The (dis)comfort of strangers

Love is a stranger in an open car...I wonder if there are statistics anywhere that show just how many people took that lyric line to heart in the year the song was popular and, if so, what was their experience?

My mother, who read True Detective books by the hundred, was constantly warning us as we little ones were growing and spreading our wings, "Never accept a ride from someone you don't know. Now, repeat that please."

And after we had duly recited the warning mum would ask her final recap question: "Now, who is it you must never ride with?" "A stranger," we'd chorus, and mother, satisfied, would return to True Detective.

My siblings and I grew up in a railway colony where, if you set eyes on a car it would indeed make your day. And we knew all the people who owned vehicles. Probably four of them.

Everybody else pedalled a bicycle merrily to work and back - and the air, by the way, was pristine. We'll never know what advice Dana's mother, or father, drummed into her adolescent mind vis-a -vis strangers and cars.

What we know is that she'd been shopping for groceries - straight from getting off the train from work. It was a Thursday - a day set aside for late shopping. Dana shared a flat with two other girls. By the time she'd finished with the mall it was barely two hours to midnight.

Another day was dying. Dana called and spoke to one of her flat mates shortly before leaving the mall, just in case they were anxious.

"I have so much stuff in so many brown bags but I've also found a real nice gentleman who's offered to drop me off," she said, adding, with a total absence of prophecy, "See you soon."

Dana was 22 when she made that call. She would have been 43 in the year they finally located her remains.

And then, there's the case of Sarah driving blindly through the rain but happy that every mile traversed put that much more distance between herself and a physically abusive stepfather. She was going away - but she didn't know where.

Then the car decided things for her. It simply gave up - on two fronts. A tyre blew and the engine, in collusion, went up in smoke.

She managed to pull over, but faced with black nothingness, stranded in a place called 'Nowhere', all she could do was break into hysterical laughter that somehow magically produced streams of tears.

Dazzled

Minutes later she was dazzled by the headlights of a car drawing up behind. Moments later a tap on the window, then another, sharper, when she didn't respond.

His name, he said, speaking from the obscurity of a hood drawn over his features, was Paul. He could drive her to the nearest service station.

Fifteen years on, Paul still tells his friends how fate placed Sarah in his hands. There she was, a trained paramedic, sitting lost on the highway while he, driving through a power outage caused by the storm, was desperately seeking help for his ageing father who'd suffered a heart attack.

Sarah tells it differently. She says her life had reach such a dark abyss that the breakdown on the highway just seemed like the full stop at the end of a very grim sentence.

Even when Paul's headlights lit up the interior of her car, she said she failed to see the significance of it all.

It was only in retrospect that she perceived that she, too, was experiencing her own version of 'seeing the light' on her personal 'road to Damascus' via a stranger named Paul.

They have two healthy children that Paul says he sometimes jokingly refers to as 'the offspring of strangers'. They all drive cars and they will all stop and offer help when needed.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.