I posted the following on my “leadership.prn” blog in March, 2008. I was reminded of the story recently and thought I’d share it here. Right now the world needs to know there are good people lurking everywhere.

Yesterday, we drove to Camrose, Alberta to visit my dad.  We’ve made the trip literally hundreds of times and, for some strange reason (great conversation or absent mindedness) we actually ran out of gas a few kilometres south of Edmonton on the very busy Queen Elizabeth II highway.  (The embarrassing details about how you can actually run out of gas on your way “out” of town are for another story.) 

Once the truck rolled to a stop on the shoulder, we decided that I would walk back towards Edmonton in search of gas while Deb stayed with the truck and called BCAA (or the Alberta version). We were going to see who could get gas first.  As I walked/ran north toward Edmonton I started to realize that it was both colder and farther than I’d thought.  I was starting to feel a bit sorry for myself as three lanes of traffic sped endlessly past me. 

Just as the adventure was becoming a miserable experience, the driver of a small black car honked his horn and pulled over on to the shoulder just in front of me.  I looked into the car to see a smiling young man waving for me to get in.  I was too cold to worry about him being a serial killer so I thanked him profusely and happily accepted his offer.  He said that he’d recently had the same thing happen to him and he knew how I must feel.  As we drove south to Nisku to get some gas he told me that he’d been living in Edmonton for about a year but that he is originally from Dawson Creek. His name is Mike, and it turns out his dad is a retired school administrator so we know many of the same people.  It was a bonus that he too is an old hockey player (although, I’m a much older hockey player than he).

What makes the story even better, and makes Mike’s actions even more impressive, is that he actually saw me walking, drove past the truck, put two and two together and then drove all the way to an exit, got back on to a north bound lane, found another exit, and looped back to pick me up.  He drove me to Nisku to get gas and then back to the truck where he insisted on waiting until I got it started.  When I offered him some money for his time, he wouldn’t take it.  Instead, he shook my hand and said he’d be happy if I would simply stop for someone who was in the same boat some day. Then he said, “it’s the nothern way.”  

It still makes me smile to think that after all the years Dawson Creek and Fort St. John hockey players hacked and slashed at each other on the ice, one of them would step up to rescue the other in the middle of a cold and busy highway some seven hundred kilometres from home.