Colorblind

Colorblind

It was 1974, and Rex, his older brother Mike and his father, John were headed to Elko, Nevada on a deer hunting trip. It was dark, around eight or nine p.m. They had all of their gear and two horses in their trailer as they approached the Carlin tunnel. The tunnel was under construction and traffic was being diverted from the freeway to the old, two lane highway that followed along the river.

They were about halfway along this road when the lights shorted out on the truck. The road was narrow, but John managed to find a wide enough patch along the pavement to get the truck and trailer off the road. It was not the best place, because there was busy traffic on one side  and river on the other. With the hood up and one of the boys holding the flashlight, he tried to find the problem. The emergency flashers wouldn’t even work.

After struggling for some time, a pickup with a cab-over camper pulled up behind them and put on its emergency blinkers. The man was just returning from a deer hunt himself, had seen them broken down, driven until he had found a place to turn around and come back to help.

He and John worked together and finally found that the winch on the truck had rubbed the wiring apart. John patched the wires and they were good to go again. He shook the man’s hand, thanking him for his help.

He and the boys admired the four-point buck the man had harvested. They said goodbye and went their separate ways. Rex still remembers the man’s kindness and finds it remarkable that out of all of the many cars that passed them, a black man from Oakland stopped in the middle of nowhere to help some white people he didn’t know.

“With the hood up and one of the boys holding the flashlight, he tried to find the problem. The emergency flashers wouldn’t even work. ”

Photo by Jonas Verstuyft on Unsplash