A 911 call.
Blue crayon signs hung on the door at the Denny’s.
A morning sun soak with a cat I had just met in the waiting room of an auto repair shop.
The 13 or so hours between a blowout on my car’s left rear tire and the resumption of my trip were among some of the oddest of my life.
First, though, let me set the scene, as I was in my Honda CRV, trying to drive five hours home after an 11-hour day at a student journalism conference.
Needless to say, on Saturday night, I was trying to make tracks.
After spending all Saturday, from 7:30 a.m. to 7 p.m., helping with the Northern California edition of the Journalism Association of Community Colleges‘ regional conference, I was trying to get home. I left Livermore — in the San Francisco Bay area — almost exactly at 7 p.m., with hopes of being home near Los Angeles by midnight. That meant a long and dark, but doable, drive on the 5 Freeway, which would basically take me home.
At about 8:50 p.m., though, while in the middle of nowhere on the 5 among the Central Valley’s more neglected agricultural fields, I heard and felt a “thump.” Then, in quick succession, more thumps. Then, within seconds, the thumps turned into punches, then a couple seconds later into a full-on roar.
I knew what it was — a blowout. The lurching from my Honda CRV made it clear the blowout was on my left rear tire.
I was fortunate that no traffic was around me on the freeway; I quickly and easily made my way to the shoulder and parked. I threw on my hazard lights, and I mentally prepared. I knew I had some work ahead of me. But I wasn’t worried. I had a jack and a spare, and I know how to change a tire.
Except one thing — I had the brains but not the brawn. After successfully lifting the car, I put the lug wrench on, only to find the lug nuts were stuck. They would. Not. Budge. Moreover, I didn’t have anything that might make the process easier, like WD-40 or a cheater bar. No, my car was full of boxes of supplies from the journalism conference, the whole reason I was on the road in the first place.
After a half-hour of straining my arms, shoulders and wrists, I gave up. This was beyond my capability. It was time for a tow, and I made peace with the fact that I wasn’t making it home tonight. A quick tow, however, to a nearby location like Kettleman City (a city in name only) to my south or maybe that group of gas stations and hotels I had passed a few miles earlier to my north. I called my wife to let her know; she started hooking me up with help with our insurance and said she’d text me links to towing services she could find.
With that help, just short of 10 p.m., I reached out to my national insurance group’s 24-hour roadside assistance help (and no, I’m not going to name names here — you can guess). The automated system let me know they were trying to find a tow service for me. After just a few minutes, though, I got an automated text that, in hindsight, was a portend of things to come.
“Due to labor shortages in your area, finding a rescuer is taking longer than normal. Rest assured we will provide the details shortly.”
They didn’t.
After an hour of waiting, I gave up and decided it would be easier to call towing services myself and set something up without my insurance’s help. My wife had sent me a couple websites, and I figured calling them directly instead of going through my insurance company might be the best way to handle this.
It wasn’t.
I reached out to what looked like a reputable towing service in Kettleman City. I got ahold of someone, and after I gave him my cell number, I immediately got a text requesting a pin drop. I immediately sent one. I relaxed; I canceled my insurance’s roadside services. Help was on the way.
It wasn’t.
I know that reaching out for towing help late on a Saturday night in what amounts to the middle of nowhere is a tough ask. Chances are that I’m getting someone out of bed — they’ve got to put on their shirt, their pants, their boots; they’ve got to get to their tow truck, get it going; then they’ve got to find me on a freeway that, despite being the main thoroughfare between San Francisco and Los Angeles, has incredibly desolate stretches of empty land, and finding someone can be difficult. So I waited. But after an hour of waiting, I figured asking for an ETA would be OK. So I texted the number. No reply. A few minutes later, I sent another text. No reply. Then I called. “This person has a voice mailbox that has not yet been set up.”
He wasn’t coming. I was still stuck. And now it had been about four hours.
At the four-hour point, I realized my phone battery was dying. The red battery warning on my phone flashed on, signifying less than 20% life remaining. By now, my car was now no longer responsible for transportation — without hyperbole, it was responsible for keeping the hazard lights flashing (and keeping me alive), and it was responsible for keeping me connected to the rest of the world. As long as my car had battery power, I HAD to use it to charge my phone to find help. Between that and the hazards constantly flashing, I didn’t know how much more life it would have in it.
With my patience shot and with sleep depravity kicking in, I called the towing service that had stiffed me directly. This time, I reached another dispatcher, who seemed to be confused that I had never received a confirmation number from my first call. I wasn’t in their system anywhere. No one had ever been dispatched. After a few minutes of back-and-forth, she told me it would take a few minutes to investigate. She asked if she could call back; I said sure, I’m not going anywhere. She told me she’d call back in three to five minutes.
That call never came.
At that point, I gave up on that tow service and went back to my insurance. I submitted another roadside assistance plea, hoping for different results the second time around. By this time, it was 1:18 a.m.
I also decided to hedge my bets and call another towing service in Kettleman City. Advertised as a 24-hour service, I reached their answering service; they put me through the paces of asking where I was, make, model, problem… about 10 minutes’ worth of information. Then they fed that into the system, only for the answering service’s dispatcher to get the automated reply from the actual towing service itself — not tonight. No one was available (or, more likely, no one was awake). Another opportunity gone.
About half an hour after I put in my roadside assistance request, though, I got a call from the insurance company. Maybe, help on the way? But no, sadly, my short burst of hope was immediately squashed. They, too, couldn’t find any tow services willing to come out. Shortly thereafter, though, they called back again with the phone number number of a tow service. So I called… and they basically laughed me off the line. I had no idea where this particular towing service was based (I just looked it up now, and it’s north of Sacramento, a good three hours from where I was stuck). Their dispatcher said not only was I was so far away from their service area that they wouldn’t even consider sending a truck, I was so far away that they didn’t even know any services in my area.
So much for that.
My insurance company called me back shortly thereafter, and I told them what happened. At that point, my insurance company gave up on their efforts to help me. They told me, point blank: Call 911.
It was 2:05 a.m.
The text from my wife at this point:
Oh FUCK. 🙁
Despite the waning car battery, and my growing chills from only having a hoodie among my arsenal of short-term clothing options, I really didn’t think it was an emergency. I called the California Highway Patrol’s non-emergency line. That call, originally dispatched to the statewide center in Sacramento, was transferred to a location more near my location. The dispatcher there said basically that my insurance was right. A 911 call would give a more specific ping on my cell phone than a non-emergency call, and they could find me easier. After a short text exchange with my wife to let her know what was up, at 2:12 a.m. I called 911.
The 911 dispatcher gave me the first real ray of hope I had that this night would end in some way other than me sleeping in my car without flashers on along a busy freeway. In just a couple minutes, she let me know a patrolman would be out soon, and she told me to expect a call from a tow service within minutes. About three minutes after our conversation ended, that call came. And just like that, Carlos and his tow truck from Cal State Towing were on their way.
ETA? About 40 minutes.
I waited and watched as my flashing lights got dimmer and dimmer. The double-click sound that had been with me for the past few hours faded, two clicks replaced by one as the battery strained to keep up. A quick attempt to start the car created nothing, not even an attempt to turn over the engine. But I didn’t mind. This time, I knew this ordeal was ending soon. The false hopes were over. Carlos was a real person with a real tow truck and a real cell phone number — the only things that felt real in a surreal experience.
Both Carlos and the CHP patrolman arrived at the same time, just short of 3 a.m. Carlos got to work, and I meandered over to talk to the patrolman who was just leaving his cruiser.
His first words to me?
“Good morning!”
The irony struck me immediately. That was probably not the best thing to say to someone who hadn’t had the chance to sleep that night. It wasn’t his fault, though. At that moment, we occupied the same small patch of dirt off the freeway, but we were in different worlds. I was trying to end a day that had started about 20 hours earlier with a wake-up call to start putting together a journalism conference for 100 community college students from across Northern California, and I had been stuck on this same patch of dirt for the past six hours with increasingly frustrating results. My frustration had melted into helplessness, which had melted into delirium. Good morning? GOOD MORNING? Miss me with that. For him, though? I was probably his first call of the day. It probably was a good morning; his first call was an easy one.
Within 10 minutes, my car was on the tow truck. A couple minutes later, I was sitting in Carlos’ heated cab as he drove across the median and headed north on the 5 Freeway to the nearest repair shop, which was just up the road about 5 miles.
Fortunately for me, the exit with the repair shop also had a couple hotels and restaurants, including a 24-hour Denny’s. Carlos assured me the shop was reputable, and by 8 a.m. they’d be open and I could be on my way. At 3:30, Carlos had dropped off the CRV and left, and I made my way to the Travelodge next door for a good night’s sleep.
Locked lobby.
No worries, I told myself. Try the Best Western down the street.
Locked lobby.
Shut out twice, I thought. Still, I figured I could always go to Denny’s with a simple plan: Ask for a booth in the back where I can put my head down and sleep; order a side of hash browns; tip generously when I leave as the sun comes up.
However, taped onto the front door of this 24-hour Denny’s, scrawled in blue crayon on a piece of 8.5×11 paper: “Closed for 15 minutes.”
Now I had no clue what to do.
Fortunately, my wife set me straight with a couple text that had simple instructions, exactly what I needed when I wasn’t thinking straight: Call the hotel. With my phone battery waning, I looked up the Best Western’s phone number. I called, not sure where the call might go or who I might reach, or what I would do if no one answered.
Fortunately, the call went right to the front desk. Unfortunately, the phone kept ringing; as I could plainly see through the glass door, and the reason I was hesitant to call in the first place, no one was there.
Then, from the back, a door opened. The night clerk was still there, invisible to my eyes but not to my call. She answered the phone: “Best Western.”
I replied: “Hi. I’m standing outside your front lobby door, and I’m hoping you still have a room available for the night.”
She turned and saw me, and I can’t imagine how pathetic I must have looked. Shivering, dirty hands, stained pants, half-open bloodshot eyes, a bag on each shoulder and no car in the parking lot.
I waved. She smiled.
“Let me unlock that for you.”
Within five minutes, my bed had been secured — and with a discount because I had checked in so late and was going to use the room so little.
By 3:45 a.m., I was in the room. By 4, I was asleep, with an alarm set for 7:30 — leaving me enough time in the morning (er, the later morning) to wake up, shower, grab my complimentary breakfast and walk up the street to the repair shop.
At 8:05 a.m., I called the repair shop and explained that the car that was dumped in front of their business was mine. The owner replied, incredibly kindly: “Thank you. We open at 9…”
So I killed an hour at the hotel, grabbing some more food and saying hello with the group of five feral cats on the property. At 9 a.m., I walked up the street, where the shop was open and ready to take me in. Also ready to take me in was the shop cat, Honey, who had a cat tree and a bed shaped like a queen’s crown sitting on the shop counter. We enjoyed the morning sun together, me thinking about one of the weirdest nights of my life, Honey reacting to my scratches with purrs. I was no longer cold, frustrated or unsure. I stroked the cat’s tail; she flicked it toward my hand, asking for more. Things were going to be all right.
The new battery and the new tire took an hour. Settling the bill took two minutes. I filled the gas tank with $6.73 per gallon unleaded.
Finally, after 13 hours, I was on my way home again.
Once I started thinking straight again, I told myself: Write it all down. Don’t forget it. Because as much as I want to, I shouldn’t.