Balance

            Before I made a trip to Eugene last fall, I decided I should have snow tires put on my highway car, the Yaris. Because my bridge was being rebuilt, the Yaris was on the paved-road side of the creek, and I used my winter-and-trails car, the RAV 4, as a shuttle to and from the bridge site. I left it at the top of the muddy-muddy-muddy part of the road at the ford through the creek. When I came home from town, I would just park the Yaris on the paved road, cross the creek on a plank, and plow through all that mud to get to the RAV 4. I had been walking that way for two weeks. I didn't think I would have trouble carrying my snow tires with me across the creek on the planks to put them in the Yaris.       

            Two days before I left to have my tires changed, an all-night rain swelled the creek. I had to wade through water to get to the planks, and the creek was washing over them, too. The next morning, though, the water had subsided, so I managed easily enough carrying the tires across the creek to the Yaris and went on to town to have them mounted. But when the worker at Les Schwab started to put the tires on the car, he discovered that someone had slashed two of them with a knife. I didn't believe him at first – it must have been the claw of a cougar or the tooth of a bear. But the man was certain. He showed me the cuts. "Nothing but a knife could do that," he said.

            Who would have arbitrarily gone into my shed, way up here on the mountain, and slashed my tires? I don't know who, but someone did, some creepy, mean, malicious person. I left the tire shop upset, worried, and $335 poorer.

            By noon I was back at the broken bridge, carrying first groceries, then, one by one, my four highway tires back over the creek to the waiting RAV 4. When I still had two tires to carry, two teen-age girls, who live on the next property up the road but whom I had never met, appeared and offered to help me carry the tires. Gratefully, I gave one tire to one and the other tire to the other and followed them across the creek to the RAV 4. They charged up the road and through the mud as though they didn't have any burden at all, those strapping young country girls. Did I know, they asked as they put the tires in the back of my car, that their driveway went past their house and had a gate onto my road, up the hills, where the road leveled off? They would open the gate for me, they said, and until my bridge was repaired, I could use their driveway to access my own.

            My heart warmed towards these good neighbors. What can you say about a world with such good people in it?