Why worry?
Why worry?
When the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, a family learns who is in control.
When I was four, I lived in Western Montana. During the summer my family took a trip to Wisconsin to visit relatives. On one trip, my father stayed home to work so we could stay longer than usual. The three-day trip there—with my mom; brother, Kaleb, who was 10; and sister, Lydia, who was 2—was problem free. We did have the occasional search for a gas station and McDonald’s. These were actually quite hard to find in North Dakota.
We enjoyed being able to see our cousins for two weeks and soon began to pack up for another long trip home. On the third day of our return—after watching Kaleb beat Pokémon twice and exhausting our juice pack supply—we were 30 minutes outside of Billings, Montana. That was about seven hours away from home. We started talking about getting home, seeing Dad, and all the stories we had to tell him. At that point our car broke down. We were within coasting distance to the nearest exit, so the car came to a stop on a frontage road. This was before the days of cell phones. We had come to a stop in a place that was out of sight of the highway and the state patrol. The car obviously was not going to start, so we rolled out the blanket by the side of the car—the only available shade on this blistering 90+ degree day.
Now they don’t call it Big Sky Country for nothing. Montana is unlike Wisconsin. There is not a gas station every 10 miles but rather every 100 or 200 miles. We were stuck in the middle of nowhere with limited water and food. We imagined that we would have to wait a long time.
This is where the story gets amazing. After about 20 or 30 minutes a pickup truck came down the frontage road and stopped. Two young men climbed out of the truck. One of them wore a cap with a Christian symbol on it, and they offered to help us. What a relief! One stayed with us, and the other drove to Billings to call for a tow truck. When he returned, he thoughtfully brought back some pop. (That’s what “soda” is called in Montana.) They could have just left, but they wanted to stay until the tow truck came. After a long hour with no sign of a tow truck, one of them had to return to make a second call. Thankfully, this time the tow truck eventually came.
Quite miraculously, one of the men had a friend whose father owned an auto repair shop. After dropping off our old van, they took us to a nearby hotel for the night. Then first thing Monday morning we were on our way home.
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