A Dusty Tires Short Story

By Ken Drenten

The man and woman in the compact car were young, newly married, and looking forward to their first Christmas together. She had insisted that they drive to her parents’ home in Rendville, Ohio; he had to work late at the newspaper.

Because of this, they were not able to leave until very late in the afternoon the day before Christmas. They had intended to leave by 3 p.m.

By the time they left their apartment, the rain that had been falling all day was changing to snow. Their white two-door Toyota hatchback was loaded with gifts and food.

They passed through the town where they lived, and on the other side, into flat, open country. The snow fell in the darkness on the two-lane highway and seemed to close in on them. The landscape was broken only by occasional houses, barns and clumps of trees. Wind whipped snow across the roadway and the little car’s windshield.

“I wish we’d been able to start out on time,” she said as he drove. “What kept you at the office so long today?”

He grimaced at the headlights of a car approaching on the other side of the road. “Work,” he said. “I had to meet a deadline.”

She was silent. He knew she was not satisfied with that answer. 

“My editor said he wanted the story I’d been working on for several days before Christmas so they could use it to fill in next week when most of the staff will be off,” he added. “So it had to be done by Christmas Eve.”

They came to an intersection with a flashing red light, and the car skidded a bit when he applied the brakes.

“Be careful,” she said, her voice raising an octave in alarm.

It was snowing so hard now he could barely see more than a couple car lengths ahead. He slowed down to about 40 mph. A truck was somewhere up ahead; its red taillights could be seen only faintly.

He knew that on this lonely stretch of road there were no gas stations or businesses of any sort. There was just flat farmland and a ditch on either side. The next town was about 30 more miles ahead.

The road seemed to be getting slicker. He slowed the car even more but the car’s cheap tires had a hard time gripping the road.

The car’s tires suddenly lost their grip completely on a patch of ice, sending them spinning around in the road like a top. In what seemed to them like slow motion, the car landed hard into a ditch on the opposite side of the road, with its front end plowing into the watery trough.

Stunned by the impact, he looked around for a second. He heard the car’s engine whine to a stop. His wife’s head rested against the window on her side of the car.

“Hey, honey, are you OK?” he gasped, touching her shoulder. She didn’t move at first, then she groaned and put a hand to her head and rubbed her neck.

“My head hurts,” she said. “How are you?”

“I’m OK, but my leg feels jammed in there,” he said. “It hurts and I can’t get it out. Let’s see your head.”

She told him she thought it was just a bump and a bit of a scrape that was bleeding. He helped her wrap her neck scarf around the wound and tried to comfort her, but she was direct in her assessment of the situation.

“We need to get help.”

“I know.”

“I mean, both of us are hurt.”

He shrugged. “Not badly, though. Can you open your door?”

She shook her head. The door had been dented out of shape. He tried his own door, but it was jammed fast against the side of the muddy ditch.

He tried the ignition key, and the car started after a few tries, but the tires just spun in the icy mud when he revved the engine. He switched it off.

“I don’t think we’re going to drive this car out of this ditch,” he said.

A few minutes passed. They heard a car go by and their hopes lifted. The car continued on its way.

“Maybe they couldn’t see us!” she exclaimed. She was becoming more concerned about their situation now.

He gritted his teeth and nodded as a dull pain became more noticeable in his right ankle. “I think my ankle may be broken,” he said.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Can you move it at all?”

“Not without a lot of pain. How’s your head feel?”

“Not great,” she said. “But is your leg still stuck?”

“I just can’t move it,” he said. They were both silent for a few minutes.

“We need to get out of this car,” she said. “It’s getting cold.”

“Can you roll down your window?” he asked. She tried. It was jammed. After a few more tries, it moved a few inches, then a few more. “Look in the front of the car, in the glovebox, under the seat for anything we can use to start a fire.”

She came up with some outdated receipts and old newspapers. He dug up some spare change and some plastic grocery bags.

“Any matches? Can you look in your purse?”

She shook her head but looked anyway. She found not one but two books of matches from the restaurant where she was employed as a waitress.

“Good. Now let’s put some change in the bags to weigh them down. Wad up the papers in them, light them and try to toss them up onto the roadway.”

She nodded and went to work on the window until it was nearly halfway down.

“Here come some headlights,” she said. They lit one of the bags and she managed to toss it into the road. The car passed by while the little trash fire burned itself out in the snow.

“We must get out,” she said. “I’ll try to push my door open with my legs.” She strained but it was no use. They were jammed in tight. They waited a little while longer, huddling together the best they could to try to keep warm.

About a mile away, a white International utility truck with a bucket lift drove through the darkness and swirling snow toward a reported electricity outage. The passenger in the truck, a power line mechanic, suddenly told the driver to stop.

“I see somethin’ up ahead, Cap,” he said. “Looks like a car in the ditch.”

Between them, the two line mechanics had 40-odd years of experience wrangling electric distribution lines for the power company. This kind of situation, in this kind of weather, was not what they faced every day, but was not unknown either.

Parking the truck by the side of the road, the pair turned on emergency flashers and put out orange reflective cones. Cap trained a spotlight on the truck into the ditch and around the scene. It was hard to see through the heavy snowfall. 

The small car had spun off the road, striking a power line pole. Now both the car and the crumpled pole, with its electric lines still attached, were resting in the ditch.

Cap tugged on his bristly gray-and-black beard and swore. “There’s people inside. Call this in and get the sheriff, too. We’ll need a tow truck and the squad.”

The young man and woman waved back to them when asked if they were OK.

The other line mechanic, a tall, wiry man whose nickname was Tiny, called the power company’s regional dispatch center on the truck’s two-way radio. The local sheriff and fire departments were notified quickly.

Cap called to the people in the car but didn’t walk too close to it. “We’re gonna to get you out. Stay in there. Don’t move.”

Then they waited. Infrequent cars went by slowly, their occupants straining to see what was happening. Cap and Tiny directed them past the accident scene. A voice called to them from the dispatch center on the radio.

“OK, they got it,” Cap said. “Git the recloser at the next pole.” They extended a long pole and manually switched a pole-mounted circuit breaker. This ensured the power was turned off at the circuit they would be handling.

Within a few minutes, vehicles flashing blue and red emergency lights pulled up. Men and women in blue uniforms quickly assessed the scene and organized to extract the trapped couple. The firefighters and emergency medical technicians expertly loaded them into an ambulance that took them to a hospital. About an hour later, a tow truck was hauling the car away.

While that happened, the two line mechanics worked in the snowy night to replace the pole, restring the conductor cable and restore power. The sheriff’s deputy stayed with them to direct traffic.

When their work was complete, Cap and Tiny finished putting away their equipment and walked up to the sheriff’s deputy.

“Unless you need us for anythin’ else, we need to run, boss. We got some more work to do tonight,” Cap said.

“Then we’d like to git on home for Christmas,” Tiny added.

“Good deal. You gave me your report and your phone numbers, so you get on home,” the officer said. “Glad you boys came along when you did.”

They chatted a bit more about the weather and people they knew in common, then Cap and Tiny shook the deputy’s hand, got in the truck and drove off, leaving tracks in the snow-covered road. The deputy went back to his cruiser and called in on the two-way radio.

After their long shift was over and Christmas Eve had turned to predawn darkness at the power company’s service center, the two utility workers said a few final words to each other in the parking lot.

“You gonna do what I think you’re gonna?” Cap said.

“Yup. You?” responded Tiny.

“You’re as brainless as that deer we saw by the side of the road,” said Cap. “But yeah. Then git home to yer wife an’ kids.”

Then each walked back to his own pickup truck and drove off.

Tiny didn’t go directly home. He stopped his GMC Sierra at an impound lot where the dented, muddy white Toyota was parked and spoke for a few moments with a man in a shack in the fenced-in yard. He went back to his truck with a wave and drove off.

Cap also took a detour. After a short time, he arrived at the hospital. Parking his Ram 1500 pickup, he jumped out and went in for a short time until he found who he was looking for. He returned and drove home.

Dawn came. The young couple emerged from the hospital’s emergency room where each had spent several unpleasant hours waiting and being treated for their injuries. It had been a long, exhausting night.

They were greeted by a hospital parking attendant who handed the man keys to a rental car. Someone had loaded the couple’s gift packages and foodstuffs into the vehicle.

A sheriff’s deputy was waiting for them as well. “Are you the couple we pulled out of the car in the ditch out on Route 4 tonight?” he asked. The man nodded.

“I don’t know who was responsible for all this,” the deputy said, nodding toward the rental car. “I just spoke with someone who told me there was a live electric line laying on your car. If you had tried to get out of the car on your own, you’d for sure be dead right now.”

The man looked shocked, then thoughtful. He turned to his wife. “Being stuck in the car saved our lives,” he murmured.

His wife mouthed, “Oh, my …” then shook her bruised head. They both thanked the deputy and shook his hand.

“Don’t thank me,” the deputy said. He zipped up his jacket and walked away.

“Come on, honey,” she said, gently putting his arm under hers. “Let’s get on with Christmas.”

Her husband walked gingerly with her support to the car. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess we’ve already been visited by angels.”

Ken Drenten is creator and editor of Dusty-Tires.com, a travel blog for out-of-the-ordinary places in Ohio.

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