Seven Hours to Pittsburgh

In my many years of travel, I have known that Charlotte is where many American connections go to die. My travel would be no exception. I landed already behind schedule, delayed out of West Palm Beach with a shorter window than I needed to make the connection to Pittsburgh, and it did not survive. The airline rebooked me onto the next evening's flight. Their solution only created problems for me. My daughter's graduation events were scheduled to start well before that flight would land. Their plan was executed by a computer and did not take into account any of my needs. I required a different plan, and American had shown neither the competence nor the confidence to help me build one.

I started with my company travel agent. They were only showing bookings for rentals that started the next day. It seemed as though they and American were conspiring against my travel. I now know: I am on my own. I went through the rental counters one by one, crossing each off as I found it closed or out of cars for the night. Dollar was the last one standing, an agent still at the desk. Technically open turned out to be the operative word. The deck where cars actually got released to renters was shutting down behind him. He had cars in the system. He did not necessarily have an easy way to get me into one.

I gave him the short version of my situation and told him honestly that I would be quick: sign, walk, drive, gone, so he could still get out at a decent hour instead of babysitting my paperwork. It worked. He got me into a car and started shutting the system down behind me.

That is when a mother and daughter walked up with the same story I had just told him, needing a car to get to Pittsburgh. He apologized. His screen had already gone dark. There was nothing left for him to sell them, and nothing left in that system for me to fix on their behalf either. I only caught one word out of what they told him: Pittsburgh.

I still had my own problem, and it was not a small one. I had caught a short nap on the flight into Charlotte, but not enough to carry me safely through seven hours overnight alone. That kind of drive is really another shift of work. It is a bet against your own attention span. Without something to keep me alert, I was looking at a stop somewhere along the way to sleep it off, which would have cost me an hour or two I did not have if I wanted to make the events I was driving toward in the first place.

So I offered to drive them regardless of what came next, and asked for one thing in return. If she kept the conversation going for the seven hours to Pittsburgh, we would get there without a sleep stop. If she could not, I would still get them there, just later, after I pulled over somewhere to nap. It was not kindness toward two strangers stuck at a counter after hours. I needed someone in that car to help me stay awake. The ride was not conditional on it, but my plan, as I drew it out, was.

She agreed, and she held up her end better than I expected. She was a nurse by background, which meant she understood exactly what was at stake in keeping a driver alert for seven hours, and she knew how to keep a conversation moving with someone she had just met: the kind of questions that require an answer instead of the kind that let you drift. We stopped for gas around three in the morning, and the Coca-Cola I bought there is most of what I remember about it, the kind of caffeine you take not because you want it but because you need the next ninety minutes to happen. It was the best Coke of my life that night. We stopped again just outside Pittsburgh for Starbucks. Her daughter had a college visit to make. I had a graduation to make. We were in the home stretch.

I have given things away to strangers before in places like this one: upgrades, tips, a seat I would rather have kept. Those trades work because I can afford them. I have enough built around the rest of my travel that giving something up in the moment does not put much at risk. The ride to Pittsburgh was one of those. I was always going to drive them. What I could not afford, not really, was the two-hour nap stop that came with doing it alone. She had a daughter who needed to be in Pittsburgh and no way to get her there. I had a plan that only worked if someone kept me talking for seven hours straight. The ride was a favor. What she gave back was not.

At the end of the day, we both took a risk. Driving into the night after a full day of work and flying is a risk. Getting into a car with a stranger you have no history with is a risk. We each looked at what we knew, weighed it against what we did not, and decided it was worth it. I made every event I drove toward, with enough time left for a nap in the middle of the day, which by then I needed badly. She and her daughter got to Pittsburgh the same way I did: on time, in one piece, on the strength of a decision two strangers made at a rental counter. Whether they made their college visit after that, I still do not know. I never got a way to find out, and I am not going to pretend otherwise just to close this out neatly. The risk is the part that paid off, for both of us.