A Strange Encounter With A Stranger

We all need picked up out of a roadside ditch now and then

A country road in Southern Maryland Credit: Dunks Photo

Last Saturday afternoon began as uneventfully as any other. But it wouldn’t stay that way.

Let’s backtrack a little. Over the last month or so, I have been one cranky customer due to: multiple writing deadlines both here and elsewhere, the punishing slog of political conventions, the never-ending convoy of news developments forever swerving at us with its high beams on, extended-family health setbacks, the oppressive heat that has made fishing an unfruitful chore even when I can get away to do it………All of this has conspired to make me feel like a veal calf locked in its TV/internet pen, unable to move freely, longing to be turned into cutlets, drenched in Marsala, and put out of its misery.

Even my Great Pyrenees, Solomon, has looked at me with wary eyes lately, as I keep stiffing him on his daily expedition to one park or another. When he hears the front door open, and emerges from behind his favorite bush, seeing me walk to the car without his leash (a sign of betrayal he recognizes as me just going on a non-dog-related errand, probably to pick up more caffeine or alcohol — the sun and moon of the overworked), I can almost hear him saying, “I get next-to-no stimulation besides chasing the occasional squirrel and smelling the crotch of the Amazon delivery guy. Thanks for letting me down again, buddy-f***ker.”

But on Saturday afternoon, things finally let up. So my wife Alana and I load up Solomon in the truck for an away-game walk, rolling down the windows to let the wind hit him in the face, as he sits erect and stone-still, taking it in with his eyes closed in blissful serenity, like a Himalayan Sherpa on a mountaineering smoke-break, savoring every puff. 

We head to a nearby one-street Southern Maryland town, studded with beautiful old Victorians —  a former Patuxent River port village torched by the Brits in the War of 1812 on their march to incinerate Washington. Though it still has a mini-wharf where — when my sons were young, before I ever put a fly rod in their hands — we used to go drown nightcrawlers, trying to coax channel catfish into accepting our worm sacrifices. We disembark at an old cemetery, bordered by a clapboard Methodist church on one side and a broken-down tobacco barn on the other. Some of the gravestones here go back 200-plus years.

I like to walk my dog in cemeteries. Not only because there’s rarely people there, aside from the ones six feet under. But because the latter demographic reminds me that my fleeting concerns are just that.  (I haven’t surveyed any of our below-ground friends, but I assume precisely none of them give a rip about who wins the election in November.)  I also like the way Solomon sniffs the headstones before trying to mark his territory on them. I tell him “no,” and pull him back before he activates his sprinkler, out of respect for the departed.  Still, I admire his defiance — nonchalantly pissing in the face of death. It’s no accident that dogs are often happier than we are.

On the way back to the house, driving along a road that overlooks our home river — its marshlands teeming with blue heron and bald eagles — we drive around a bend and encounter a middle-aged man with his SUV parked in the middle of the street, his door open. He is frantically shouting into his phone.  He’s wearing what looks like a Scoutmaster uniform — the boyish cap, the woggle-secured neckerchief, the works. I contemplate leaning on my horn to get him to close his door, allowing for easier passage. But he looks so serious about conveying something to whoever he’s talking to, I resist, and just scoot by him. It’s about then I pick up the sight of an older man — possibly in his early seventies — about 30 yards away. His arms are covered in gauzy bandages, with a little blood seeping through. He is stumbling around the middle of the road. And then he teeters off of it, looking as unsteady as a hippo on a tightrope. He face-plants straight into a weedy gulch.

I immediately pull over, get out, and wrap my arms around him to help bring him to his feet. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” he insists before I do, looking like a struggling turtle turned over on its carapace — though he is on his stomach, but similarly unable to move, as his limbs spasm to regain uprightness. Alana runs down the road to find out what the Scoutmaster knows — he doesn’t know much, it turns out, but he is now alerting a 911 operator.

The second I pull the man up alongside me, I catch an alcohol-infused gale. He smells like a brewery. At first, I think maybe he is having some coronary episode. But I ask him outright, “You’re drunk, right?” He looks at me with a flat stare, as if he’s been caught red-handed and has no alibi. “Yes,” he admits.  While trying to gather whether he’s in any sort of real medical jeopardy  — he insists he’s fine — I ask him if he lives around here.  Yes, he says.  He gives me an address. “I just need to get home,” he pleads. I feel sorry for him. I’ve been there, brother.

I tell him to wait in my vehicle, where Solomon is looking on curiously in the backseat. And he doesn’t need to be asked twice. He immediately gets in, and I figure I’d better move Alana’s purse back with the dog, in case our visitor decides to rifle through it, or accidentally urinates on it while I go find out what’s what from the Scoutmaster. The latter seems mostly in the dark, too. Scout just happened to find him wandering and bleeding, and bandaged his wounds. He’s trying to get an EMT to pick the guy up. But the guy has insisted to me he doesn’t need any medical treatment, so I call Scout off, and tell him I’ll take him home. Scout wants to make sure: “You’ve got him, then?”  Yes, I assure him. A successful human-misery baton handoff.

Alana and I get in the truck, she in the backseat, since my new passenger has already helped himself to shotgun. I ask for his address again. Alana plugs it into her GPS, though he sloppily insists he can get us there without technological assistance. I’m not even sure his address is real.  I ask his name.  He tells me it’s “Roy” (I’ve changed it), and that he’s lived “right up the street for nearly 50 years.”

We ride quietly for a while, then I try to make polite conversation. “So, what’s your poison of choice?” I inquire. “Beer,” he slurs. “Why do you ask?”  I pity Roy. It’s a tough road, being a beer drunk. You generally have to drink a lot more beer than you do if you were say, a whiskey fiend, to get the same job done.  Though you not only sustain the same liver damage, but also suffer the additional bloat, even though Roy looks as wiry as a Whippet.

I catch my wife’s eyes in the rearview, and she looks at me in a way that says, “WTF? You gonna compare favorite bourbons with the town drunk next?”  But I’m just trying to make him feel at ease, as it has to be embarrassing for him, face-planting on the side of a country road. We ride in silence for another minute or so, when Roy volunteers: “My wife died two years ago. Cancer. It ate her up pretty fast.”

I tell him how sorry I am. I’ve known plenty of friends and family this has happened to, and there’s nothing harder than losing a spouse. Roy takes a beat, then says without any drama or spite or rancor, “It’ll happen to you, too.” I glance at Alana in the rearview again, her eyes now full of sorrow. And I know Roy is right. Unless we go down in a fiery plane crash together, either she will check out, or I will, before either of us are ready for checkout time.  And one of us will be left alone, trying to remember how to live without the benefit of the other.

I ask Roy if he has any other family in the area. He does. Some adult kids, he says, about a half an hour away. “Let’s call them,” I suggest. “You don’t seem to be in the best of shape. You could use a little help.”

“Don’t!” he firmly insists. “Don’t call them. They already know.” They already know that he’s been caught wandering around aimlessly, collapsing on the side of a rural road? Or they already know that this isn’t out of character for him when he drinks himself into a stupor? I don’t press.

Another 30 seconds of silence go by, and Roy reiterates that he’s lived around here for nearly 50 years, and that his wife died of cancer two years ago. Two facts he repeats at least once more. At first, I think he might be suffering from dementia, in addition to inebriation. But then I realize that Roy is essentially talking to himself, not me. He’s a man trying to reclaim a life that is mostly lost, a life now defined more by what’s gone than by what’s still here.

I ask him why I found him on the road —  a road that isn’t anything like a pedestrian thoroughfare. Now that we’re five minutes into the trip, it’s obviously not all that close to home. He says he was walking his dog, Beau Jocque. Which makes me immediately think Roy is a man I could do musical business with under different circumstances, as that’s a great Zydeco singer’s name. But before I have a chance to ask him about the dog-name inspiration, he tells me his dog was lost on his drunk-walk when he collapsed. We need to find him.

I’m a sucker for dogs, of course, so I don’t intend to let one stay lost. I point to my dog in the backseat, still happily taking wind in the face, but who is suspiciously side-eyeing this mysterious, sozzled stranger. I tell Roy that first, we need to get him back to his house, then my dog back to my house, so that my oversized dog doesn’t try to eat his undersized dog if I can find him, which I will do.

We finally pull into Roy’s driveway. It is way too many miles away from where I found him for him to have been on a drunken dog walk. But Roy hasn’t bum-steered us that he lived here. It’s a nice house, with manicured landscaping and well-crafted stone and woodwork. He built the house himself, he tells me. He’s lived here for nearly 50 years. “So I’ve heard,” I offer.

I walk around to the passenger side to steady Roy as we stumble into his house, not wanting him to fall again. Beau Jocque, thankfully, is barking in a bay window. Roy never lost him at all. He’s been here all along, and Roy was telling me imaginary stories about being on a dog-walk. When I come into the house and squat down to pay attention to Beau Jocque, making sure he’s okay and well-fed (he is), the dog just seems utterly happy to have a new face to lick.

Aside from some dark stains on the couch upholstery, and some half-empty pizza boxes in the kitchen, Roy’s house is in pretty good shape for no longer benefiting from a woman’s touch.  (Alana, who has always been a neat-freak Felix to my packrat Oscar, later tells me that if she goes first, mine would be in a lot worse shape — someone will probably have to dig me out of the wreckage with a backhoe.) Roy is still unsteady on his feet. So I make him promise not to try to walk upstairs until he sobers up. And whatever he does, he cannot drive. He will kill himself or somebody else. He promises. I fill two glasses of water from his kitchen sink, put them on his living room coffee table, and walk him over to the couch, where I tell him to sleep it off and/or watch TV until he’s right again. He promises he will. As I grab his shoulder to help guide him to his sofa, he throws an arm around me, hugging me. Not like a drunk man, just like a genuinely grateful one.

“Thank you,” he says, tearing up. “Thank you for getting me home. You didn’t have to do this.”  I tell him not to worry about it. I drive drunk guys on fake dog-walks on country roads home all the time. I’ll call him tomorrow to make sure he’s okay.

On the way home, we drive past a smashed-up car ­– Roy’s car — that looks like it came to rest on a tree stump in someone’s yard. The police are already gathered around it. I suspect Roy will have another visitor or two before the night’s over, even if his kids don’t make the scene.

The next morning — Sunday morning — I am sitting in church. My church attendance, always spotty, has grown downright quarterly-at-best in recent years. First, because of Covid. Next, because of all the excuses I tend to present now that Covid is no longer a good excuse. On Sunday mornings, there is always more sleep to catch, or more fish, or whatever other temporal concern is distracting me in this life from that which involves the life to come.

But the guest preacher has my undivided attention today, as I’ve been sleeping with her for decades. It’s my wife, Alana. Much more faithful than me, she’s taught a class at our church for the last several years. But lately, she’s been asked to do some guest shots in front of the entire congregation. And though I was raised Southern Baptist, and Baptists are theoretically against swearing, allow me to say that she’s damn good at it. It makes me feel like a prized secret is getting shared, as an auditorium of people is now benefiting from the wisdom I receive in abundant supply at home.

The passage her sermon is based on is Psalm 144. Sample:

Lord, what are human beings that you care for them,
mere mortals that you think of them?
They are like a breath;
their days are like a fleeting shadow.

Alana tells us that being a Christian isn’t all sweetness and light. Like the rest of life, it is hard at times. But going it alone can be even harder.  She tells us how to pray.  To offer prayers not just of supplication — asking for things that we need. But those of thanksgiving, as we often miss the everyday miracles that show up under our radars. Prayer, she tells us, helps us remember:

A couple weeks ago, after sharing a few details of my life as of late, my friend asked, ‘Do you see that God has come through for so many of your prayers from the last several years?’ And then she added, ‘You see that, right?’ In essence, she was ensuring that I hadn’t been blinded by the fact that nothing had happened sensationally, maybe not as I expected, maybe not as soon as I wanted, but that many miracles had undeniably taken place. Slowly, over time, like waiting for water to boil. And then it finally does. Sometimes, we fail to see the mystery unfolding before our eyes. Taking the time to remember before launching into the rest of our prayers, is  ‘entering his courts with praise.’ It changes our hearts, it changes our minds, and it changes our relationship with God. Clearly, David remembered.

And not just David, the Psalmist, but also that other great songwriter, Kris Kristofferson. Who Alana reminds us sang “Why Me,” which she quotes, and which is one of my favorite songs:

Why me Lord, what have I ever done
To deserve even one
Of the pleasures I’ve known
Tell me Lord, what did I ever do
That was worth loving you
Or the kindness you’ve shown

Drawing the net, as if she were an old pro, Alana continues: “Like these two renowned musicians, from ancient times and today, we should recognize our place and be humbled by the Lord’s care for us. But if God thinks we are worthy, if God thinks so highly of us, then just maybe we should agree with him by believing him.”

I’ve rarely been prouder of my wife, and I’m proud of her plenty. When we come home from church, I even contemplate trying to get in the preacher’s pants. But I have some other business to tend to. I promised Roy I’d call to check in on his well-being, so I do.

I hit his voicemail several times, worrying that he’d either lost his phone, or that that the cops had indeed visited his house, and he was now in jail. But eventually, he answers. “How’d you get my number?” he wants  to know. This is one of the only upsides of being a drunk: you get to live life twice. A fresh surprise every day, even if you’ve already experienced it.  “You gave it to me,” I remind him.

Roy tells me he is fine. That the cops did indeed visit, but didn’t arrest him. He tells me he swerved the car off the road while trying to avoid a deer. (Okay, whatever, if that’s his story……)  He sounds sober, for now.

It occurs to me that if I’d passed Roy on a city street instead of a country road where nobody walks —the former being a place where we are often inured to human suffering — I might have walked right by him. As we train ourselves to train our eyes on other distractions. The better to convince ourselves that such a fate could never befall us. That our good health or status or financial security somehow wards off unpleasant inevitabilities, like death or loss or general misfortune.

An old pal of mine, the writer Jay Nordlinger, who has graced these pages before, likes to walk the streets of Manhattan, where he lives.  And when he runs into those who are less fortunate than him — often barking mad and barking to themselves —  instead of ignoring them, as so many others do, Jay will often square up, addressing them directly, asking, “You angry?” They usually say something like, “Hell yes, I’m angry!” To which Jay responds, “Well I am, too!” And then he will tell them not just how much God loves them — though Jay does indeed tell them that — but he tells them about the particulars of what’s bothering him. Not because he’s a solipsist, but because he’s not. Because Jay knows that sometimes the best way to help people isn’t to pity them from afar, but to sit with them as co-equals, a fellow sufferer of the human condition. Your problems are your own, but everyone else has them, too.

Back on the phone, Roy remembers that he had thanked me before. But he says he really needs to thank me again. “You didn’t have to do that. You didn’t have to get me home.”

Oh, but I kind of did. It was out of my hands. I couldn’t very well leave a septuagenarian flailing like a turtle in a roadside ditch without feeling like a monster. And besides, even if what happened to Roy hasn’t happened to me literally, it has happened to me figuratively.  I’ve needed someone to pull me out of a ditch, and to show me the way home.

And just as Roy warned me, even if it hasn’t happened to you yet…….. it’ll happen to you, too.

Bonus Tracks: Here’s my favorite stranger song, and coincidentally, my favorite Kinks song, titled, appropriately enough, “Strangers.”  Played over some great visuals by Wes Anderson from The Darjeeling Limited. (There’s something I find beautifully moving about Adrien Brody struggling to run after a train, while throwing his suitcase on the caboose.)

And while this isn’t my favorite version of the aforementioned Kris Kristofferson’s “Why Me” (that would be the one he cut off his wonderful 1999 album, The Austin Sessions), I’m including this live version since he tells the story of the song, and also has the Hillbilly Dalai Lama, Willie Nelson, sitting beside him, singing harmony: