On a Dark and Stormy Night
I delivered newspapers in a fairly rural area the summer after I graduated high school. One night, it’s pouring rain and I’m driving down this dirt road that is a cul-de-sac to a farmer’s house. I’ve been down this road a few dozen times and know the routine—drop the paper off in the box at the end of the drive, turn around, and go back up the road and off to my next stop.
This time, as I am getting out of my car to place the newspaper in the holder, I see this man in the ditch wearing a drenched white shirt and running at me as fast as he can. He got within 20 feet of me, and I could see what my mind pictured as a hatchet or axe in his hand. I had never ran so hard in my life to the front of my car, jumped in, and took off.
Everything happened so fast that I almost didn’t realize where I was. It must have been about 5-10 miles later that I attempted to call 9-1-1, but there was no signal using my Motorola flip phone in the middle of nowhere in the year 2000. I had to stop at a farmer’s house to call the authorities at 2:00 am. Turns out the guy took his own life within an hour of his run with me in that wooded ditch.