Thursday, February 20, 2014

"You do things sometimes for a stranger. You simply do them"

Expert from a NYT Magazine article "In the Company of Truckers".
I lifted the hood and stood there. It was getting dark. Several truckers came over to help. Theories were suggested, but no one seemed to know what the trouble was. A petite and wiry man walked up, grim-faced, carrying one of those Igloo coolers for six beers that was filled with a jumble of greasy tools. The others nodded in his direction and someone said, “There’s your man.”

I’ll confess I was slightly disappointed by his junky-looking tools, but the others acted as if the messiah had arrived. He did not acknowledge me; he simply went to work as the rain fell on us. Among other things, my starter was bad. The wiry trucker was disconnecting the Impala’s custom headers to get to it when a tow-truck driver, a big, chubby man who told me to call him Snacker, got involved. Snacker had keys to a parts warehouse 60 miles east and offered to fetch the replacement starter and charge me only cost. The trucker and I went inside and drank sour coffee as we waited for him to return. He insisted on paying for my coffee. He never made eye contact. “You’re so kind to help me, and you won’t even let me buy your coffee,” I said. He replied, almost impatiently, “I have a daughter.” The thing is, he wasn’t nearly old enough to be my father.

When Snacker returned, it was around 10 p.m. The trucker proceeded to install the new starter and reconnect the exhaust, a task that — with no lift and in the rain in the middle of the night — was not enviable. When he was finished bolting the exhaust manifold, he had grease in his eyes. My car still would not start. After a lengthy diagnosis, he said the problem was a bad part in the electronic ignition, which had fried the original starter. Snacker, now part of our one-night team, agreed to go east once more to get the module. “I’ll get everything ready for when he returns,” the trucker told me. “You go sleep in my rig.” I protested. He insisted. “You have to drive to California tomorrow, and that’s a long ways. Get some sleep.” I thought it would bother him less if I complied, 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 that the interior is fancier than you might imagine. His special trucker alarm (almost impossible to turn off) blared at 5 a.m. The trucker himself was on the floor, below the slim bed. He was shirtless, 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 part. The trucker installed it. The car rumbled to life when I turned the key. Snacker whooped. “Go, you’re set — that’s it,” the trucker said to me. I stayed there. I could not leave. “I must pay you. You worked all night on my car.” But I had given all I had besides gas money to Snacker for 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 as if my insistence would disrupt the entire system by which he was operating. READ MORE 

11 comments:

john said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
john said...

A petite and wiry man? Oh, she's a girl. No wonder it was written that way. I didn't get to the end where it said the writer's name is Rachael until after I read the part where they didn't have a homosexual tryst in the fancier-than-you-might-imagine trucker's cab; that also being why he didn't have a shirt on.

Cause she's a girl and if she had been a guy she would have slept in the back seat of the Impala, and had to order the part herself and wait a whole nuther day at the truckstop for the Greyhound bus from Des Moines to come by with a package containing the part she needed. Or he.

ricpic said...

At the very least Rachel could've gotten his address and sent him a kugel, a nice kugel in the mail.

deborah said...

This wasn't just a girl. She has to be a total cutie.

But I call bullshit on this story.

john said...

I shouldn't have been snarky, it's a nice story. However, that Rachel thinks getting treated kindly OUT THERE in flyover country is noteworthy says more about her than the truckers.

Icepick said...

I looked up Ms. Kushner - I tend to agree with deborah calling bullshit on the story. She's not so cute that someone shall willingly go 240 miles out of his way for her. Now Kate Upton, OTOH....

Christy said...

I had a guy stop and change a tire for me on a lonely country road in a rainstorm at 4 a.m. Halloween night. I was dressed in a black satin gown hauling the tire out of the trunk as he drove by in his van. Not as extreme an effort as in the article, but still above and beyond.

Maybe the trucker feared for her safety at that particular location without help.

I choose to believe the tale.

Icepick said...

Christy, I can believe people would help her. I don't believe as much help was offered as in the article. Really, 240 miles of driving back and forth? I'm not sure I'd help myself that much. That's what tow services were invented for.

john said...

I'm not even sure that she ever travelled through flyover country, except at 35,000 feet:

Raised in Eugene by hippies, got her BA at UC Berkeley, post grad at Columbia, wife/mom in Ithaca, move to LA to write. No, I think that this fiction was written to both needle and impress her NY artsy friends that she actually and accidently interacted once with proles and not only did not get killed or raped, but found them quaintly friendly and generally helpful.

Interestingly, Trooper has been posting a thematically similar story here. Quite a coincidence.

Evi L. Bloggerlady said...

I have come across strangers who will do amazing things for a person out of kindness. I hope this story was not a bunch of BS (it might be) but I also know such people do exist.

deborah said...

I mean it reads like fiction. She'd sleep in his cab, he on the floor, shirtless in the morning? Not meeting eyes. It's sexualized, to say the least.

It reminds me of another NYT, or NYT Mag story I read. A woman recounts the story of how she was the youngest child in a large, chaotic family, so she had a small group of toys, including a doll, she was especially attached to. She kept them in a cupboard in the kitchen. She came home from school one day to find her father had installed laminate faux wood paneling in the kitchen, including over that cabinet door. And to this day they sit behind the paneling.