A Dark Road to Fargo

The night was dark and cold, which wasn’t unusual, considering that it was December and we were somewhere in the middle of nowhere, roughly a dozen miles east of Fargo, North Dakota. The snow wasn’t unusual either; if it had been worse, I probably wouldn’t have been driving, as I was 18 and only on a learner’s permit. 

The car was an old station wagon which belonged to my boyfriend, and it was a definite improvement from the death trap Mazda that he had owned before. In fact, this was the reason that he had the station wagon; he had taken the Mazda to the shop and the guy there said that there was no way it could be fixed up to an acceptable level to drive safely on the road. The station wagon was one of his loaner cars, and he offered that to my boyfriend for a decent price, and the deal was done. 

It was a little after 9pm, which, in New York City is just when the party is getting started. In northern Minnesota, though, the road seemed to be ours alone, and I was looking forward to pulling into Fargo. The darkness and the emptiness didn’t necessarily bother me, but I knew I’d feel better actually being at our destination. Being 1997, we didn’t have cell phones or internet radio; on certain stretches, we were lucky to get halfway decent radio reception. We were but just one tiny point of light travelling along the road. My boyfriend had grown up in this area, and nights like these were just a part of life up there, but as a city kid whose thoughts wandered a lot, the darkness, emptiness, and cold made me feel as though it was all that we could do in these moments to keep them all at bay in order to not be consumed by them.

On the right side, off on the shoulder was a car with its emergency flashers on. Being from Chicago, it barely registered; people brake down, help gets sent out to them. One has to be careful about these things; not only is it incredibly dangerous to stop when you don’t know what you’re doing, one never knows if it’s some sort of trap either. For this reason, I registered that it was there, and with barely another thought, kept going.

“Pull over!” my boyfriend told me.

“What?” I was more than a little confused.

“Pull over!”

I knew he meant it, and so I went about the task of pulling over to the side in a safe manner. Still confused, I asked him why we were pulling over. I knew it had something to do with the car on the side of the road, but I wasn’t comprehending exactly what we’d accomplish here.

“There might be people in that car,” he said. ”I’m going to go check. That’s what we do up here.” 

It finally dawned on me why we stopped. Yes, I can be slow to the obvious sometimes. If someone needed help, there was no way to know without stopping. It was possible that everything was fine. However, if it wasn’t, who knew when the next car coming by might be.

My boyfriend trotted back to the car. I kept glancing back, but I was terrified to get out. He was back there for what seemed like a very, very long time, and then he came back, reporting that there was a lady with kids in the car and they were on their way to Fargo to pick up her husband from work when the car broke down, and that they’d been sitting there for ten minutes already because there was next to nobody on the road. According to the lady, she’d be okay if she could get to her husband; he’d be able to take care of the car and everything. 

Very, very carefully, I backed up on the shoulder to get closer to the other car. When I was decently close, I stopped, and my boyfriend got out again to go by the lady to help her. She got out of the car, and as she got the kids out, I realize that they were little. Once she got to the car, I think she said that they were 3 and 18 months. Even being 18, imagining being broken down with two little kids like that really hit me hard. How long would they had to have waited if we didn’t stop? 

In any case, the station wagon had plenty of room for the three of them in the back seat. All three of them were incredibly quiet back there while I drove into Fargo. As we got into the city, she started giving directions as to where to go. I basically knew how to get to North Dakota State University by myself, so to deviate from this course, I needed a bit of hand-holding. The woman found her husband at his job, I’m sure cash was offered and refused, everybody was good, and we said our farewells. 

I’m sure most of us have had those moments in our lives where we’ve been really thankful for an “angel” to help us out of a bit of trouble. I think that this was the moment in my life where I understood that it’s important as a matter of course to keep our eyes open to opportunities to be that “angel” for others as well. At the same time, “this is what we do here” normalizes this type of behavior, and makes it possible to build actual communities. Funny how “bear each other’s burdens” is fundamental in multiple ways! 

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