanting photos. I didn't have my camera. But even if I had, I don't think I would have taken any. It made me happy just to watch nature unfold in front of me and to remember that there is still so very much beauty in the world. And I like to think that this was one show that was just for me.

Kansas City Saturday Night

This is an old story, but a good one.  The best part of it is that it's all true...

My sister and I were stranded at a gas station at 6:00 p.m. in Kansas City on a Saturday night. It was a cold evening in February, already starting to get dark and we had wanted to be on the road home by that time.  The left rear tire was completely flat and wouldn’t air up. Of course the spare was only a donut and not a full sized spare, and on top of that the car was a hatchback. Now this may not seem important in the grand scheme of things, but at this particular time it just happened to be full of stuff.  Lots of stuff.  Heavy stuff.  All carefully packed so I could see over and around everything while flying 85 miles an hour down the interstate, coming and going from the most recent tribal event where I would hopefully have made rent, and maybe a little more, for the next month. And of course we had to unload everything to get the donut out. So there we were, at the gas station, by the side of the road, all our stuff spread out around the car, hatch up, doors open, and then the donut, and the jack, and the tire tools.

Now my sister and I can and have changed tires before, growing up around our dad, working on cars, fixing and making things.  But the lugs on this one were just too tight, owing, no doubt, to the fact that I had just had all four tires rotated at the dealership the week before by those nice auto service men with those wonderful air wrenches that make sure your lug nuts don't go careening off other vehicles during 4 hour Saturday drives. No amount of pushing, pulling, turning, tugging, torquing or jumping up and down on the tire iron would budge them. I was on the phone trying to find emergency roadside service when a handsome young man pulled in for gas and offered to change the flat for us. I tactfully refrained from asking what took him so long, batted my eyelashes and said we would be ever so grateful for his assistance. At which point he changed the tire in less than 5 minutes. Skilled, he was.

After a thorough inspection by my sister, the tire was declared to have picked up a nail. A finishing nail, no less. You would think if there were a nail that would strand me 4 hours from home, it would at least have had the consideration to be a roofing nail. In any event, the handsome young man said he had once been a truck driver and if we would take the flat to the TA Center at the Oak Grove exit off of I-70, they would probably be able to fix it. I wanted to pay him something for getting us mobile again and being kind enough to give us some additional advice on where to get a tire repaired at 6:30 on a Saturday night, but he refused, saying only that he was happy to help and we should just pass it on.

It was a relief to at least have transportation of some kind, even if I could only go 45 mph riding on the donut. But driving all the way home at that rate would have turned our trip into a 6 or 7 hour ordeal. We were betting our comfort on the TA Center having time and being willing to help us. No guarantees on a Saturday night at a truck stop in a town I’m unfamiliar with, at a place that doesn’t usually do work for auto drivers, in rapidly dropping temperatures. But my sister and I have never been the kind to let circumstances interrupt our plans.

So we limped on down the highway about 30 miles to the TA Center. The woman in the store was real friendly and said we should talk to the guys in the “shop,” then gave us directions to get there. Good thing they are open 24 hours because it seemed like the “shop” was 4 miles away by sidewalk. I’m guessing that was because by this time it was barely 10 degrees outside with a nice little wind kicking up. When we got to the shop there were 3 truckers standing by the counter talking about truck parts and radios and all manner of trucker whatnot while the man behind the counter was on the phone to Tulsa trying to locate a spare transmission for an 18-wheeler. We waited patiently until he hung up the phone and could get to us. He was about 4 feet tall and just as wide, but was a cheery sort and told us to pull the car around to the side of the building and set the flat outside next to the car. He said he’d have one of the guys take a look at it as soon as they got time. But, he said, it might take a while because they had a couple of rigs in just then and there was no guarantee that they could fix it anyhow. I was pretty certain that it was just the nail and that it could be easily fixed but I was thinking to myself that if he said it would take 5 or 6 hours I was going to try to make it home on the donut anyway. When I inquired as to what he meant by "a while" he said he thought it might be about 30 minutes or so which was fantastic since I had been thinking the worst and running through a mental checklist of exits ahead that had hotels nearby just in case.

So we walked another four miles by sidewalk back to the car, pulled around to the side of the shop, took the flat out, inspected it again for good measure, decided we were right about the nail, leaned it carefully against the back bumper and walked the four miles by sidewalk back into the truck stop to have a bite to eat with the trucker guys at the lunch counter. We got a coffee and an iced tea and my sister got scrambled eggs, bacon and toast and we talked to all the trucker guys at the counter and everybody smoked 3 or 4 cigarettes and Hanks the waitress gave us a slip of paper with a number to call and tell the home office what a good job she’d done and how friendly she was so we could all win a trip to Aruba.  After our appointed half hour wait and an extra 10 minutes to fill out the forms for the trip to Aruba, it was time to check on the tire.

As we walked back into the shop, a young man was rolling my tire up to the door. He said it was all ready to go and that it was no problem to fix. So I asked him what the chances were that we could get him to put it back on the car for us, at which point he said he would be happy to. He told us to drive around the back door of the garage. So we walked another 4 miles by sidewalk and pulled the car around to the garage.  He opened up the bay door (yeah, the one for the 18-wheelers) and I drove my little bitty car inside, between two huge rigs. The young man put the tire back on for us and we stashed the donut in the trunk and piled all the stuff, which was once packed so nice and neat and now looked like a tornado had tossed it around for a while and deposited it all upside down, back on top.

Then I asked the question that had been haunting me the entire time we had been there waiting. “How much do I owe you?”

Now ordinarily if an auto service thinks they have you at their mercy, they will charge you four times the amount for the least little thing, especially after-hours on a weekend in 10 degree weather. I was cringing inside just waiting for his answer.

Then…

He just kinda looked at me like he didn’t know what to say. It was almost like they’d never done this before, rescued two women in a little sports car from certain death by driving 45 miles an hour for 6 hours on a donut down an interstate highway in the middle of a winter night. But he eventually said to me

“Is $5 too much?”

I could have kissed him then and there. Which wouldn’t have been all bad since he was pretty good looking in spite of the fact that he was covered in oil and grease from working on trucks, and also in dirt and salt from leaning up against my car. But instead I handed him a ten dollar bill and told him he was a lifesaver. He just smiled and opened up the bay door again. My sister and I backed out of the garage and drove around to the front of the TA Center, went inside and said thank you to the nice lady in the store, bought a couple of sodas and a pack of gum and got back on the road. We made it home by midnight, which was only 2 hours later than planned. Plus we now had a great story to tell.

These days I have a bigger vehicle, a full sized spare, and two roadside service memberships.  But I'll never forgot the night we were almost stranded in the middle of winter by the side of the road in Kansas City.  We were fortunate to run into many nice people who were willing to help two strangers stay in good spirits and get back home on a cold weekend night when we weren't sure what was going to happen and many nice men who offered their muscles, auto tools, and good will toward getting us back on the road.  So if anyone EVER tells you that there are no nice men left in the world, you just tell them to get themselves to Kansas City ASAP. And it doesn’t hurt to have a flat tire!