― C.S. Lewis
Stella
I'm stuck in a pickup truck in the woods with my beautiful neighbour. It would be romantic if it weren't for the fact that we're surrounded by a pack of coyotes...and she's giving me hell eyes.
Other than that, it's not too bad.
Did I mention I either broke or sprained my ankle and I'm moaning in pain?
Yeah....sucks to be me, but can't get any worse—can it?
Stella's had enough of the baying hounds—and me, She starts up the truck and gasses it. The tires spin. She tries again and the tires spin more.
“Just tromp it!” I order.
She stands on the accelerator and the truck slides sideways and I can feel it stuck in a rut.
“Okay! That’s enough. I guess we’re stuck.”
“I guess you don’t have snow tires,” she growls. “Do you have a phone?”
“Yeah—at home, charging.”
She pounds the steering wheel with her fist.
The coyotes howl, snow covers the windshield and it starts to get dark.
“Just lovely.” She’s not even looking at me.
Two hours pass.
We start up the truck every fifteen minutes and let it run long enough to pump some heat into the cab—by morning, we figure she’ll be able to hike out to the road and walk the four miles back to her farm to get help.
We don’t talk much. She’s not a happy camper.
About midnight though, we hear a roar and then the snow-covered windshield’s illumined by lights. Stella cranks down her window and cranes her neck to get a better view.
“It’s Jim Crow.”
I groan inwardly, already anticipating the whispered jokes at my expense in the local café and general store.
Jim comes up to the driver’s window smiling like the cat that swallowed the canary.
“Phoned you guys to check up on you and no one answered—kinda figured you’d come out to see the fence and I knew Jed didn’t have snow tires.”
Well, I won’t bore you with the details of the rest of the night—the six-hour wait in the Emergency ward and then Stella driving me home and helping me into bed.
Strange thing about interruptions though—they kinda dictate the direction your life takes.
That night with the coyotes was a watershed incident for me—and Stella. We’re going out now. She still figures I’m a jerk and maybe she’s right.
But everybody’s gotta change sometime.
That night we faced life and death, but between those two intervals we found a way to move forward and live and have our being.
I still believe my life’s a Morse code of long and short pauses, but I think I’m beginning to figure some things out.