That Kind of a Blessing

After an early morning walk at the Mall,
I drove toward the Nokomis Beach Coffee Cafe
where six or eight of us meet to tell lies.

Just as I approached an intersection,
a small car came from the right,
intending to turn left, toward me,
but drove up onto a three-foot-high wall of snow,
leaving its front wheels hanging free.

"A cell phone!" I thought.

I stopped, and backed up to the car.
The driver, having discovered that revving the engine
did very little to get him back off the ice pack,
climbed down and said, "Cell phone!"

"I will pull you off," I said, "if you will
hook this tow line to your own car."
(I didn't want to be responsible for
ripping the plastic bumper off his car.)
"Try to find a place on the frame!"

He tried. He got up and said he would hook it
to his bumper. He was willing to take a chance.

"No," I replied. "Let me look."
I found a place on the frame.

He turned the free-hanging front wheels of his car
curiously sideways. I suggested he straighten them.

I said I would go very slowly. He just stood there.

"Why don't you get in the car and steer it straight back?"
I asked him. He thought that would be a good idea.

Watching by a side mirror,
I saw that the wheels were straightened,
so I eased very slowly forward.
The car came smoothly down to the road,
and just as smoothly, continued to roll.

"Oh, my god,!" I thought, "Where is the driver?"

He came limping toward the pickup.
He had tried to steer his car from the outside,
and he slipped, and the car ran over his toe.
I could see the tire tread marks on his shoe.

It seemed best to me that the Good Samaritan
put his tow rope away and go to coffee.

Before I left, he came limping up to the pickup,
and said that if he had fifty dollars he would give it to me.
I would not have taken it even if he had it.

"You are a blessing, sir!" he said.
"You are a god-damned blessing!"

Comments

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy. Those were skills to be learned and practiced. I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop. He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes. He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade. Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore. The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up. I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth. I knew how to do that. Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down. On the second try, aimi

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

SmokeSound

Search This Blog