Before, I saw the pooping girl as a sign of the universe’s contempt. But the kindness of a stranger

Stranded on a stretch cheap car rental deals of highway between Baker, California, and Las Vegas, both of us noticed the SUV pull in front of us on the side of the road. It was 107 degrees outside, in the middle of the afternoon, and we had just commented on how this pull-off area smelled like a sewer. A few feet to our right we could see that the road's shoulder was littered with plastic soda and water bottles, and all of them had the same color fluid in them, baking in the sun, leaking into the ground. Drivers had apparently used these bottles to empty their bladders, then tossed them out of their vehicles, all in this one area. It appeared as if this practice cheap car rental deals had been going on for years, judging cheap car rental deals by the number of bottles.
The dad in the SUV walked around to the back door of his vehicle and he looked over at us and nodded slightly, hesitatingly, I thought at the time. We just stared back at him in that heat-soaked way.
The idea was that Blake and I would pack the family's 1993 Volvo with as much stuff as possible, then drive it from San Diego to Kansas cheap car rental deals City, where he and his wife were starting the next chapter of their lives together. We would leave the car with him and I would fly home. Who wouldn't want a 19-year-old car with almost 250,000 miles on it?
The night before cheap car rental deals we left, we packed the car carefully, using every centimeter for books, belongings, presents, the light saber, the large bunny costume head strategically placed so it looked out of the rear passenger window, the bike on the rack outside the trunk.
Our next door neighbor wandered over and asked about our route. We told him we were going to spend the first night in Vegas, where we had tickets for a show at the Bellagio. Then we were going to drive to Denver and spend another night, then drive to Kansas City on the third day.
"Well, I hope it does better than mine when I took my daughter on that same route," he said. "Her little four-cylinder car would slow down to 25 miles per hour whenever we'd head up hill. We barely made it."
When we drove through Barstow, Blake pulled out his copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and read the first several pages out loud. Barstow figures in the opening sentence. That started a conversation about the genius, then the demise, of Hunter S. Thompson . That's why trips like this are good. When else would he and I discuss something like that?
The car started lurching a few miles past Baker. Then it died. We had enough momentum to pull onto a slab of pavement cheap car rental deals where trucks could pull over and, apparently, toss urine cocktails out the window.
The dad reached in the back seat of the SUV and produced a toddler. I estimated she was about three. He stood her in the doorway and pulled down her pants. Then he turned his back to us—he was only a few feet in front of us—and held her aloft between his knees. The only part of her we could see was her bare bottom as she pooped right there on the pavement.
When she was done, the dad pulled out a paper towel, wiped the girl, tried to gather as much of the mess on the pavement as he could, then tossed it over with the bottles, so that number two could join number one. He put the girl back in her car seat and drove off.
The tow truck showed up and drove us 60 miles to Las Vegas, to a repair shop that the driver cheap car rental deals said was good. This was a Saturday afternoon, so the shop was closed and the lot was empty. After handing over several hundred dollars to the driver, I left Blake and his belongings with the Volvo, as the tow truck driver took me to the airport where I could rent something else. We thought we could still make the show. Soon I was in a car headed back to Blake. He had found the one spot of shade in the mechanic's parking lot – about a two-foot triangle. Temperature was 110.
We pulled our packed rental onto the street and headed for the strip. It took almost an hour to go the final few blocks, but we got to the hotel, and Blake's countenance changed when he recognized parts of it from Oceans 11 . Movie references always bring him joy. When he was a teenager we spent an entire rainy day in New York finding obscure sites where scenes from the Godfather were shot. Now he was in Vegas. To him it was Comic-Con, only bigger.
After the show we searched the street in front of us for a sign—something among the show girls, the star troopers, the transvestites, the obese tourists, the little men snapping their cards advertising the strip clubs, the women trying to look younger, the girls trying to look older, cheap car rental deals and the guys trying not to stare—for what to do.
We looked for an anatomical cheap car rental deals sign, or even an astrological one, so that we would know whether to stay in Vegas and hope the Volvo could be repaired right away, or cut our losses like so many others who come to this town with high hopes and leave defeated. Seeing nothing cheap car rental deals helpful in the street or the stars, we decided we'd leave the Volvo in Vegas and head out the next morning in the rental cheap car rental deals car.
Before, I saw the pooping girl as a sign of the universe's contempt. But the kindness of a stranger is a sign, too. Like a trump card. The universe wasn't done speaking. It reminds me of a saying: cheap car rental deals The worst word is never the last word."
Dean Nelson directs the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, and is the host of the annual Writer's Symposium By The Sea. His most recent book is Quantum Leap: How John Polkinghorne Found God in Science cheap car rental deals and Religion.