"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