Roadside Assistance

There’s a place on the drive out to my parents’ house where the road takes a sudden vertical turn. Town ends here. The houses are built in clusters right up to the base of the hill, then end suddenly and the chaparral takes over. There’s a three-way intersection with a stop sign, offering one last chance to go another way. There’s a fire hydrant, too; this is the last one, the end of the city water system. There’s a sign announcing the end of the 45mph speed limit, and another warning of lessened shooting laws. Climb the hill and there’s a view worth note. On a clear day, you can see downtown and the bay from thirty miles away and two thousand feet up. Some mornings, the whole world is buried in a blanket of fog, and the higher peaks of the county poke above the blanket like islands in the sea. At night, it’s a living system of electric lights.

I always liked to drink in the last sight of those lights in my rearview mirror when I came home late at night. It cheered me, a bit, to think about the people that those lights represented. Then the road would turn and descend into the next valley, and the lights would disappear from sight.

One night, as I dipped into that next valley, I encountered a thick fog at the low points of the drive. This was not uncommon. The road rose over hills and fell into valleys, and there would be fog at low points and not at the high. This carried on for a few miles, and, very near to home, I suddenly encountered a small SUV stopped in the lane. Clearly this was dangerous, especially with the fog, and I was able to slow in time to stop behind it. Its lights were on, and when I turned my radio down I could hear its horn blaring incessantly. I decided to try to pass it on the left, slowly to check it out. The front of the vehicle had collapsed inward, smashed in with some force, and the whole vehicle crumpled into half its normal length. There appeared to be no other vehicles around, and I had to stop to help. I pulled my truck passed the wreck and parked in the shoulder, then grabbed my flashlight and ran back.

A man appeared from a house on the hill above the road, and he came running down, yelling that his girlfriend was calling 911. We connected and ran to the wreck together. The horn still blared, as if laid upon. We reached the driver’s window and saw a woman, probably in her seventies, looking frantically about but unable to move. The man I was with—a few years older than me, with a short mohawk and no shirt—asked if she was okay.

“What did I hit?” she asked, dazed and frightened.

“Are you hurt?” he demanded to know. She didn’t respond coherently, and panicked even more. He tried to open the door, but it was locked. “Ma’am, I need you to unlock your door.”

“It’s not locked,” she insisted, though he and I could both clearly see that it was. “What happened?”

 The man got frustrated. “That goddamn horn is scaring her. Ma’am, are you pressing the horn?” She didn’t understand the question, even after he repeated it. “We need to kill the horn.”

He stepped around to the front, and I followed him. I admit I was a little unnerved myself, and I was glad to have him there because he was level-headed. He pried away some broken pieces of the hood while I held my flashlight for him, and behind the passenger side headlight he found and cut a pair of wires. The horn died instantly.

We walked back around to the door. “Ma’am, are you hurt?”

“I can’t move my legs.” Her legs were clearly pinned by the crumpled steel, but we couldn’t tell much about their condition from outside the car.

“I need you to unlock your door so we can get you out.”

She mumbled something, then, “What did I hit?”

“There was a truck,” the man said. “They were waving for you to stop but you didn’t.”

“I didn’t see anything,” she said defensively, a little more in control of her nerves now.

I hadn’t seen the truck either, so I asked, “Did they just bounce?”

The man looked over at me but didn’t answer, probably because it was a stupid question.

Headlights became visible to the east. “Make sure they stop!” the man barked at me. I took my flashlight and ran up the road waving it. The car slowed and stopped. I walked up to the driver’s side and explained the situation. The driver pulled off the road and got out to look around. Another car came, and I directed them carefully around the wreck; they didn’t stop.

Eventually, a firetruck showed up and the firemen took the man’s place at the woman’s window. I stayed my post on the road, waving off passing cars. Soon enough there were cops and an ambulance, but the firemen had not yet made any visible progress extracting her from the wreck, except that they’d placed a gurney beside the car. A highway patrolman relieved me from my traffic directing, and another cop wanted to hear what we had to say about the wreck. Pointing at my truck on the side of the road—with its multiple dents and broken body panels—the cop asked, “And that’s the other vehicle?”

I laughed. “No, that’s just my truck.”

“Then what’d she hit?”

My compadre explained what he’d seen. When he finished the story, he asked me if I had a cigarette. I did, and I smoked one with him. Another cop walked up to my truck with his flashlight to check it out. I called out that it was mine, and yes, I drove it here that way.

Eventually, the officer in charge instructed us to leave. He didn’t have to tell me twice, but I looked back at the woman to see if they’d made any progress. They hadn’t.

I wonder what happened to her.

Jimbo and the Fire

The side of town that I grew up on got hit pretty hard by wildfires in October, 2003. I was in high school at the time. I remember the thick smoke that covered the entire city for a few days and the ash that drifted down like snow. Many people could be seen in public wearing dust masks or bandanas over their mouths and noses. Others roughed it out and spent a few days coughing occasionally or avoided going out doors. The smoke didn’t bother me a terrible lot, being at the time a smoker of cigarettes (a little math reminds me that by this month I’d only been smoking for a short while).

I lived with my parents a little way into the hills, and brushfires in this time of year were common. This particular fire we could watch from our back deck if we looked a mile  to the north, and we could see plumes of smoke rising from another fire to the south. That was as close as those fires got to us.

My younger brother Nate had recently been hired by a friend of his named Jim. Jim was a plumber who lived in a small but densely-populated community a little ways into the mountains. In anticipation of fire season, he had instructed Nate to clear brush from around his home and between his house and his neighbors’ houses. Then, within a week, the wildfires came through and burned nearly every house on street, excepting Jim’s. He credited this to the great job that Nate did clearing the brush.

After the fires, Jim set out to help his neighbors clean up in every way he could. He got an idea, and drove his work truck from lot to lot to turn on the main water lines at the street so the people sifting through the remains of their homes could have water, both to clean and to drink. In order to do this, Jim would cut the line right after the main valve, splice in a reducer, a pressure regulator, an elbow, a couple feet of pipe and then a spigot for the people to connect a garden hose to. This proved to be a great service to the community.

The task was great, though, as many homes had burned (a quick google search tells me that 2,232 houses burned down in this fire). Jim set his two older sons to work up one street, he and his younger boy started up another, and he had recruited Nate, my dad, and I to aid in the effort. The work was humbling; we had a sort of reverence toward the people who’d just lost everything material in their lives, in many cases including the family pets. We would approach a home and make friendly contact with the people there to explain what we were going to do and how it would help them. I was young, and not good with words, so I let my dad do the talking. I remember at least one person tell us to leave.

We did this for a fair part of the morning, then skies darkened and there were reports of a coming storm. The authorities issued a flash flood warning. Though it wasn’t raining yet, people began to panic about mudslides. Most of these neighborhoods were carved into the sides of mountains, most of the vegetation that held the hills together had burned completely off, and most of the exposed earth was covered in two inches of loose soot and ash. If the rains came, anything salvageable in these homes would be buried and lost.

Jim came and pulled us off the plumbing project; now we were going to help the people by giving them sandbags. Someone (the local Home Depot, I think) donated a truckload of sand and dumped it at a park, along with empty sandbags, and Jim put us to work shoveling sand into the bags. This was simple work. One person would hold the bag open, the other would shovel sand into it, then it would be tied off and set into a pile by the road. Jim took his work truck and drove out to put them in place. A few other volunteers came by, perhaps eight of us in all, and we made happy work of it. Someone came along passing out sandwiches.

After shoveling for a couple hours, feeding hundreds of sand bags to Jim to deliver, we were interrupted by some kind of official, who looked at our pile of sandbags beside the road and declared it was enough. I like to remember this guy wearing a suit, though that part is probably false. He thanked us for our work, said that everything was under control, and that we could go home now.

We didn’t stop working, of course, because there was plenty of sand left and Jim would be expecting more sandbags when he came back. The official insisted, in a friendly manner, that our work was done, and still none of us stopped. Jim came back, eventually, and he and his boys hopped out of the work truck and began filling it full of sandbags, as they had done repeatedly for hours. The official walked over to them and said something like, “You guys are welcome to take some sandbags, but you should replace the ones you take.”

I think Jim pointed over at us and said, “Those guys are making more right now.” I don’t think that the official knew that we were friends of Jim, or that we were there because of him.

I remember the official explaining to Jim that we’d met our quota of five hundred sandbags and that we were done working. We knew that no one had counted how many sandbags we’d filled, that we were not stopping any time soon, and that no one had said anything about a quota. Apparently, the official wanted a stockpile of sandbags, ready to use when the rain started, instead of to preemptively place the sandbags in strategic places around the town as Jim was doing.

Jim replied that we needed tens of thousands more sandbags, and that we would work until we ran out of sand. The official didn’t like being disrespected, and began to get pushy. Jim pushed right back. Now, Jim was a large man—stocky and strong—a rough, working man, rather intimidating to strangers, and he was not afraid to get physical. The official was thin and pale, a little older, too. When Jim exhibited some force, he immediately locked himself in his car and called the police.

There was some discussion among the volunteers concerning how to proceed. I remember a stranger saying, “I think that one’s just a bureaucrat and the other guy actually knows what he’s doing.” We kept shoveling and Jim kept loading his truck.

Eventually, a cop showed up. By this time, the official had driven away and Jim was out placing the sandbags. The cop sat in his car and watched us. We would glance over at him occasionally. After a few minutes, he got out, walked over, picked up a shovel, and began filling sandbags with us. This pleased us a great deal, especially when he said nothing to Jim when the latter came back for another load.

But, a little while later, the official came back with a few cops, and they stopped Jim. They asked him a lot of questions, and in the end ordered him to discontinue the sandbag work. When he quit, so did we, though there were hours of daylight left and still a sizeable pile of sand.

We heard that McDonald’s was giving away food in the community center, so we headed up there. They had big boxes filled with cheeseburgers and were handing them out. Someone said that Outback Steakhouse had donated some, too, but it was gone by the time we got there.

Danielle

I accidentally took a train east instead of west today. When I realized my mistake, I hopped off at the next station. The particular station I found myself in is very small; it has no seating, no maps of the train line, and—save one girl who got off the same train I did—had no people. My plan was to wait for the next westbound train to come and ride back downtown. Trains should come every 15 minutes, I thought.

I had plans to meet someone downtown for dinner. I was sorry to keep him waiting, and texted him to say so. I looked around the station a little; most of the surrounding buildings were industrial structures of some kind. There was an abandoned apartment complex to one side and a neighborhood of less-than-inviting houses beside it. The wait began to feel long, and I stepped into the tracks to see farther down the line. No train.

I noticed the girl began to walk toward me. I noticed her because of the long, pleasant legs that carried her and the short denim shorts that showed them off. “Do you know the train schedule?” she called out, long before we were in conversational range.

I shook my head. “I think they come every fifteen minutes,” I replied.

“It’s been more than that already.” She was closer now. “Say, you got a lighter?” She pulled a bent cigarette from her pocket.

I laughed. “There’s a broken one on the track,” I said, pointing. She didn’t think it was funny, so I added, “No, sorry.” I debated telling her that I had recently quit, and that on a normal day I would still have a lighter—in spite of quitting—but none of it sounded true in my head, so I didn’t say it.

“Shit.” She studied my face a little. “You look like that guy…that gay blogger—what’s his name? Bon Iver? I think he’s gay.” I smiled. So did she. “No, I didn’t mean you look gay. You just look like him with the beard and glasses and all.”

“Really?” I asked, pretending to be interested. She grinned, revealing a row of yellow teeth. At least a couple of teeth were broken or rotten. I tried not to stare at them.

“I think…” I started talking before I had anything to say. “People tend to think I look like anyone with a beard.”

She laughed. “No, you really do. Watch, you’ll look him up and be like, ‘oh, Danielle was right.’ I’m Danielle, by the way.” She extended her hand.

I smiled and took it. It was pleasant to the touch. “Luke.”

“Nice to meet you, Luke.”

There was a pause, and a Mexican construction worker walked into the station.

“I’m gonna see if he has a lighter,” she said, and started walking away. I watched her a moment. She had an attractive body. She got her cigarette lit and came back, but we didn’t seem to have anything to say to each other. I drank in her secondhand smoke happily, as ex-smokers do.

Finally a train came. Apparently, they only come to this station every thirty minutes instead of fifteen. It was nearly empty, and when I sat, Danielle came and sat across from me, without saying anything. She sat cross legged and played with her shoelaces.

At some point, a homeless-looking black man-- the only other person in the train car—began calling out in our general direction. Danielle looked at me. “He ain't talking to me. Is he talking to you?”

I liked the way she’d worded that. “Nope, he’s not talking to me either.”

“You’re not from around here, are you?” she asked.

“Actually, I am,” I answered. “Well, east county, anyway.”

She got excited. “I grew up in Lemon Grove!”

I smiled. “Spring Valley,” though it was only partly true.

“Oh!” She paused a moment, and looked downward nervously. “Do you live with your wife there?” Then, before I could answer, “Are you married?”

Now, I’d like to pause the story to give a little background. I have several brothers. My brothers and I like each other well enough, I suppose, but we seem to have trouble communicating. What we have found that works best is communicating through obscure movie quotes, because we basically watched the same fifteen movies over and over again for the twenty years that we grew up together. It’s become a hilarious game to us, now that we’re adults, to try to speak to each other only in this manner. The reason that this fact is relevant at this point is because our movie-quoting-turned-real-life-conversation will often spill into our conversations with other people. Collateral damage, if you will.

So, when Danielle asked me, “Are you married?” I answered without hesitation, and without a single consideration for the implications of my response, “Occasionally.”

Some of you may recognize this. It’s a quote from Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park. I have not, in fact, ever been married, but I have been waiting for years for someone to ask me that question so that I may answer in this manner. In this case, however, I instantly regretted the word. When she looked confused, I mumbled, “Uh, not at the moment.”

She hesitated a second, but pressed on. “Can I get your phone number?”

I was still recovering from the embarrassment of the last exchange, but a series of ideas passed through my mind. How cool of a story would this be if we ended up together—that we met in a train station because we both took the wrong train? She certainly seemed to be a fun person, and she was pretty, too. I imagined kissing her, but could not get over her crooked, yellow teeth. I didn’t think that I could kiss that mouth.

Apparently my hesitation was too long for her. “If not, it’s cool. You don’t have to give it to me.”

I sunk a little, and shook my head. “Sorry. No.”

She nodded. “It’s cool. Thanks for being honest.” She stood up, and began to walk down to the other end of the train. I felt like I’d just clubbed a baby seal, and didn’t want her to go.

“Danielle,” I said, before she got too far. I read once that women appreciate it if you use their name when speaking to them. “Thanks for being forward.”

“Wait!” She exclaimed, “Wait, are you gay?” She suddenly became happily excited.

I should have said yes. I didn’t.

She was disappointed again. “Me and my goddamn vanity,” she muttered.

She sat at the other end of the train and got off at the next station.

Just one more thing for me to feel shitty about.

Oh, and I looked Bon Iver up. As far as I can tell, it's a band, not a blogger. I saw no indications of his sexuality, and he doesn't look like me, but he does have a beard.