Achievement unlocked: hitchhiking Challenge level: language barrier Taking a walk in the evening, about a mile from home, when I realize it's getting dark in the west much faster than I expected. A cool wind starts to blow. It suddenly smells like rain. April is tornado season. The person I'm on the phone with (about thirty miles away) says "wow, the weather is suddenly terrible" and we are disconnected; she texts "my power went out." I start jogging. In high school I was a runner, but that was decades ago; I have to be careful when running not to hurt my knees or ankles, and I go in and out of practice with it. I am currently out of practice. I think that jogging will reduce my travel time home from twenty minutes to … twelve, honestly. I have a pretty good idea of where I'll be when the cloudburst hits: on the steep hill where the road is narrow and visibility is bad, with several minutes to go. I don't want to be there in the rain. There are headlights behind me. From the left side of the road, I wave, and the pickup truck slows way down. He thinks I am trying to cross the road. So I do, and wave conspicuously again. As he pulls near me I wave a third time, and he slows down with his window open. "I hate to ask, but could you give me a lift? I just live at the top of the hill there." "Sorry, I don't speak English. Español." This complicates things. My Spanish is halting and fragmentary, the kind of mastery where I suddenly think of a word I could have used (like "drive" or "help") several hours after a conversation is over. "Español … mi casa está alta, allí …" He says "no" and indicates the Amazon vest he's wearing. He's doing delivery gig work in his personal vehicle, and they have rules against transporting passengers. Those are good rules. I say "Ah, su trabajo. Sí. Gracias" ("Oh, your job. Yes. Thanks"). There is an extended intra-cloud lightning display in the north, where I'm looking and he isn't. I wave and start running again. I guess he either finished parsing what I was asking for, or else had his own smell of the impending rain and the cold wind, because I got about forty feet away before he pulled up next to me again and gestured for me to get in the truck. I do my best to be effervescent with gratitude. I am not an especially effervescent person. The road back to my apartment is a little longer than the walking route. We pass the hill where I had expected to get stuck without incident, but around the next bend there is already some pretty serious tree debris in the road — not enough that the road is impassable, but enough that I don't begrudge my hero when he crosses the centerline to avoid some. (I'm writing this at midnight and someone nearby is using a chainsaw, so apparently more stuff came down.) We approach the entry to my development and I'm able to summon "Aquí está la entrada, aquí es perfecta," and he stops to let me out. I trot into the neighborhood, into my building, and step out onto my balcony just in time to watch the rain start to fall. It's a good storm. No tornado sirens, no hail, pretty lightning. The weather alert (which I didn't try to access from the road, because the sky was telling me "go inside" and other details didn't matter) said to prepare for 50 mph gusts. I would have turned out okay if I had kept jogging, but what happened instead was better. Thanks, stranger.