At 8 a.m., my daughter and I left family camp, trying to hold back tears, in disbelief that the week was over and wishing we didn’t have to leave.
At 8 p.m., I was in the back seat of my parents’ vehicle, being driven back to family camp, wondering how I’d ever make it home. My car was stuck in a low-clearance parking garage, and one after another tow truck failed to get it out.
Family camp is 700 miles from home in Henry County. I had gone the first 100 miles and stopped to drop my daughter off at an airport to catch a flight to visit her other grandparents.
When I got back to my car in the parking garage, the car wouldn’t go. The engine started just fine, but the parking brake was stuck holding. It wouldn’t let loose.
I subscribe to an emergency roadside service. After paying for it all these years and not needing it, finally, it’s paid off!
But did it?
To condense 6 hours stuck in the parking garage into a paragraph or two: Neither the website nor app would complete my request. I called and went through loops and loops and loops of answering machines. I told the company and the lady on the other end of the line confirmed – that my car started up fine but the emergency brake prevented it from moving, and it was inside the airport parking garage with 6-foot 10-inch clearance. The roadside service lady told me that was marked in my file.
Over the course of 6 hours, that roadside service company sent tow truck drivers with trucks much too tall to be able to get into the garage. Each of the tow truck drivers told me he figured he could simply jump-start my car and get it going far enough to take it to his truck parked outside the garage.
Duh!
As the day wore on, the later tow truck drivers and the roadside service company lady on the phone told me and my father, who had arrived by then, that my car required a specific type of truck that no longer was in service in this city nor for at least an hour or more in every direction.
“Is what you need a wrecker?” the lady on the phone asked me.
“I don’t know the names of those kinds of trucks,” I replied. “I just need a truck that can get my car out of a place that is 6 feet and 10 inches clearance.”
Terrible daydreams of buying a new car I wasn’t prepared to pay for and unloading everything from my stuck regular car into my new car filled my head. I imagined driving away in my expensive new car, leaving my old car to fritter away in there forever.
While I was stuck, I texted my best friend, including: “I used to be afraid to park in parking garages because what if it collapsed. Explain engineering all you want to me [and I was once married to a structural engineer, and now our daughter wants to go major in the same subject as her father when she goes to college], but it is a fear easily avoided by parking in a lot not garage. I only started parking in garages recently. Now I know I was right in my avoidance; I just had the wrong disaster.”
She replied: “I do not like parking decks/garages at all. Same fear of collapse but also I’ve always feared getting stuck. This situation validates that 100%.”
We grew up in a tiny country town no parking garage, in fact, barely even any parking lots.
Throughout the day being stuck in the parking garage, I had a few conversations with various airport security guards. Near the end of the day the realization struck that there WERE towing companies that could get my car out. They just weren’t with the so-called roadside service.
Why did that company and their associated tow truck drivers put me through 6 hours of worry and discomfort inside a parking garage they knew all along they couldn’t get me out of?
I called one recommended by the security guard and by then I did not at all care who had to pay, me or the roadside service – the next day.
Every cloud has a silver lining. This one is this: Every previous year we’ve left family camp, it’s been with the feeling that I didn’t want to go home and I wanted to stay there for much, much longer.
This time, as I bumbled around the empty cottage and cabins with my parents, closing up camp now that the rest of the family had gone, I was ready to go. It was lonely and felt empty without everyone.
Plus, for the hours it looked like my car would be stuck in that garage for all of eternity, and I had to get back to my pets, my job, my gardens and my regular bed and pillows.
It sure put things into perspective – and made me happy to drive home after all.
