Kindness on the road
A senseless tragedy evokes thoughts of how things should have been.
The horror of 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis’ death in Hebron last month brought back memories — not of violence, but of kindness.
Twenty-five years ago, I was, like Kaylin, driving rural roads in upstate New York. Like Kaylin, I was 20 years old. I had left SUNY Cortland after 5 p.m. on a Friday, heading 250 miles home to the North Country town of Peru. The state Thruway and then the Adirondack Northway was one possible route — busy, patrolled, with convenient gas stations, rest stops and food. But Route 8, a two-lane road through the Adirondacks, was shorter, so I chose that — an easy choice for a college girl bent on surprising her boyfriend on Valentine’s Day.
Like Kaylin, my life was ahead of me. But it was already dark by the time I left central New York, and soon I was one of very few cars winding through places like Hoffmeister, Nobleboro and Speculator. Still, it was all good, excitement and expectation, until I realized my Subaru needed gas and I hadn’t seen an open gas station in more than an hour. As I drove slowly through Speculator — a village that fills up with tourists in the summer — I saw few lights, and no open gas station, in the February darkness.
Like Kaylin, I was lost. Not lost geographically — I knew where I was — but lost because my empty gas tank told me I had no way home.
Like Kaylin, I pulled into an unfamiliar driveway.
I knocked on the door of a simple cabin that reminded me of our family’s seasonal camp in Willsboro. A woman with a toddler on her hip opened the door.
“Honey, are you all right?” were the first words out of her mouth to the stranger on her doorstep that dark night.
I wasn’t all right. I was scared. I was far from home, angry at myself for my predicament, and depending on strangers on a frozen winter night.
I got some of my explanation out, but soon the woman interrupted and called her husband. “Norm, come here. Help this girl.”
Norm came, took my car keys, drove the car around the back of the cabin where he filled it with gas. When he came back, he gave me the keys, and he’d written out directions to my home if I needed them. He wouldn’t take any money for the gas. As I left, the woman said, “You be careful, girl.”
I got home okay, shared Valentine’s with my boyfriend. On Sunday I drove back to Cortland through Speculator before it got dark. I left a gift and thank-you card at the home of the family who helped me. What kindness, what old-fashioned charity they offered a stranger who had only herself to blame for the situation she was in.
All of that came back as I read of the horror — the violence, the gun, the mindlessness, the death — Kaylin Gillis suffered. The life after 20 she will never live.
Oh, Kaylin. I wish you met my Samaritans.
I was scared. I was far from home, angry at myself for my predicament, and depending on strangers on a frozen winter night.