Two and a half miles.

The small pool of green fluid pooling around his feet as he stared in horror told the fate of the car that had been held together mostly with hope over the years. The steam rising from under the hood provided an odd moment of noxious warmth from the surrounding frigid air. He closed the hood and looked up into the dark clouds. Only a faint blur of the moon could be seen in the cold Midwest sky. By now the frigid rain had nearly completed its metamorphic transition to falling ice.

Inside the car sat his worried wife and baby daughter, barely six months old. Out of the range of any available communication, there was not much choice. He would have to make the walk back for help to the last tollbooth they passed — two and a half miles back.

Climbing over the back seat so as to preserve as much heat in the car as possible, he grabbed his gloves and hat out of the back of the car. As he slunk back into the driver’s seat, he kissed his daughter on the forehead. For a couple of seconds he sincerely wondered if it would be the last time he ever saw her.

His wife reached back and brought the child into the front seat to help keep her as warm as possible. He kissed his wife and reached for the door handle. As he left, he turned on the emergency blinkers, hoping that the car’s battery would hold out and continue to provide a faint but definite beacon in the freezing darkness.

The door clasped shut with a cold thud. On his best day he knew he could cover the distance in about thirty minutes. But in the freezing rain and cold he knew that time would be nearly impossible to beat, and it would be even more so if he didn’t stop thinking about it and get moving. Weak flashlight in hand, he turned his body north, away from the car, and took the first of many steps.

Still relatively warm, he made the half mile to marker #125 with relative ease. He’d wave his flashlight at the passing cars, but none stopped. He wasn’t angry at them though. He knew they probably couldn’t see the small light in the rain and ice. He might as well been shining that light from the fuzzy moon overhead. He stopped getting his hopes up after the fourth car passed, not out of defeat, but out of acceptance that he wasn’t likely to be seen. Still he plodded along with one determined step, and then another, and then another.

By marker #126 his glasses had long since lost their benefit and were duly relegated to his inside coat pocket. He chuckled to himself as he wondered if these were not the conditions imagined by the coat manufacturer when it was advertised as being water resistant. Despite the double layered gloves and reasonably warm hat, his ears and fingers had already started to go numb. Still he plodded along, knowing he was over halfway there, but oblivious to the time it had taken him to reach this point.

The traffic was completely void now. His only companion now was the wind, the darkness, and the sleet. In between the bitter gusts from the north, he could hear his waterlogged shoes crunch through the ice collecting on the pavement below him. As if out of habit, or maybe hope, he turned for a moment to look back towards where the car should have been, but the distance and the weather had completely obscured that view long ago. He turned back north, switching the flashlight into his left hand in order to give the numb fingers of his right hand a momentary stretch.

As he passed marker #127, he could see the tollbooth a few hundred yards away up on the right. His goal was finally in sight. He stopped for a brief moment to take off his hat and shake the ice off of it, more to give himself a short break than anything having to do with the condition of the hat. By now the coat, the hat, the gloves, and the jeans were all only providing a modicum of protection, nearly soaked completely through from the drudging trek into the sharp teeth of the wind-driven frozen hell coming down out of the sky.

Barely able to keep his eyes open because of the whipping wind, he never saw the pothole in his path on the highway’s shoulder. He stumbled and collapsed to the rippled pavement, howling in pain into the darkness. Not even an echo was returned by the nothingness that surrounded him. He rolled over onto his back and winced again. From the surface of the rocky tarmac, the tollbooth mocked him silently as a lighthouse in the distance.

For a minute he thought about giving up, about rolling off the pavement into the ditch and admitting defeat. He never believed in guardian angels, and it was because of situations like this. A guardian angel would have held that radiator together long enough to get to family. A guardian angel would have stopped another traveler a mile ago. A guardian angel would have pushed him that extra half step it would have taken for his left foot to avoid that pothole. Common sense finally got the better of him, though. Soaked, cold, numb, and in pain, he had to keep going. He knew he had to keep walking. If he ever wanted to see her walk, he had to keep walking. If he ever wanted to see her walk to school, he had to keep walking. If he ever wanted to walk with her down an aisle, he had to keep walking. If he ever wanted to see his grandchildren walk, he had to keep walking. He had to keep walking.

On one good leg he managed the will to pull himself upright and start again, limping and wincing at ever step. It was only a couple of minutes to the base of the hill where the tollbooth stood. The only question left was whether he could make it there before his left knee was completely drained of what remained of its usefulness.

He literally dragged himself up the last hundred feet of that hill as if he was reaching for the summit of Everest itself. A tollbooth worker dashed away from her post to help him the rest of the way. As he collapsed onto a couch in the small office shack next to the tollbooth, tears streamed down his face from the pain, diverting around the ones already frozen before they had a chance to fall off his jaw. Very soon a patrolman would be dispatched at high speed to rescue his wife and daughter from their sheet metal-thin shelter. Soon they would know his plight, his mission, was a success. Soon they would all be safe and sheltered from the storm. Soon his family would be there with warm drinks, dry clothes, and a towing trailer.

He reached his hands out gingerly towards the space heater placed in front of him. The feeling was slowly starting to return to his face as the kind tollbooth worker handed him a cup of hot chocolate and wrapped a dry towel around his neck. As she pulled away, he glanced at the name tag on her collar.

Her name was Angela.

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