A bang followed by a muffled under-hood scream and a temperature gauge that suddenly spiked told me everything I needed to know: get off the Ohio Turnpike. Now.
I was just a half-mile east of Exit 209, around mile marker 210.1, and with the temperature gauge pinned in the red, running the engine for even another minute could make a bad problem much, much worse. I pulled onto the very narrow shoulder on the right side of the road, which happened to be part of a bridge, and shut it off. I reached for my Triple-A card as the bridge see-sawed up and down and my car was buffeted back and forth by passing traffic.
"Are you in a safe place?" the dispatcher asked.
"Ummm, no. Not really. Actually, it's quite dangerous," I said.
"Oh, sorry to hear that," she said. "Year, make and model of your vehicle?"
Somewhat put off by her apparent indifference to my precarious situation—but realizing it was probably just part of her script, and there wasn't much she could do about my location anyway—I responded:
"2009 Toyota RAV4. Green."
A couple of minutes of the worst on-hold music of all time later, she came back on.
"Okay. You're all set, Mr. Connolly. Thank you for being a Triple-A member for 45 years. A tow truck will be there to assist you by 7:40 p.m."
It was only just past 6:00 p.m.
Good grief.
It was then that one of those ODOT—Ohio Department of Transportation—vehicles with the big flashing arrow on top appeared in my rearview mirror.
"Yes!" I thought to myself. "The traffic gods are converging! I'm saved! They'll not only get me to safety, they'll fix my car for me, too, in the blink of an eye."
If only that were true.
The person in the truck raised the big arrow, alerting passing motorists to the hazard that was me and my ancient RAV and suggesting they move to the left.
Many did not.
You don't think much about the faceless, non-playable characters—NPCs—you see stranded on the side of the road with their hoods up. At best, you're like, "Geez, sucks to be them," as you whiz on by.
You look at it differently, of course, when it's your ass in the barrel going over the falls.
Part of me was thinking, "I can't believe no one is stopping just to check in and offer me a bottle of water."
The ODOT employee sat in the truck for nearly 15 minutes. Then I saw the door open and out she came, motioning for me to stay in my sweatbox of a car. She made her way over to the front passenger-side window, which I had already lowered.
Through the deafening roar of traffic, she asked what was going on. I told her I thought I'd lost my water-pump pulley, and she took my phone number and said someone from Johnny's Auto & Truck Towing would be calling.
When I told her I had already called Triple-A, she told me Triple-A doesn't service the Turnpike; the Turnpike's designated towing operators do. Sure enough, no sooner had she said that than Triple-A called me back and told me the same thing.
"Call pound-677," they said.
The ODOT lady, whom I later learned was named Loretta, said not to bother because she had already contacted the tow company. She then went back to her massive truck.
Probably a liability to have people in my position wandering around up there with them.
I decided to get out of my car and wait behind the guardrail. Better to get a late-afternoon sunburn than be pancaked by some yahoo who didn't see Loretta's arrow.
Once over the guardrail, I discovered there was literally nowhere to go. I had maybe a foot and a half of gravel before a sharp incline down to the nameless, lonely road the bridge passed over; actually, it was Ravenna-Warren Road. A tall metal fence blocked access to the road, presumably to prevent people from walking up to the roadway to play license-plate bingo.
Chris from the towing company showed up around 7:00, a good 40 minutes ahead of the time Triple-A had given me.
A short, gruff-looking guy who was maybe 45 years old, he didn't give me a chance to put the RAV in neutral before he dragged it up onto his flatbed, leaving tire skids on the road and on his bed.
"That won't give me flat spots on my tires, will it?"
He stared at me blankly, then motioned for me to get into his truck.
As a Triple-A Platinum member, I was eligible for a tow of the 70-plus miles back home. That also meant an hour-plus ride in a bouncy Ram 5500 with someone who, much like sitting next to someone you don't know on an airplane, you'd just as soon not speak to.
I knew I'd have to fight my instincts and impulses and not be chatty. He appeared to be someone who'd rather not make small talk.
I spent the first 10 minutes or so wafting in the cool, cigarette-smoke-drenched, air-conditioned air of his truck's cabin, texting my wife and checking email before realizing I was down to about 10 percent battery. He had his phone plugged into what I could tell was the only charging port on the dash.
Knowing I didn't want to come across like the Uber driver or passenger who insists on conversation, I started out by lobbing softballs.
"This thing gas or diesel?" I asked.
He stared straight ahead, his right hand at five o'clock on the steering wheel and his left hand clutching his phone.
He then muttered, in the rather unusual Midwest-meets-Deep-South kind of way some native Ohioans talk:
"Day-zul."
"Must be a Cummins turbo-diesel," I said excitedly, although doing my best not to sound like a car geek—a car geek with a dead Toyota RAV4 on the back of his massive rig.
"Wow, this thing is quiet. Not like the rattling knockers back when I was a kid."
Silence.
Mildly freaking out over possibly spending an hour or so with nothing to do but stare out the window—I don't do well with being idle—I felt compelled to pursue a conversation.
"How many of these do you do a day?" I inquired.
"Depends," he said.
And that was that.
Giving the convo one last shot, I said to him, "Bet you could tell some stories."
He looked over at me, nodded, and said:
"You have no idea."
For the rest of the ride home—which he took what seemed to me like the longest, dog-legged route possible—I got story after horrific story. He used I-80, I-71 and finally I-480 as a heart breaking visual aid, pointing out where this happened and where that happened.
There was the story about the family of five who stopped in the right lane of the Turnpike near Exit 261 after hitting a deer, only to be plowed into by a semi seconds later, killing everyone except the youngest child, who was sitting in the middle of the front seat.
There was the older couple zigzagging through traffic in their Volvo convertible when the driver lost control and somehow flipped the car, with its open top landing on the concrete divider between the eastbound and westbound lanes.
There were stories of wrecks people walked away from without a scratch, along with stories of people dying—sometimes multiple fatalities—in accidents that didn't initially appear all that severe.
DUI accidents. "Phone accidents." Crashes in bad weather. Huge semis in ditches that took days to pull out. Motorcycle accidents. Suicides. Murders. There were a couple of stories about times that people crashed into his truck when he was working, stories of co-workers hit by motorists and killed.
At one point, I asked him if he was desensitized to what he sees.
He said he was, to a certain degree.
But he said he still has a hard time dealing with children who are killed or severely injured.
After 26 years on the job, most of those years working 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., six days a week, he said—in not so many words—that he'd learned how to compartmentalize what he sees.
We got back to the Triple Wide around 9:00 p.m.
Chris angled his ramp so I could drive the RAV4 down it and into the back of my driveway. It still runs, although noisily. I think it's the water pump. Who knows?
After we did the paperwork, Chris gave me a Hollywood-handsome grin I didn't think he had as I shook his hand, gave him a gentle chest bump and offered a sincerely heartfelt:
"Be safe out there."
Perhaps it was cathartic for Chris to tell me as much as he did. I know police officers and firefighters enjoy—probably a bad choice of words—telling stories about their ordeals. I have to imagine his wife has heard all the stories, too—stories that, after a while, probably run together until they're all but the same.
I doubt he'll be putting the story of me and my RAV4 into his storytelling power rotation.
