Lucky Sign (And the Inexplicable Kindness of Total Strangers it Brings)

This is officially my family's lucky sign.

 

Last week, we had a crazy experience while traveling on I-5. We left Bellingham in the late morning to make the 200-mile trip south to Aberdeen where much of our family lives. We were going there for my nephew's birthday and my son, one year younger than my nephew, was excited to see his cousin again.

 

The traffic was unusually good and we made it through Seattle without hitting any traffic jams (unbelievably... Seattle's traffic sucks balls.) About 20 miles to the south of Seattle however, the traffic started to get heavier and eventually we found ourselves creeping along, bumper-to-bumper. It turns out that there had been a 7-vehicle accident to the south and all southbound lanes were closed.

 

As if that weren't bad enough, my wife noticed at one point that the "check gauges" light was flashing. The needle on the temperature gauge, normally near the middle at 195 degrees, was pushed over to the high end in the red. As if on cue, wisps of steam started coming out of the right side of the car's hood when we noticed the gauges. We were in the far left lane at the time and had to signal and shout to cars in other lanes who dutifully backed up and allowed us to cut diagonally across the 5 lanes. By the time we managed to pull off to the right shoulder, huge puffs of steam were blasting out of the car's hood. (It was an awful experience, but I felt even worse as the entire series of events scared my daughter to the point of tears. She thought the car was going to explode.)

 

Of course, it turns out it was just the car overheating. When you don't move for that long, the cooling system doesn't work efficiently and the water in your cooling system overheats and you get a startling eruption of steam, harmless for the most part. I pulled over and opened the hood to let the car cool down. Eventually, I opened the coolant reservoir and saw that all the water had evaporated. Our car has a very small reservoir and nothing was left. Not good.

 

So, there we were, stuck. My daughter was panicking, the car was giving up the ghost in the form of billowing clouds of steam, my wife on edge and very upset, the traffic was clogged and at an utter standstill, and it was clear we weren't going to make it to Aberdeen in time for my nephew's birthday, if at all.

 

And there we sat for the next four hours, traffic barely moving the whole time. We weren't alone. Other cars overheated too. Several behind us pulled over with steam billowing out of their hoods. Several ahead of us did as well.

 

What was really amazing was that the traffic jam brought out such kindness in total strangers. One woman got out of her van and walked across two lanes of still traffic and offered to call her husband at home to get a tow truck phone number for us if we needed it. Another woman came over and gave us a Disney storybook (she had noticed my son in the back seat and had been taking some books to donate them and thought he might want something to look at while we waited.)

 

I ended up striking up a conversation with a guy 20 feet behind us whose car had overheated. He was from Port Angeles and very friendly. He knew a lot about cars (unlike me) and explained to me why the overheating happened, why it was harmless, how I could drive for a while without coolant once the car cooled down, etc. It was good to have someone around to calm my nerves about everything, and he even offered to look under the hood of my car just to assure me that there was nothing else going on there that I needed to worry about.

 

Most remarkably, near the end of our four-hour ordeal, as traffic was just starting to creep forward again and as my wife and I were gearing up for the nerve-wracking prospect of driving our water-less car to the nearest gas station, some couple whose names I will likely never know shouted over to me and asked if we needed water.

 

I nodded. "Yes, I do." She waved me over to their truck while her husband, at the wheel, reached back and handed me a gallon sized jug of store-bought drinking water they had in their back seat. Not cheap, and not the stuff you'd normally waste in a car, but here it was. They were willingly turning it over to me to pour into my car.

 

"Thank you so much. You two are life-savers," I said. I didn't have much time to talk however and had to duck out of the traffic as it was gradually picking up again. Within a few minutes, they were gone, far enough down the road and lost in the stream of cars packed together, creeping forward. I had barely had enough time to thank them. I was speechless. Total strangers who owed me nothing, had nothing invested in my well-being, had just given me a gallon of their drinking water--water they had paid good money for.

 

Before we rejoined the traffic, I desperately looked for some way to put some positive spin on things. I asked my wife to get out her cellphone and take a picture of the exit sign we had sat next to for the last four hours. I dubbed it our lucky sign, and it would be a family tradition that future trips would include acknowledging this sign, on passing, for good luck. (We later made ourselves laugh by declaring that the run-down, squalid Shell station just off the exit had been our real destination all along thus our journey to visit it had been a complete success.)

 

Laughter or not, the experience was, overall, pretty awful, but this outpouring of kindness from people who neither knew me and my family nor expected anything in return was astonishing. Deanne and I talked about it on the way back (we ended up giving up on the trip and going back home as everyone was tired and stressed out.) We often see cars at the side of the road and never once had it occurred to us to stop and help the people in them. We just speed by with a shrug and think how glad we are that's not us stranded there.

 

That's an attitude I think I'll have to work on changing.

Done