Stopping in the woods on a snowy evening
DAVID SILVA
Like most native Southern Californians, I maintain what I consider to
be a healthy distrust of strangers. I’m certainly not as bad about
this as some. I will, for example, occasionally strike up a
conversation with the person standing in front of me at the checkout
line, and I feel an obligation to assist anyone asking for
directions.
But whenever an unfamiliar person comes near me in public, I am
immediately on my guard.
It’s a big-city thing. You learn the rules early and you stick to
them. Never open your door to strangers. Stay alert in unfamiliar
places. And never, ever pick up hitchhikers.
Having lived in the city all my life, I assumed for a long time
that everyone lived by these rules. But one winter night in 1985, I
discovered there were some in this world who had no problem putting
their trust in the hands of complete strangers.
I was with my then-girlfriend Angel that winter, spending
Christmas with her family in Prescott, Ariz. Prescott is about 5,400
feet above sea level and gets really cold in December, so the visit
involved a lot of sitting indoors and playing Trivial Pursuit with
Angel’s siblings.
After about four days of this, I was ready to slug the next person
who asked me to name the capital of anything. Then one evening,
Angel’s brother, Sal, announced he was leaving to visit some friends
in Walker, a nearby town even higher in elevation than Prescott.
“Hey, do you mind if I tag along?” I asked.
The trip to Walker is by way of a treacherous, winding mountain
road. The road is especially dangerous in winter, when you can easily
round a turn, hit a patch of black ice and slide soundlessly over a
cliff. As such, Sal crept his little beige Volvo along at 15-20 mph,
slowing it to under 10 at every turn.
I didn’t mind. It was wonderful to be out of the house, and I
couldn’t get enough of admiring the snowbanks along the sides of the
road. I had never really seen snow until this trip, and for the life
of me I couldn’t understand why Angel’s brothers and sisters
constantly complained about it. How could you hate something so
beautiful, I thought to myself. And just as I did, the Volvo’s
headlights caught the contorted face of a young man standing by the
side of the road, hopping up and down in what was apparently a losing
effort to stay warm. The man frantically waved his arms at us and
looked despondent as we drove past him.
“Boy, that guy’s in trouble,” I said. “No one’s going to stop for
him out in the middle of no --” I stopped talking because Sal was
pulling over to the side of the road.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“What do you mean, what am I am doing? We can’t leave that guy out
here,” Sal said, turning off the engine and opening his door.
“Hey!” he shouted to the stranger. “You need a lift?”
I sat frozen in my seat. Had Sal lost his mind? No one picks up
hitchhikers on dark mountain roads! Did the name Manson mean anything
to these people?
I got out of the car just as the stranger ran up and started
thanking us profusely. He looked like he couldn’t have been more than
20 and was wearing a dark brown hunter’s jacket and a wool cap pulled
down over his ears. I thought he couldn’t have looked more suspicious
if he’d been carrying an ax.
“The name’s Joe,” he said. “Aw, man, I thought I was dead for
sure! I came around that turn too fast and my truck slid down the
hill. Look, you can just see it!”
He walked up the snowbank and pointed downward. Sal and I walked
over and looked. All we could see was blackness.
“Hey, man, I know it’s asking a lot, but would you go down there
with me and help me get my truck out? Its rear tires are stuck in the
snow. I think if you pushed it from behind, I could probably drive it
out of there.” And with that, Joe stepped over the snowbank and
started climbing down the hill.
I snorted. “Yeah, right, buddy, I don’t think so.” I stopped
talking because Sal had stepped over the snowbank and was following
Joe down the hill.
“Sal! What are you doing?” I called. “Hey!”
Suddenly I was all alone on the dark mountain road.
“This is nuts,” I said aloud. No way was I going down there.
Then I started thinking about what I could possibly say to Angel
if I came back without her big brother. How could I tell her that I
had been too afraid to follow Sal into the woods and thus abandoned
him to the mercy of a wool cap-wearing mountain psycho? Was it
possible to spin that to make me come out looking good?
Of course it wasn’t, but I decided I’d head back anyway. Angel did
have two other brothers, after all. But then I realized that Sal had
taken the car keys with him. I shook my head, balled my hands into
tight fists, and climbed over the snowbank and into the woods.
It was dark, going down that hill. Dark and cold and scary. I
called to Sal, whose silhouette I could just make out in front of me.
Sal stopped. I was about to plead with him to come to his senses and
please, please either come back up the hill or at least give me the
car keys, when he whispered, “Um, maybe this isn’t such a hot idea.
Let’s get out of here before ... well, you know ...”
We were about to scramble back up the hill when Joe yelled, “Here
it is!”
We turned around, and there was Joe’s truck. He reached into the
cab and turned on the headlights. Its back wheels were visibly
wallowed in the snow.
“Man, I’d call for help, but my dad’s the sheriff, you know,” Joe
said. “He must have told me a million times not to be horsing around
out here. If he found out about this, he’d take my wheels away for
sure.”
Instantly, the tension lifted from my shoulders. Only a complete
idiot would tell a story like that, and complete idiots I could
handle.
Sal and I tried pushing that truck out of the snowdrift for about
an hour while Joe gunned and gunned the engine, but we just couldn’t
get traction.
Finally, Joe suggested hooking the cable from the motorized winch
on the front of his truck to the front of Sal’s Volvo, then Sal could
back up and lift the truck free.
Perhaps it was the general confusion of the moment that caused all
three of us to miss the obvious problem with that suggestion, which
was that Joe’s truck was easily about a ton heavier than Sal’s Volvo.
Nevertheless, we hooked up the cable and Joe started the winch, which
immediately pulled Sal’s Volvo right off the road and down the hill.
It came to rest about a foot from the truck’s front bumper.
Joe turned off the winch, and we stood in silence for a long
moment.
“Say, you guys didn’t bring any food with you, did you?” Joe
asked.
The next few hours saw the three of us on the side of the road,
frantically waving our arms to passing drivers while jumping up and
down to keep warm. To my continued amazement, someone actually picked
us up and drove us into town.
My experience that cold December night was a real eye-opener for
me.
I learned that there remain places in the world where no one locks
their doors and where strangers aren’t immediately viewed with a
general distrust. Places where an extended thumb might actually be
met with a helping hand.
And after almost two decades, I still think that’s just weird.
* DAVID SILVA is a Times Community News editor. Reach him at (909)
484-7019, or by e-mail at david.silva@latimes.com.
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