Before last Wednesday, it had been decades since I’d had something like that happen to me.
There’s no doubt at all, it was my fault, and I had to live with the consequences.
I headed into the office early on this very warm morning and took care of a little business with the intention of going home in an hour or two to fully prepare for the day.
It’s a trek of less than a mile, and with my coffee cup low, I needed to refuel. Unfortunately, so did my vehicle.
A few days prior, I may have noticed that my fuel level was low. However, when you’re just driving a mile here and there throughout the day, you can lose track of something like this. Maybe you can’t, but I can. I never gave the gas gauge so much as a glance as I trekked home. A couple blocks into my journey, my engine let out a cough and quit on me. There was a gas station a couple blocks in either direction. I thought perhaps I could coast to one, but a slight incline made that impossible. The parking spots to my right were occupied, so I was in a tough situation. I tried to start it a couple times to see if I could coax a couple drops of fuel from the tank. It gave me nothing.
I was stranded in traffic and had to think fast. I waived one car around me. I thought that I could use the slight incline to my advantage. Just behind me, there was a parking spot, so I thought I could put it in neutral, get it going and coast. As I was planning the maneuver, a car stole that spot, leaving me stuck in the northbound lane.
A couple nice folks helped push me into a spot around the corner, and I hiked up the road to the gas station, borrowed a two-gallon can and did the out-of-gas walk of shame back to my vehicle.
This isn’t the first time this has happened to me, unfortunately, but I think that I’ve grown wiser and more attentive as the years have gone by. I’m fairly certain the last time it happened was perhaps 2004, when I was forced to leave my Suburban on the side of Hwy. 29 outside of Wausau. I was halfway into a mile-long walk in 90-degree heat to the Marathon City exit when a car driven by a young woman pulled to the side of the road. She was on her way to Bible Camp and said Jesus told her to stop. It turns out she didn’t have enough gas to get to Bible Camp, so to thank her and Jesus, I filled her tank for giving me a lift to and from the BP.
There have been other occasions, unfortunately. Sometime in the 1980s, I ran out of gas once passing a station in favor of one a few blocks ahead that had better coffee.
I’ve made a mental note now to glance down at the needle whenever I depart on a mission. It seems like it’s a once-in-20 years misadventure, so at this pace, I should be OK. I may run out of gas before another vehicle of mine does.