Commentary: 2 noble-minded deeds, but just 1 expected ending

“Excuse me!” The words came out of the blackness at the small parking lot next to the Angeles Crest fire station, a place where, at 6 in the morning, I had never heard a voice before. “Excuse me!” I heard again and only then made out the outline of a man behind a car parked at an odd angle.

“I hit a rock, my tire’s flat, I can’t get a signal on my cellphone. Can you take me to somewhere where I can call ‘Triple A?’” So, no mystery after all. I said yes of course and 10 minutes later dropped him off at the Shell station near Foothill, where he looked like any traveler hit by bad luck but no longer a waif marooned on a black mountainside, within a few feet of an endless succession of hurrying cars, all of whose drivers would have helped him, but who was powerless to make contact with any of them. My being there for my daily hike was a piece of luck he could never have expected.

Now, this may be hard to believe, and you will have to trust me, but two weeks later at exactly that spot and at exactly the same time another car limped into the parking lot, its passenger side front tire making that dreadful scraping sound when the metal not the rubber hits the road.

But now I knew the routine. “You won’t get reception up here,” I told him. “I’ll take you to the Shell station.” He and his wife got into my car but decided to give it another try and to everyone’s surprise reached AAA. The reception wasn’t good and the dispatcher couldn’t understand how there could be a tire station on that remote road. Both their voices were taut with tension. “No, no, not tire station,” the man said, “fire station.”

In the end, he made himself understood and was told that help would arrive within 30 minutes, a weight lifted off his shoulders tempered only by the reflection that he would be late for work, would need to pay for a new tire and that his car’s front end might be badly damaged.

They didn’t need me anymore, so I took off.

An hour or so later when I came back one the firefighters was walking into the station. “The man with the flat tire got away OK then,” I said to him. “Yes, he did,” he replied “but he’d locked his keys in his car and had to be towed.”

I could only think of the chivalrous knight who berated a man for whipping his servant, then rode away very pleased with himself for his good deed, not knowing that as soon as he was gone the man whipped the boy even harder.

Call me the Don Quixote of Route 2.

Reg Green, lives in La Cañada. His website is www.nicholasgreen.org.