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I had little knowledge of such things during my college years. Before pulling out of Salt Lake City, we thanked our hosts profusely—but how do you really repay a family of strangers for bailing you out of a bad situation? In our youthful ignorance, we neglected even to write down their address, and by the time we arrived in California, we had forgotten their names.
And yet our good fortune in Utah left its mark: I rarely passed by anyone in need on the freeway again. After school, I married, had children, and landed jobs in Colorado, Georgia, and California before I came east to Washington, D.C., in 1982. One night, while fighting Beltway traffic on a miserably cold night in a driving rainstorm, I saw three kids huddled together out of the corner of my eye.
It was wet and dark and took me a couple of hundred yards to pull over. They saw my brake lights and came running, hesitating as they approached my pickup. They were a bit younger than my teenage brother, his friend, and I back in '73.
"Hop in," I said. They did, and I asked where they were headed.
"Little Rock!" one of them replied delightedly.
I cocked an eyebrow, and one of the boys said, "This is Virginia, right?"
"Yes," I replied.
"Good! Virginia is in the South—and so is Arkansas."
"Where are you boys from?" I asked.
"New Jersey."
I told them that Arkansas and Virginia had indeed both been in the Old Confederacy, but they were about a thousand miles apart. I asked if they had money or a place to stay—they had neither—and I realized that they were in the same kind of predicament we'd been in on Interstate 80 a dozen years before.
Cell phones were still not common, nor were ATMs. But my mother lived nearby, so I took them to her house and came out bearing sandwiches, a six-pack of Coke, and some camping gear that I'd stored at my mom's house: two old sleeping bags, three rain slickers, and a flashlight.
I gave it all to them, plus all the cash I had, about $80, which at the time was enough for a couple of nights at a roadside motel. I also gave them a map from my glove compartment and drove them an hour to a truck stop in Gainesville, Virginia, next to a well-traveled route heading south.
On the ride out, one of the guys asked me why I was doing this for them. I told them of my own experience in Utah and how I had never properly thanked the man who had helped us—that this was the best way I knew to repay his kindness. The boys got quiet. One of them wrote down my name and address. But one of the others seemed to really take in the spirit of the moment.
"I know what you're saying," he said. "One day when we're older, we'll come across some stranded kids—and we'll help them."
Yes, I thought, you will. It's what Americans do.
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