Kindness Of Others Can Be Costly

They may move massive objects for a living, but I doubt our unappreciated tow truck drivers will ever impound the Golden Rule.

They’re tugging at it, though. Like blown radiators, these people are fuming at interfering do-gooders who pull stuck drivers out of ditches before the tow trucks show up.

“That takes money out of my pocket,” says Doyle Knight, co-owner of Deer Park’s Nite-Bird Towing. “How’d you like it if I showed up where you work and told your boss I was gonna do your job for free?”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Doyle, what day can you start?

Doyle invited me to a tow truck drivers’ meeting to see if I’d help them kick a little good Samaritan butt.

Like most of the free world, I never knew tow truck drivers had meetings. I thought they sail onto the scene like pirate ships, usually seconds after some overzealous parking cop chains your wheels for being in the wrong spot.

Sure enough, the Washington Tow Truck Association gathers once a month in a Spokane Valley restaurant.

I had a swell time getting to know this fun-loving group of mainly burly men whose towing experience ranges from dim-wit nudists to gaseous elephants.

Much meeting time was spent discussing an edge-of-your seat tow truck topic: “How many GVWs does it take before you need a CDL and when are air brakes exempted?”

The answer, of course, is “10-4, good buddy.”

Eventually, however, conversation rolled around to those motorist meddlers in their four-wheel-drive macho wagons.

This last long winter was particularly bad for a condition I have diagnosed as “Towis Interruptis.”

Doyle, for example, recently got a call to help a woman who had driven her LTD into a snowbank. After a 62-mile drive, the Ford was nowhere to be found.

Instead, he found a guy in a truck with one of those electric winches mounted on the front end. “You lookin’ for a woman in an LTD?” the guy asked.

Doyle said he was. “Well, I just pulled her out,” said the smirking Samaritan. “Didn’t charge her nothin’ neither.”

Being a serious professional, Doyle didn’t grab a tire iron and do a “Sling Blade” number on the smart aleck’s head.

It wouldn’t have done any good. See, everyone who has ever opened a Gideon Bible knows human beings are supposed to treat one another with kindness.

Faded country star Glen Campbell once sang a song about it. The song is called “Try a Little Kindness,” and it goes like this: “I am a lineman for the count-eee.”

Anyway, the point is that people who help stuck drivers think they are doing the right thing.

In the process, they probably break traffic laws getting to the stuck vehicle and then damage the car with their cheesy, Costco winch.

Then there’s the ethical question of moving the car after a tow truck is already called. Betsy Bourquin of Rouse’s, a Spokane towing company, says she was getting 20 no-shows a day during some storms.

This is not to imply that the tow truck industry is completely joyless.

No, sirree. Doyle, for example, is regularly called to the Kaniksu nudist park at Deer Lake to help naked people get into their locked cars.

This happens because of an incredible chain of stupidity that probably deserves a government study: 1. Nudist steps out of car. 2. Nudist puts keys in pants. 3. Nudist takes off pants. 4. Nudist locks pants in car.

Then there was the time Mark Valgardson had to give the old heave-ho to a full-grown elephant. The beast had fallen and stuck herself in a moat at Portland’s zoo.

The task took considerable effort, but had an extremely happy ending.

As the hoisting began, the poor pachyderm panicked. She then quite unexpectedly unleashed an earth-shattering bowel movement that literally drenched a TV news cameraman with about 50 pounds of oozing elephant dung.

And some of you think there isn’t a God.

, DataTimes