I’ll confess I was slightly disappointed by his junky-looking tools, but the others acted as if the messiah had arrived. He did not acknowledge me; he simply went to work as the rain fell on us. Among other things, my starter was bad. The wiry trucker was disconnecting the Impala’s custom headers to get to it when a tow-truck driver, a big, chubby man who told me to call him Snacker, got involved. Snacker had keys to a parts warehouse 60 miles east and offered to fetch the replacement starter and charge me only cost. The trucker and I went inside and drank sour coffee as we waited for him to return. He insisted on paying for my coffee. He never made eye contact. “You’re so kind to help me, and you won’t even let me buy your coffee,” I said. He replied, almost impatiently, “I have a daughter.” The thing is, he wasn’t nearly old enough to be my father.

When Snacker returned, it was around 10 p.m. The trucker proceeded to install the new starter and reconnect the exhaust, a task that — with no lift and in the rain in the middle of the night — was not enviable. When he was finished bolting the exhaust manifold, he had grease in his eyes. My car still would not start. After a lengthy diagnosis, he said the problem was a bad part in the electronic ignition, which had fried the original starter. Snacker, now part of our one-night team, agreed to go east once more to get the module. “I’ll get everything ready for when he returns,” the trucker told me. “You go sleep in my rig.” I protested. He insisted. “You have to drive to California tomorrow, and that’s a long ways. Get some sleep.” I thought it would bother him less if I complied, instead of pointing out that he had a tanker of chemicals that surely needed to be delivered someplace.

If you haven’t slept in a trucker’s cab, I can tell you that the interior is fancier than you might imagine. His special trucker alarm (almost impossible to turn off) blared at 5 a.m. The trucker himself was on the floor, below the slim bed. He was shirtless, a hand towel draped over him like a sad little blanket. As we both got up, we said nothing, made no eye contact, just like the night before. The rain had stopped, and the sun was coming up when Snacker returned with the magical part. The trucker installed it. The car rumbled to life when I turned the key. Snacker whooped. “Go, you’re set — that’s it,” the trucker said to me. I stayed there. I could not leave. “I must pay you. You worked all night on my car.” But I had given all I had besides gas money to Snacker for parts. “No,” he said. “No way.” I begged him to give me his address. I was crying. It could have been lack of sleep, but it was also a moment when I understood what it means to be overwhelmed by kindness. He refused and mentioned his daughter again, and it felt as if my insistence would disrupt the entire system by which he was operating. You do things sometimes for a stranger. You simply do them.

I left. I remember the angle of the early-morning sun as I pulled out of that truck stop. A day later, I crossed into California. I was on the part of I-80 where it starts to loop along next to the Truckee River when I passed a group of boys on the side of the road, shirtless, carrying towels. One of them put out his thumb. He did it playfully, I suspected, but I stopped anyway. There were six or seven of them, and when they piled in, the car sank on its springs. One gave directions to a house with a bunch of kids skateboarding in front, but then my passengers said actually it wasn’t where they needed to go and waved tauntingly at their friends as we gunned it. They did this twice more. I didn’t mind. They wanted to be seen in a dope ride. We drove around Truckee as they hung their arms out the windows and signaled to people they knew. I complied willingly, but understood that this was not my big chance to help a stranger. This was too much fun.