Breakdown!

Smack dab on the heels of my extraordinary camping adventure, nature hadn't quite finished with me yet. Nature can be a vindictive and ironic so-and-so.

My wife and I were having a lovely Saturday afternoon date out in the country where we visited a winery and a cider mill. As we pulled out of the cider mill's parking lot onto the small highway, I suggested to my wife to punch it, so we didn't get stuck behind an oncoming truck.

Punch it she did and the results nearly caused her to punch me. Flooring the gas, the car started hacking, coughing and sputtering like a two pack a day smoker. The semi we'd attempted to beat drew up and passed us. The car died. And so did my hopes of getting home.

My wife drove off onto the shoulder, leaving us broken down in the gawd-awful heat. First things first, she called Triple AAA. Now, Triple AAA has come a long way; they can  pinpoint your exact locale via the interface of Smart Phones and longitude and latitude coordinates. That was the LAST thing I'd be impressed with AAA about.

"Ma'am," the operator said, "we'll have someone out there within two hours and I'll make your case a priority."

"Two hours?" I moaned. "What're we gonna do for two hours?"

The sun beat down. Sweat drenched my chest and back. Sitting in the car was akin to a hot dog exploding in the microwave. Yet standing outside the car there was no escaping the sun's stabbing heat. Usually my wife has a couple bottles of water stashed around the car. Not that fateful day. I found one bottle that had a few small drinks in it that we rationed and shared. Water had never tasted so great. Pretty soon I thought we might have to go all James Franco and drink our own urine.

Some idiots passed us and honked, apparently our broken down status annoying them to no end. A few good Samaritans actually stopped, asked if we needed help. "No, but thank you," we said early on when hope was high, "we have a tow truck coming."

Except, of course, it wasn't.

Soon, boredom kicked in. We resorted to playing a trivia game on my wife's IPad. Then a sense of desperate delirium kicked in at the two hour mark.

"We've gotta call AAA," I screamed to various hallucinations wiggling in the heat.

After going through the endless barrage of telephone robots, we finally connected to AAA's humanity. "I'm sorry, ma'am," said the not-very-helpful operator, "we haven't been able to find anyone."

"And you couldn't have let us known that?" asked my wife. "I'm worried about heat stroke! Never mind, I'll call a tow truck myself."

First call, my wife got a tow truck. "I'll be out there in about...thirty or forty minutes," he said.

Deflated, we collapsed in each others' arms. Then I remembered something important: my wife didn't have any bottles of water in the car, but she had four umbrellas. Why? Beats me, but I was sure happy for them that day. Out popped the umbrellas as we stood beneath their small arc of shade under the beating sun while drivers sped by us, honking. Doesn't take much to rile up America these days.

The phone rang. I braced myself for another worst case scenario. My wife answered, then started chuckling and shaking her head. After hanging up, she said it was the AAA manager apologizing. Which was about as helpful as men's nipples.

Another nice person stopped, this time with two bottles of water in hand. "Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you..." My groveling continued until I scared him off.

Finally--finally!--the tow truck showed up. "Well, I'm surprised I even answered the phone," he mumbled. "I was mowing the yard and couldn't believe I even heard it. I was gonna finish mowing before I came, but you sounded hot."

"Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank..." I stopped shy of hugging the guy.

He tells us to get in the truck where it's cool. Easier said than done. Tilted on the shoulder and as spent and dehydrated as I was, I had a devil of a time hoisting my big arse up into the vehicle. Of course my wife popped right on up before me, not a prob. Embarrassed, I kept attempting to get into it until the guy came running over to help me. But I needed to retain a tad of my manhood and finally made it on my own.

All the way back into the city, I pretty much worshiped the ground the guy walked on. Then another terrifying thought crossed my paranoid, cynical mind.

"What do you do when the tow truck breaks down," I asked.

The guy looks at me and solemnly says, "Call a bigger tow truck."

Eat it, nature.

Speaking of nature and its eating habits, why not check out my werewolf, horror thriller, dark comedy, mystery, Corporate Wolf, where you'll learn much more about a werewolf's dietary needs than you ever wanted to know (unless you're like me, of course).