I was coming back to my home in the mountains one night with my little girl and a puppy, when we saw a truck stopped above on the switchback turn - he was stuck, and he was outside digging out around the tires. He had taken that huge truck around a sharp switchback, but the road was a little icy and at some point he'd drifted back until the back of the large wagon he was hauling was up against the cliff that started at the edge of the road. He wasn't going anywhere. Somebody was already out there helping him.
Wanting to get my daughter, my puppy and me home, I considered taking the long way, which meant going back down to the highway a few miles, down through a nearby tiny town, and then out another gravel road maybe about ten miles until it got to the valley where my house is. That gravel road is also full of treacherous switchbacks, and would also be icy on this cold winter night, but the real problem is it's isolated - you go off the road out there, nobody might come by for days, because nobody has any need for that road outside of hunting season. So I hesitated and decided to see if I could help the guy.
He had a huge semi-trailer kind of truck but the bed he was carrying was actually empty. Usually people are bringing heavy equipment over the ridge I live on the other side of - bulldozers, things like that to do some kind of project or building or something. Why he would move anything over that ridge on a winter night was beyond me - it seemed to me that maybe he was trying to sneak over there, doing it on a snowy night and all - but I never found out. I asked him if I could help him as he seemed to be pouring sand or something under the large wheels of the bed. But he just mumbled in response, and, worse, I got the slight impression that he was drunk. You'd have to be drunk, I thought, to bring a semi like this over this ridge on this cold night.
At that point I gave up and decided to go the long way around. It was a remote road, full of switcyhbacks and dangerous, but at least I'd make it home. The problem as I saw it was this: most of the people that could pull him out were on my side, the town side, but couldn't reach him, because he was blocking the turn. They'd have to get past him just to put a chain on him and start pulling him out, and they couldn't get past him because he was blocking the whole switchback. If there was some mountain road you could take to get through the forest and up to the ridge around him, and then come back down, you could do it, but I didn't know of any such road or maybe I would have considered taking it myself. I couldn't get around him, and I didn't want to wait until he figured out how to get himself out of that jam.
Fortunately my neighbor was a car or two behind me - by now there were about five of us waiting on him - and she rolled down her window and we talked. I told her I didn't trust his ability to get out of that jam so there was nothing for it but to go back down and go the long way around. She agreed to follow me. It would be safer if there were two of us going gingerly over those mountain switchbacks. And sure enough it was. She followed behind me, or rather her son did, as he was driving, and slowly we did that ten miles of mountain gravel and came back down into our own valley where some of the roads were real slippery but we knew the way and could get home one way or the other.
Now this did not answer the question of how that guy got up there in the first place, or how they ever got him out. It turns out one of our other neighbors went and got a fire truck and pulled him out from above him, on the ridge side of the switchback. That's what I noticed, I said, you could only get at him to pull him out if you were above him, so only someone from our remote isolated valley could have done it. But this guy did it. He took a fire truck up that ridge, and a chain, and used it, and yanked him out. I was impressed. But I knew it must have taken him half the night. Any of those other people in the other cars would have had to either sit there a few hours, or turn around and go back to town. There was no getting around him until he got his truck yanked out of that slippery patch.
People are more resilient than you think. Even in his drunk and confused state, if he was in fact drunk, he had friends, and he must have been able to contact that neighbor to get him to go pull the fire truck out of the bay. Of course he'd been carrying sand, and other things that he might have needed in that situation. And what was more remarkable to me was that the guy who pulled him out had the time, and was able to just go grab a fire truck and do it. Maybe he wasn't supposed to do it, because it wasn't an official call or because that's not what fire trucks are for, but he did it anyway. That's because on a cold, snowy night in a remote valley, if somebody needs help to get out of a jam, you go and help him. People rise to meet the needs of their neighbors and help each other out.
The truck driver, as it turned out, had been on one of the local fire departments at some point, and that I think helped. They knew him. It didn't matter if it was bad judgment to take that truck up that mountain in the first place, we're all guilty of bad judgment once in a while. Look at me for example. But on that night, I apparently did the right thing. The neighbor told me later that it was her birthday - she and her son had gone to town to celebrate. Well, I led her home over that back route, being myself more concerned with the little girl and the puppy's safety, but you never get out of winter without at least one of these stories. And this winter, this was mine.
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