One summer in the late 1990s I was driving across the country on I-80, having just stopped to visit some friends in Des Moines, Iowa. I was behind the wheel of a 1963 Chevrolet Impala I’d bought outside Asheville, North Carolina. The car ran well and was beautiful—champagne body with a cream top, no dents, no rust, and no one had done anything stupid to it. I remember vividly that the interior had these plastic disks, like thin translucent washers, that fit between the window roller and door panel, to keep the upholstery from being indented or pinched; that’s how pristine, how undefiled, that car was. I was planning to sell it in Los Angeles, where a ’63 Impala in such cherry condition would fetch several times what I paid for it.
It had been later than I’d hoped, maybe four p.m., when I’d said goodbye to my friends in Des Moines and got on I-80. Everything felt fine despite the heavy sky, which seemed to go almost black on the horizon as I headed west. I remembered what an Iowan, a guy named Johnny Coin who lived a bit like he was in the movie Apocalypse Now, had said to me once about the weather in that state: “It’s like Vietnam.” I was crossing into Nebraska as I hit a wall of rain. I slowed to thirty miles an hour with a thick sheet of water pouring over the car. I’ve had old cars that leak around the windshield; this one did not. It had working heat and AC, a functioning radio, intact weather stripping, wipers—these things are luxury and civilization in an antique car. It’s chamber music: you feel on top of the world when you’re dry and moving along in a downpour. In a new car, in which everything is plastic and somewhat ugly and works today but will break eventually, there’s no thrill to function.
But then there was no function: the car cut out. Cleanly. No sputter, no de-acceleration, just click. It was off, and slowing. I moved right, but heavily, because the car’s power steering was out. By a stroke of luck, there was an exit just up ahead. I willed the car enough momentum to roll to the exit. It did. It rolled right into a truck stop.
I know only the most rudimentary things, mechanically speaking. I can lift the hood and check and add oil, aim carb cleaner in the general direction where it’s supposed to go, but really that’s it. I lifted the hood and stood there. The rain had let up, but it was getting dark. This was before cell phones, and, in my life, at least, it was before the invention of the credit card and AAA roadside service. Several truckers came over and stood around the open hood. Various theories were suggested, but no one seemed to really know what the trouble was. A petite and wiry man walked up, grim faced, carrying one of those Igloo coolers that is for six beers, with the top ripped off. It was filled with a jumble of greasy tools. The others nodded in his direction and someone said, “There’s your guy.”
They backed away, one by one, as the wiry little man began a methodical inspection of my car. I’ll confess I was disappointed by his junky-looking tools, but the others had acted like a messiah had arrived. The man did not acknowledge me. He simply went to work, as the rain began to fall again. Soon, we were both soaking wet.
He was disconnecting my exhaust manifold when a tow truck driver got involved. The starter was bad, and because the Impala had custom headers, they had to be removed to get to it. The tow truck driver, a big chubby man who told me to call him “Snacker,” said he had the keys to a parts warehouse sixty miles east and would go and get the replacement starter I needed and charge me only cost.
The wiry trucker and I went inside and drank sour coffee as we waited for Snacker to return. The trucker insisted on paying for my coffee. He never made eye contact. I said, “You’re so kind to help me, and you won’t even let me buy your coffee.” He said, almost impatiently, “I have a daughter.”
But the thing is, he wasn’t old enough to be my father. Now I’m married to the son of a trucker, from an entire family of truckers, although my father-in-law died, at the young age of forty-six, before I got to meet him. One of his brothers, whom I did know, spent his final hours of life shifting gears on a hospital gurney, unaware he wasn’t operating his eighteen-wheeler.
When Snacker returned it was late, maybe ten p.m. The trucker proceeded to install the new starter and reconnect the exhaust, a task that—with the car not on a lift but on the ground, in the rain, in the middle of the night—was not enviable. When the trucker was finished bolting the exhaust manifold, he had grease in his eyes. My car still would not start. After a lengthy diagnosis, me standing there, soaked to the skin, he said there was a bad part in the electronic ignition (not an original feature, and thus someone had done something stupid to that car), which had fried the original starter and needed to be replaced.
Snacker, now part of our one-night team, angelically agreed to go east once more, a 120-mile round trip, to get the module I needed. The trucker said, “I’ll get everything ready for when he returns. You go sleep in my rig.” I protested. It seemed selfish to sleep when he, a perfect stranger, was working on my car. He insisted. “You have to drive to California tomorrow and that’s a long way. Get some sleep.” It seemed like it would bother him less if I complied, so I did, instead of pointing out that he had a tanker of chemicals that surely needed to be delivered someplace.
If you haven’t slept in a trucker’s cab, I can tell you the interior is fancier than you might imagine. His special trucker alarm (almost impossible to turn off) blared at five a.m. The trucker himself was on the floor, below the slim bed. He was shirtless, with what I seem to recall was a hand towel draped over him like a sad little blanket. As we both got up, we said nothing, made no eye contact, just like the night before.
The rain had stopped, and the sun was coming up when Snacker returned with the magical little part. The trucker installed it and reconnected everything. The car rumbled to life when I turned the key. Snacker whooped.
The trucker said, “Go, you’re set—that’s it.” I stayed there. I could not leave. I said, “I must pay you. You worked all night on my car.” But I had given all I had besides gas money to Snacker for the parts. “No,” he said, “no way.” I begged him to give me his address. I was crying. It could have been lack of sleep, but it was also a moment when I understood what it means to be overwhelmed by kindness. He refused and mentioned his daughter again, and it felt like my insistence would disrupt an entire system by which he was operating. You do things sometimes for a stranger. You simply do them.
I left. I remember the angle of the early morning sun as I pulled out of that truck stop. More things happened that day and the next, more kindness from people I did not know, and some lack of kindness, and then, in the afternoon a day later, I crossed into California. I was on the part of I-80 where it starts to lope along next to the Truckee River. A group of boys was on the side of the road, shirtless, with towels draped around their necks. One of them put out his thumb as I passed. He did it playfully, I suspected, but I stopped anyway, backed up the shoulder, and offered them a ride. I don’t know exactly how many there were but a lot. Six or seven. They piled in, and the car sank on its springs. One gave directions of where to drop them, but when we got there, a house with a bunch of kids skateboarding in front, my passengers said actually it wasn’t where they needed to go, and waved tauntingly at their friends as we gunned it. They did this twice more. I didn’t mind. They wanted to be seen in a dope ride. We drove around Truckee as they hung their arms out the windows and signaled to people they knew. I complied willingly but understood this was not my big chance to help a stranger, or strangers. This was too much fun.