One moment we were heading home from work, and the next I’m wondering if I’ll live to see another day. I know what happened. I know exactly what happened. We were heading home from work, just Dan and I, taking the back road late at night. The road never seemed so empty before. Not until Dan hit a patch of ice and the car got stuck in a snow bank. Not until we couldn’t dig the car out of the snow. Not until I realized it was negative thirty degrees. Not until then, did I realize how empty that road was.
There was nothing for miles in either direction. If we tried to walk to civilization, we’d freeze. If we stayed in the car, we’d freeze a little slower. So, the car it was. At first we just tried to convince ourselves that someone would come. Someone had to come. Someone had to know that two 25 year old men, who didn’t deserve to freeze to death, were out there. But as the seconds turned to minutes, and the minutes turned into too many to keep track of, I began to worry. Everything went numb. I couldn’t tell if I was being paranoid or if I could really feel my insides shutting down. And then there it was.
A light. But what was it? Was it the entrance to the pearly gates, had the cold finally got me? It wasn’t heaven, but what it was could have surely been the work of an angel. A large truck coming down the road, coming straight for us. The truck was big enough to pull our car out and tow it back to civilization. He didn’t even know we were out there. He just happened to be taking the back way as well.
Dan and I couldn’t stop staring at our driver on the way home. He was a savior, disguised as a rugged truck driver that desperately needed a shower. I’ll never forget the luck of that scruffy old man finding us that day. That’s when I started to believe in fate. That’s when I started to believe that I had a purpose here. The cold would have eventually got us if we hadn’t been rescued, and we would have died. But dying in a beat up station wagon wasn’t my fortune that day. And I’m willing to spend my whole life finding out why I was spared.
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