Good Samaritans

How many times did I break down over the years without a cell phone and AAA insurance (and usually no money, either). Let me count the ways. Pud hauled Mark and me into Blue Springs, Missouri, where he worked on our car all day at his house while we whittled away our time in a 1950s motel room before paying him about what he probably had to pay for the parts. The eighteen wheel truck driver with track marks up and down his arms, hauling lumber from Mendocino to LA, picked Jordan and me up after our VW bug died on Highway 1 and drove us across the Golden Gate Bridge, down Van Ness Avenue to Mission, and down Mission to nineteenth street, where our friends lived. “Wouldn’t want you girls to get picked up by just anyone, you know.” I was parked on the side of I-25 one night trying to figure out why my rear wheel was loose, when this nice man pulled over behind me and tried to figure it out with me. The next thing we knew we were both lying in the ditch and our cars were down the road ahead of us, totaled. Another man, drunk, had plowed into both our cars, the force of which knocked us head over heels. After the cop drove the helpful man and me to his trailer in Bernalillo—he kept saying, “I never liked that car anyway”— he got his wife’s car—she kept saying, “You’re so lucky, you both could have been killed”—and drove me home to Placitas. Good Samaritans all, no?

So it’s thirty years later and Paco, my dog and I are driving down to Albuquerque, via the Jemez Mountains after covering the protest at Los Alamos National Laboratory on Nagasaki Day, and my trusty Subaru (the nicest car I’ve ever owned) suddenly tells me it’s overheated, via the temperature gauge and a written exclamation on the dashboard where the odometer reading usually is. This time I have both a cell phone and AAA. Except that when I dial my son Jakob’s number to tell him I’m broken down and won’t make it to dinner, a voice comes on my phone and tells me my service has been “deactivated.” I have over 1,000 unused minutes on this phone because there is no cell phone reception where I live, in El Valle, so the only time I use my phone is when I’m in my car, like now, and I need to call someone and tell them why I’m in my car instead of where I’m supposed to be.

After the voice tells me that my phone has been “deactivated” it gives me some options, one of which is to “reactivate” it. So I press that number, and after a few false starts I actually get someone from India on the line. I explain that even though I have all these minutes on my phone it’s been deactivated and I need to reactivate it so I can call AAA and get rescued. He tells me that he will gladly reactivate my phone but he can only do that if I call him from a different phone than the one I need to reactivate. It’s only a matter of seconds before I’m yelling, How in the hell am I supposed to call you from a different phone when I’m stuck out in the middle of nowhere (actually, I’m about 22 miles from Bernalillo) with an overheated car and no phone? And he’s calmly answering, I’m sorry ma’am, but you have to call me from a different phone before I can reactivate your account.

But I have one more option. After I hang up on the man from India my service informs me that if this is an emergency I can call 911. I decide that the situation now qualifies as an emergency—my hood is up and I’m obviously stranded, but no one has stopped—and I reach the 911 operator. I explain what the situation is, describe where I am, and she says she’ll send someone out within 45 minutes.

So I wait. And wait. I decide to get out of the car, even if it means standing in the hot sun. Thank god the backseat is in the shade so Paco has some protection. I wait some more. Then, after dozens of cars have passed by, one stops. It has a missing backseat window covered by a flapping shade, and a young girl gets out and asks if I need help. I ask her if she has a cell phone, and she does, but it doesn’t have a signal here by the side of the road. Then the driver gets out, and I know right away he’s a Mexican national. He speaks no English, but the young girl translates, and I tell him, you can’t check the radiator, it’s too hot, and thanks, but if you don’t have a cell phone there’s not much you can do.

Later, when I’m telling my son Max about what happened I tell him to guess, by category, who was the first person to stop and help me, and without hesitation he says, a Mexican. That’s because years ago when he broke down coming up La Bajada hill in his funky Subaru the only ones who stopped to help were Mexican nationals who put him in their van, gave him something to eat, and took him to his grandmother’s house in Santa Fe.

But there’s another category to come. I wait another half hour (no sign of whoever the 911 operator supposedly called to come help me) and a Mercedes Benz passes me, pulls a U-turn, and comes up behind me. A black man and woman both get out of the car and she immediately says, honey, do you need help? Don’t worry, we’re pastors, this is what we do. She has a Bluetooth in her ear, he has an iPhone, so soon I’m on the line with AAA and after a lot of explaining through a garbled connection, the operator tells me she’s sending a tow truck (but it’s up to the driver whether Paco will be allowed to ride in the truck with me and the driver). When I tell the woman pastor that it’s been about an hour since I called 911, she says, this is unacceptable, how can they leave a single woman out here on the road by herself, you need to call them up and give them a piece of your mind.

Meantime, the man has retrieved a jug of water and a partially filled container of antifreeze from his car and says, I’m going to fill up your overflow and maybe it will flow back into your radiator reservoir, maybe it’s low and that’s why you overheated. This is the first time I’ve ever heard that there can be a reverse flow back into the radiator, but what do I know? Then we wait a little while and he tells me to turn on the car and let’s see what happens. The temperature gauge is where it’s supposed to be, so he says, we’re going to follow you into Bernalillo. Keep the windows open and if the temperature gauge starts to go up stick your arm out the window and raise it with your hand up. Then we’ll all pull over.

So they follow me most of the way into Bernalillo. My car does not overheat. Just on the outskirts of town they pass me and pull over in front. He sticks his arm straight out the window for a minute or so, then turns it up, then lowers it back to straight. I stick my arm straight out the window, they gaily wave at me out their windows, he turns onto the Albuquerque bypass, and they’re off to do some more pastoring.

Max, and the others I query, are a little slower to guess my second Samaritans were black; it’s not a large profile in New Mexico. But like the “others” (as Hank Williams sang it, “just a picture from life’s other side”), those who stop to render aid are the ones who have been stranded themselves: the poor, marginalized, or discriminated against. Someone driving a Mercedes Benz may give you pause for thought, but like the Okie who once picked me up in a Cadillac, the car or where it’s going doesn’t much matter: it’s where they’ve been.