I was sleeping in a nice secluded spot in Nanaimo, where you wouldn't expect anybody to know that there was somebody in the car. At 3: 30 a.m., a girl knocked on the window. She was lightly dressed and shivering, and she asked if I could look up where she lives and take her there. Her phone was dead.
She had gone out drinking on the beach with friends while it was still daylight and then she had fallen asleep and they forgot her. She said that a small amount of alcohol had really hit her, and she just had to sleep. This was about nine hours earlier. She seemed completely sober by the time I met her and she promised that she wasn't going to puke in the car. So, I decided to let her in.
She woke up extremely cold and was looking for an unlocked car to warm up in, when she saw me. I suggested the all night Tim Hortons that was very close, but she didn't want to go there because she knew they would phone the police because of her condition. She was more worried about her parents finding out, than waking up a stranger who's sleeping in his car.
So I cleared off the front seat of all of my food and everything and then gave her my thick vest to put on. Then I transferred all of the blankets from myself, to her and two of the extra blankets from the back, so it pretty much filled the entire passenger seat area, although she's not very big. I started the car and got heat blowing at her feet.
She was carrying all of her school stuff in a small backpack, because she had left Vancouver Island University in the afternoon and gone to the beach. I gave her some Kentucky Fried
Chicken, some
water and an
apple.
We tried several different spellings of the road she was going to, and it just wasn't there. So I asked if she knew any of the connecting roads, and she did. It was a 6-minute drive and then there was a brand new development with the first spelling she had given me. It's not on Google Maps yet.
During the drive, I talked to her about the danger of accepting rides from strangers. She said, at some point the danger of hyperthermia outweighs that, plus, I was sleeping, I wasn't trying to pick up girls hitchhiking. She had seen the numerous
tools, and assumed that I was working nearby, but that I don't live here, which is correct. She told me she had peeked around the car from all angles, before deciding to knock on the window. There was no alcohol or cigarettes or anything except for all of these tools, which made it seem less threatening to her.
So, as we drove, I asked what she's going to do next time she finds herself in that situation. She said there won't be a next time. I said, well if there is, what will you do. And we both agreed that she wouldn't run her phone out of battery on frivolous calls, and she will phone somebody much earlier if there is a next time.
We didn't have any rain. I told her that if she had had a bit more to drink, and it did rain, she could very well die of hypothermia in the same situation. She knows that, and I hope she'll remember this incident the next time somebody wants to go drinking outside.
When I was working in Northern Ontario, I had a roommate named Steve. He had gone drinking when he was 17 and he fell asleep behind a 7-Eleven store. Somebody went back there for a
pee at about 1 a.m. and they found him hypothermic. He spent a week in the hospital and for a while, he held the record for the person with the lowest core temperature in Ontario to have survived to such an event. If that guy didn't have to pee, Steve would have died there. By the time I was done telling her this story, we were at the house. I waited until somebody answered the door, and then found another spot to sleep.
When you sleep in the car on a regular basis, you have little experiences that might not happen otherwise. I'm going back to sleep now. Good night.
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