Roadside Rescue Part 2

It’s almost comical when you’re the one who’s supposed to be “keeping it together” in the middle of complete uncertainty.

Huxley needed answers:

How long will it take to fix the car?
Where are we going to stay?
Will we make it to the lake day we planned our summer around?

The only answer I could give for sure was:
“I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”

Inside I was lamenting:

What the hell are we doing broken down in Idaho with an old car, two kids and no plan?

What awful luck!

Ironically, I’d tempted fate that morning by spouting some new-age, positive affirmation that “things are always working out for us.”

Now our car was a 3,500 lb. steel storage bin sitting in the dusty heat of Kellogg, Idaho.

So much for positive thinking.

So what do you do when you’re in a pit of despair and fate throws you a shovel?

It turned out to be a great opportunity to dig a bit deeper.

Kayla and I instinctively calmed the kids down.

Not with answers, but with stories.

This wasn’t our first disaster-rodeo.

“Once we got stuck in a snowdrift on a back country road with no cell phone service.”

“Once we drove from Los Angeles to Colorado with earplugs after our muffler fell off.”

“Once we got stranded in Paris when we missed our check in time by seconds.”

In each of these tales, disaster set the stage, but the story was defined by the way things worked their way out in the end.

And as we laughed at the hubris and resourcefulness of past calamities… Our mindset shifted from “why us?” to “what now?”

…and things started falling into place.

Kayla found us a place to sleep.

My dad helped diagnose the issue from across the country.

Huxley and I picked up parts from a dusty little auto shop.

A rag-tag towing company bumped us to the front of the line and their humble, heartful mechanic got us back on the road.

We’d gone from the low of despair to the height of elation in the span of 24 hours.

Turns out, if we had broken down anywhere else… the mountains, the wilderness, the long stretches of empty interstate… we’d have been hosed.

But this funny little town had everything we needed, against all odds.

That assertion that “things are always working out for us” might not have been tempting fate, but calling in the set pieces and people we depended on in the telling of our story.

Digging deeper…

It’s easy to call something a disaster in the moment.

It’s harder to see ourselves in the middle of a story unfolding.

What if the scene of the breakdown is the perfect chance to fall apart?

The low before the high?

Because when I zoom out… all I can see are these patterns stretching out in this colorful tapestry of “we’ll figure it out” and “remember that one time?”

Again and again.

Over generations.

Even when it seemed like the end of the line, it was just another stitch in a long history of people driving, thriving, or surviving.

And hey, things are always working out for us…

At least, I like to think so.

After all, it required everything in history to happen just as it did…

For us to be here living our stories at all.

Cheers,

~Ry

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“100 bad days made a 100 good stories.
100 good stories make me interesting at parties”
–AJR