Kindness Of Strangers

***Corny Post Disclamer***
Once again, we had a very busy Saturday today. We had tithing settlement at 9:30, Rob had a Jr. Jazz meeting at 10:00-11:15 and then we had to hurry and leave for my Timothy family Christmas party in Provo. Plus, we had Brooklyn's Christmas dance recital in SL at 6:15.

It had snowed most of the morning, so we knew the roads would be bad. We left a little early to the Christmas party compensate. Well, I am normally a fast driver. Some might call it speeding. Unfortunately.. today was no different. The roads started out pretty clear from Tooele. But getting closer to SL, they got a little worse on I-80. So I did slow down. And I changed lanes to what I thought was a better lane. But it turned out it was a more snowy slippery lane. So I tried to change back (at this time I was going just under the speed limit which is 75. Yeah.. I know.. dumb.) But during my lane change, the car began sliding off the road toward the center median. My first instinct of course was to hit the brakes, but luckily I had my husband in the car who said, "Don't hit the brakes!!!" So I didn't, and I just tried to control the slide. First we slid to the left shoulder, I thought I had got the car back on the road, but then we slid clear off to the right shoulder, down the embankment, and into a field. Far into a field, sliding all the way. We ended up facing almost perpendicular to the freeway.

It's amazing when stuff like that happens really. I had time to think about a lot of things. My kids were screaming in the car, and I was able to say while we were sliding in the field, "We're okay!! We're okay!!" As soon as we came to a stop and we all were okay... I felt so drained. I thought I was going to pass out. After a few minutes of gaining composure...Robert got out of the car and began trying to push us out of mud and snow. The snow and mud were up to the car door at least. We really weren't making any progress.

Suddenly, I noticed a truck pulling over on SR 201. The field was in the middle of I-80 and 201. A man and his 12-14 year old son got out of the truck, and walked down a steep embankment, and walked across a snowy field and offered to help us push our van out. He said that if this didn't work, he had a tow something on his truck and he'd tow us out!! If he were to do that, it would mean him driving until he could get onto I-80, driving down the embankement himself, and towing us up. I'm sure it would take at least an hour for him to do this. I'm sure he had a lot of better things to do.

Luckily, the man power of those 3 guys, and my expert driving stunt skills(yeah right) got us up on the freeway in less than 2 minutes. Rob shook their hands and thanked them. I yelled my thanks from my open window on the freeway. The embankment they had to walk up was much steeper than ours I'm sure. A few minutes later, it really, really hit me how inconvienenced I would have been if the tables had been turned. I wouldn't have wanted to stop. If we were to have stopped, we'd be late for a Christmas party. Robert would get snowy and muddy, etc..etc. Yet here were two people who weren't concerned about getting snowy and muddy, or being late to anything. They wanted to help us.

I am extremly grateful we were protected. (A 1/2 mile in either direction, and we would have hit a gard rail or fence, not to mention we didn't roll in the field). I am also grateful for this experience because this it taught me many lessons (like drive slow in bad conditions). But most of all, I want to be a person who stops.