Dr. Forbush Thinks

When I lived in Texas I had a 1966 Ford Mustang without air conditioning. I loved the car, but I was almost permanently sweat soaked whenever I went anywhere. This, of course, was because the weather in Houston is almost always 99 degrees and 99 percent humidity, or at least that is how it felt. This is the way I remember it, but I also remember being 100 miles from home and realizing that I was going to freeze to death unless I went to Sears and bought a coat or a sweater. The weather in Texas wasn’t always predictable. My first year there I was caught in a sudden downpour and soaked to the bone as I tried to walk from the classroom to the car to drive home. It must have taken me a couple of years to realize that I needed to be wary of the weather.

The weather is one thing, but it isn’t the only thing when one thinks about Texas in comparison to the rest of the country. Or, from my perspective I was comparing Texas to my most recent experience with life in Ohio. In Ohio I could drive on the freeway and never be more than a mile from the next gas station. Or, at least in the Urban areas of Ohio where I spent most of my time I found this to be the case.

By having a 1966 Ford Mustang in Ohio I was not normally at any great risk if my car suddenly decided not to go. I had coasted off the freeway and into a gas station several times before, and it wasn’t such a big deal. The worst case I had had in Ohio was when I hadn’t quite made it into the gas station and I needed to jump out of the car and push it into the gas station. The car had a heater, and I never needed air conditioning in Ohio.

In Texas, I still loved my car. It was a fun little ride, but it also provided me with some unexpected adventure. Now “unexpected adventure” is a euphemism for an unplanned unexpected undesired unwanted unpleasant experience that sometime later, perhaps twenty years or so, one can laugh at when the story is re-told. And, my car certainly brought me quite a few “unexpected adventures” before it was stolen and most likely taken to a chop shop and distributed to other Mustang owners around the country. I like to think that the spirit of my car is still alive and well in someone’s car somewhere.

One weekend when my car was working my future wife at the time and me took a trip from Houston to Dallas. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this trip, it takes about four hours along a major freeway. This means that the typical problems of Texas driving through small town speed traps and the like are not so problematic. The trip is relatively simple, but a bit longer than most of the trips I had taken when I lived in Ohio. But, by this time I had made this trip a number of times and it was “old hat.” By this time we normally stopped at the same places on the way there or the way back and the whole trip was almost automatic. In fact it was so automatic that I actually forgot to fill up for gasoline for the trip home. By this point in the life of my car the fuel gage no longer worked properly, so I normally needed to remember to fill up the tank on a regular basis based on the number of miles driven rather than the position of the needle on a gage.

Well, you guessed it, we ran out of gas at night in the middle of nowhere on a Texas freeway. There were plenty of cars around, but neither me nor my future wife had ever hitchhiked before. We knew that we were nearly 10 miles in either direction from a freeway exit and we believed that a truck stop was the next exit further down the road.

Being stuck in the middle of nowhere creates an exaggerated sense of fear and hopelessness. First, one fears that some unknown person may descend upon you and take advantage of your situation. And, second the you look at the long walk ahead of you as a hopeless task taking an enormous amount of time only to result in buying the sought after fuel and then in carrying that enormous weight back the same distance again. Then there is the fear of the alternative plan where you risk hitchhiking and being picked up by some unsavory person who could take advantage of your plight and make matters even worse for you. And, finally there is the fear that by leaving your car unattended for some length of time it just won’t be there when you return. And, as these fears and hopelessness take hold you begin to imagine some things that are in the extreme category of unreasonable fear.

So, as we began to long walk to the truck stop that we believed existed a few miles down the road we were caught completely off guard when a truck pulled over and motioned us to hop into his cab. Both fear and thankful gratitude bubbled to the surface. Was this just some Good Samaritan, or did he have an evil intent?

We took the risk and jumped into the cab. And, it was a very nice truck indeed. The cab was less than a year old. It was spacious and the seating was as comfortable as a living room sofa. I could have ridden for hours in this cab without even knowing that the time had passed. The cab was nice, and the driver was nice as well. He was friendly and kind, and he dropped us off at the truck stop without a hassle.

That trip was unexpectedly easy. The truck stop was a good place to get gas, but unfortunately we didn’t have a gas can and the truck stop unexpectedly didn’t sell gas cans. Of course, even in the state of Texas it was illegal to put gasoline in an unauthorized container, but it was late and we were willing to take the risk. But, was the attendant willing to take the risk and sell us the gasoline? Fortunately we found an old anti-freeze container and we were able to fill it with gasoline. The attendant didn’t seem to care what we put it in. With our gas in hand we wondered how we were going to get back up the freeway to our car. We asked a couple of the truckers at the truck stop, but they were headed in the wrong direction, so we thought it might be more productive to just walk to the freeway and hopefully catch a ride with a trucker already headed in our direction.

My future wife became delirious with our good fortune. She knew for certain that the first truck by would pull over for us, and we would be on our way to our transportation. But, I’d been through this type of thing before (maybe not hitchhiking exactly, but hoping for the kindness of a stranger in general) and it didn’t always work out the way we hoped. But instead of becoming disappointed when the first truck passed us by she came to the conclusion that the trucker didn’t see us. So, when we saw the next truck coming down the freeway she jumped out into the road and waved her hands to make sure that this guy saw us. And as he got closer to us she moved over to the side of the road. And, to my surprise the truck pulled over on the side of the road.

As we walked to the idling truck I yelled to my future wife, “What the Hell are you thinking?” And, she replied, “I thought that if he saw us he’d pull over, and he did.” And we both trotted down the road to our next ride carrying our open topped make shift fuel container.

“Could you give us a ride up the road to our car?” we asked the guy. He motioned us into the cab that was almost exactly the opposite of our previous ride. It was a dirty, smelly old cab. I wasn’t quite sure what he might be hauling, but I thought that it might have been something to do with agriculture. The guy talked to us, but I suspected that he might have had some mind-altering substance in his circulatory system. He grabbed his cigarettes and pulled one out. I placed my hand over the open fuel container. He told my future wife to put the window down and pass the pack of cigarettes to his brother who was driving along side. Caught in a bit of shock and dumbfoundedness, she hesitated in taking the cigarettes from our driver. I interrupted saying that our car was not very far from where we were. And, in a couple of minutes we saw our car and told him to pull over so we could get to our car. For a moment I believe that we both thought that the trucker might not be so obliging as to drop us off, but as we got our message across to him he pulled over and we were dropped off only slightly past our car.

For a short moment it seemed a bit hotter there in Texas. We didn’t know if our “idiot” driver was going to blow us up with his ignorance about the combustibility of gasoline. Or, perhaps his attention might have been distracted by his antic of passing his cigarettes between trucks at 65 MPH. Or, maybe he just wanted to take us along on his trip for “company.” Maybe, just maybe, it did matter who picked us up. Maybe, just maybe we shouldn’t have forced the trucker to “see” us when we were looking for a ride.

In fact, I was thinking about this after the event. The first trucker reacted out of his sympathy for our plight. He saw that we were starting out on a ten-mile hike and he felt empathy. That empathy resulted in his offer of a ride. The second driving saw a crazy person flagging him down. Perhaps he was in the mood for some crazy fun and he stopped for us expecting some crazy people. If we had acted crazy, would the first driver have stopped? Or, if we looked like we had just begun a long trek would the second driver have stopped? I’m guessing no to both questions, but then again you never know.
It turns out that our “unexpected adventure” resulted in a happy ending. But it also made us think about the possible unhappy endings that could have happened. Most of the time most of the strangers that we meet turn out to be quite nice. However, I have also met some strange people as well that have questionable moods and questionable motives. Risks can be interesting, risks can be fun but risks are risks no matter what else they are.





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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


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