Help in Times of Need: The Unexpected Kindness of Strangers

  Sometimes when we really need it, we get help from people we’ve never laid eyes on until we need them most.

  It happened to my wife and me many years ago in Davis, Calif. Our car had broken down on a Friday night at the beginning of a three-day holiday weekend so we had to wait until Tuesday to find someone who could fix it.

  We were young and had so little money in those days that our “hotel” during our vacation was a pup tent. We pitched it in a park, and to kill time waiting for Tuesday we played a lot of tennis. The temperature on the coolest of the three days was 107, and I got the worst sunburn of my life.

  We were sitting by the tent, commiserating, when they happened by – a couple, professors at the university in Davis. My sunburn stopped them in their tracks.

  “That’s a terrible burn you’ve got!” the woman said. “Do you have anything for it?”

   “No. Our car broke down and there aren’t any stores around here.”

  They mulled that over, wished us well and an hour later returned with an offer: 

  “We’ve been thinking about it. You can’t sleep here in the park, especially not with a sunburn like that. Why don’t you come to our house?”

  We were initially skeptical. We didn’t know these people in the least. They could have been a serial-killer tag team.

  They did seem awfully nice, though. They said their house had an entire wing that we could have to ourselves, and some sunburn ointment that bordered on being miraculous. That decided it. 

  They were as good as their word. Their sunburn ointment stopped the pain almost instantly, never to return. They fed us wonderful meals, trusted us in their house while they taught their classes. We spent two nights with them. A week later, home from our trip, we received a package with a note: 

  “You left these clothes at our house. We washed and ironed them for you.”

  Decades later, their kindness isn’t forgotten. It never will be 

  I’m revisiting that long-ago tale as an introduction to a similar kindness recently experienced by one of my granddaughters and her husband.

  Kelsie and her husband, Christian, were subjects of one of my columns last spring. If you read it, you may recall that they’re the couple who sold their Boise home, bought an old Air Force bus and spent months converting it to a “schoolie.” (Schoolies are buses converted to motor homes.) They did a smashing job on it. It’s so nice inside that I wanted to stow away and go with them when they left on their cross-country adventure. 

  They’ve been gone almost a year now and have been to Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial, worked as camp hosts in Wisconsin and Michigan, enjoyed live music and standup comedy in Austin, Texas. They’re currently in Quartzsite, AZ, where the year-round population of 3,400 swells to a quarter of a million or more as a mecca for snowbirds.

  It was there in the Arizona desert that the trusty schoolie that had taken them so many miles threw in the towel. 

  “We drove about two minutes to a spigot to fill our water tank, and when we finished the bus wouldn’t start,” Kelsie said. “It was turning over, but not starting.”

  Christian can fix or build just about anything, but the vagaries of old Air Force buses were outside his experience.

  “I went and got our neighbor Josh (Josh Barks, coincidentally a fellow Idahoan) because his setup is a semi-truck front with a custom flatbed and fifth wheel and a winch and crane,” Kelsie said. “… He towed us back to our spot.” 

  Quick, what’s the first thing you suspect when your car won’t start?

  The battery, of course. Or, if your vehicle is an old Air Force bus, three batteries. Christian replaced them with new ones, but the bus still wouldn’t start.

  By this time the ailing schoolie had attracted the sympathetic attention of neighbors. Mark Hillebrand, a mechanically inclined neighbor from Michigan, offered to help. He and Christian spent three days checking everything they could think of – every wire, every fuse, every sensor, everything but the kitchen sink and couldn’t pinpoint the problem.

   “I did some research and noticed that a prominent thing with these engines is a certain sensor that can be the problem,” Christian said. “If you can unplug it and the engine starts, that could be what’s wrong.”

  Finding the plug was about as easy as finding ice water in the Arizona desert. 

  Enter “Diesel Dave” Atherton. A mechanic Christian found on Instagram recommended Atherton, a retired mechanic familiar with the type of engines used in the schoolie. With his help, Christian, Kelsie and Mark were able to find  the plug. Christian installed a new sensor, and the engine sprang to life.

  Altogether, it had taken five people and more than a week.

  Kelsie and Christian are in another part of Arizona now, having bid farewell to their Quartzsite neighbors. But they’ll remember them and their acts of kindness for their rest of their lives. 

  We’re forever hearing about bad people doing bad things. They’re so often in the news that we tend to forget about good people – who greatly outnumber them – and who, asking for nothing in return, share their time and knowledge with complete strangers in times of need,  

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

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