I’m going to take a little side trip today – and step away from my gentle musings and photographs depicting the sweet/harsh/confounding reality of my rustic rural life.
Although, come to think of it, what happened yesterday more or less falls into all of the above categories.
I start many days by visiting a local gas station/convenience store for my morning coffee.
This is one of those places that has a little seating area, a few rows of overpriced and essential snacks, lots of beer stacked in the back wall fridges, and a somewhat disturbing little refrigerator selling BAIT, which is right next to an identical fridge selling similarly-packaged NON-BAIT.
My concern here is that a person could purchase a container of yogurt and wind up with a mouth full of night crawlers.
At the front of the shop there is a food counter where you can order a basic sandwich, as well as the ubiquitous glass-walled countertop warmer where you can buy a slice of flat, oily, and frankly very enticing gas station pizza.
Lorraine runs the place, which serves a diverse clientele ranging from long-haul truckers to Mennonite farmers.
And me.
You can tell that Lorraine is a great manager because the place is spotless and the workers are friendly, competent, and patient.
I’ve gotten to know Lorraine over the last year or so, and when it’s not too busy in the shop she and I will chat. We shoot the breeze, complain about the weather and share the sort of basic personal information that verges on intimate but doesn’t cross a line.
Lorraine and I like each other. We have a nice rapport.
Yesterday morning I stopped in for my coffee, and the place was very busy. A military transport had pulled up and about a dozen guys wearing camouflage had spilled into the shop. They were ordering breakfast sandwiches and purchasing giant quart-sized Mountain Dews – the ones that look like cannisters of radiator fluid.
[And – can I add – how very young strong and LARGE these men were? Flanked by these guys while standing in the queue with my coffee, I felt like a munchkin getting ready to eat her breakfast under a toadstool.]
I made it up to the register and there was Lorraine. As usual.
Normally unflappable, on this morning she seemed stressed.
She greeted me: “Amy. You’ll never believe what I found this morning by the side of the road.”
Lorraine described the stretch of road she takes on her way to work. I know it well. It’s a pretty boring rural two-lane road with narrow gravel shoulders and not much else. No houses or buildings nearby.
I’m thinking. Hmmm. Around here you can find almost anything by the side of the road, because that’s where people put the stuff they don’t want.
I started guessing.
“An old chifforobe?”
No.
“A puppy?” “An armadillo?
[I started just guessing random stuff…]
No.
Lorraine got out her phone and pulled up a photo.
The photo was of a baby. A human baby wearing a diaper and nothing else.
At 5:30 that morning, on her way in to open up the shop, Lorraine found a baby by the side of the road.
The nights lately have been characteristically cold. Cold enough that you can’t put out your annuals without the risk of freezing.
My point is that it’s too cold for petunias.
Definitely too cold for a baby.
Lorraine pulled over and picked up the baby. Of course she did!
I’m pretty good at guessing baby-ages and by the photo I estimated that this baby was around 15-18 months old – way too young to have somehow wandered outside by itself.
The baby in Lorraine’s photo was a wobbly toddler.
Lorraine said the child was shivering. She said the baby sipped almost a whole bottle of water while the two sat in her car, waiting for rescue by second responders (…that morning Lorraine was the first responder).
No parents or other adults surfaced during the time Lorraine and the baby waited in her car.
The EMTs took about an hour to arrive (!!), and during that time the sun came up and the road got busy with trucks carrying lumber, hay, milk, and — apparently, military personnel.
I don’t recommend thinking too deeply about this episode because once you start imagining what might have happened if Lorraine hadn’t come by at 5:30AM, it’s hard to stop imagining it.
I thought about that baby all day.
First of all, there’s THIS:
The universe somehow put that baby into the path of a deeply compassionate and competent problem solver.
What a miracle.
People are amazing!
Secondly:
What a nightmare. Someone seems to have put that baby out into the dark and cold.
People are monsters.
In the afternoon I called Lorraine. It occurred to me that this extremely sanguine person might have been rattled by her early-morning experience. And yes — she was.
Lorraine said she hadn’t heard anything from law enforcement, and – frankly – I don’t know if she will. Do police or social services follow up with strangers delivering a miracle? Probably not.
I decided to try to find out more about this incident and so I did a little rooting around.
If you want to sleep at night, I DON’T suggest you do this.
I was not able to find out about this child, but the Internet coughed up so many similar stories that this sort of incident seems almost commonplace.
There is no tidy way to sum up this story, except to acknowledge the quick thinking and compassion of a regular person who set out for her pre-dawn shift and became something of a hero before she’d even warmed up that first pot of gas station coffee.
I’m reminded of Mr. Rogers’ beautiful and enduring advice, passed along from his mother to him, and now to us:
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'”
Love,
Amy
PS: As always, I treasure your “hearts,” comments, and stories. Please do share.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.