It was like a scene from a movie.
The sun was setting in the west, darkness gathering as the temperature plummeted – the highway stretched out, vacant and unfeeling to the north and the south. My precious car curled up on the shoulder, crying weakly as the last of its power steering fluid dripped down onto the pavement. Coyotes howled and yapped in the distance, where a farmhouse could barely be seen, weak lights shining from windows where, presumably, a family gathered around a table for a homey, warm meal that probably involved roast chicken, and maybe potatoes.
There would be no roast chicken or potatoes for me, as I waited with a growing sense of inevitable doom to see whether the awful movie I'd found myself starring in would be a tragedy or a comedy.
Turns out it was a tragicomedy.
I haven't been driving as long as I technically should have been. I earned my licence in October, more than 10 years after most of my peers had gotten theirs, and maybe with a little more experience, I could have avoided the tragic mechanical failure which led to being stranded in the middle of the Prairies on April 4.
As I sat there for two hours waiting for rescue, I had a lot of time to reflect on the conspicuous series of seemingly unrelated events that had led to my situation. There was that massive pothole in Cold Lake that had taken me unaware two days before. There was the fact that I had risked the wrath of all my fellow drivers by refusing, even while being pressured by tailgating and aggressive passing, to speed. And probably the very worst of all, in the moments before my car had begun making awful sounds as if it were a dying rhinoceros, I was having the best drive of my life.
I had been blasting Taylor Swift, singing along, thinking about the nature of life on the road and the freedom it entails, freedom I had only known for six months, and wondering how I ever got along without being able to drive. I was filled with love for my car and my father for giving it to me shortly before my move to Bonnyville. I was thinking about how powerful I was, being able to just hop in my beloved car and drive at exactly 100 kilometres/hour down the highway to visit my family, how it meant I had never suffer homesickness again.
It was just asking for trouble. Being too happy, too self-aware of how very, very awesome the universe is for arranging itself in just a perfect way… It's like slapping the face of fate and not expecting to be slapped back.
I don't even know how I heard the sound of my car breaking down over the sheer volume of Taylor Swift and my in-car karaoke, but somehow, I heard it. Thinking that a rock had somehow gotten trapped in my tire well, I pulled over, hopped out, and crouched beside the tire, humming as I attempted to diagnose the problem. That's when the shower of black fluid hit the pavement.
Popping the hood as if I knew what I was doing, I was horrified to discover the splatter pattern of black fluid under the hood that even the investigators of CSI would have winced at. There had clearly been a geyser of epic proportions. Fluid was still hissing and leaking from the thing that read “power steering.” Clearly, something very bad had happened.
The thing about my dad is he didn't say anything at all when I called in a panic because I had blown up my car. He just hopped in his truck and came to the rescue.
So for two hours, as I waited for my dad to (once again) bail me out of another mess I had made, I had a lot of time to think about the lessons to be learned from my situation.
Don't take anything for granted (whether it be the reliability of your vehicle, or the reliability of your father). Try not to focus on the negative (sure, I was stranded, prey to coyotes and serial killers, but I had stopped before losing complete control and probably injuring myself). A sense of humour will help you through most things (and the serial killers who pull over to offer help will get freaked out and drive off if they think you're crazier than they are).
And my dad is definitely, definitely my hero. Even if he did give me a car that blew up three weeks later.
