I forgot to mention this, earlier
in this blog, but it seems apt that I mention it now as Ethan and I begin the
final leg of our trip. It was almost
something surreal, and even now as I think back on it, it is hard for me to
believe it actually happened.
Somehow,
Ethan and I had gotten lost and we ended up driving late at night in the middle
of nowhere on the Great Plains. It was
getting dark outside and we not only needed directions, but we needed some
help. We had run over a rock somewhere
in the middle of Wyoming and it had become embedded in our tire, so that
eventually we had a flat tire. Of
course, the one thing we forgot to bring was a spare tire. How could we be so stupid? Yet, we couldn’t believe our luck as we saw a
small town with an old auto repair shop just up the road. We pulled in and walked inside.
Inside the
auto-repair shop was one of the most random assortments of people Ethan and I had
ever seen. There is an old lady who
looks extremely out of place, a young boy and his middle-aged father, a tired
looking woman, and a guy in a wife beater.
They looked like they had been clumped together by chance but didn’t seem to mind. I started to talk to the older woman. She told me about her journey across America in
her truck and how it started to make the guttural sounds of a “dying moose”. We then talked about the mutual experience of
living in the Northeast and what an exhilarating experience it was to be out on
the road in the Wild West. The man and his son were fiddling with their
motorcycle and Ethan walked over to them.
After five minutes of talking to them, he came back to me and whispered in
me ear: “We need to get out of here, that guy is crazy”.
So, after finding a tire in the back
and helping us put it on our car, we left the auto shop and were on our way. We were there and gone in less than an
hour. It almost seems surreal, like
those people never actually existed; they were just there in our imaginations.
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