It was not how I planned to spend the blizzardkicking myself and silently vowing to shove the man out of my truck. But one cannot always predict such things.
I had finally managed to get my wife dropped off at work. It was a little before 11 a.m. with the snow flying sideways.
And there he was. Standing alone at a bus stop.
I never give a ride to anyone I don’t know. But I felt bad for Bradley Boone. He is tall, yet slight of build, and driving off, leaving him to brave such nasty conditions, seemed a bit like turning a blind eye to a lost child.
He just needed to get to the RTD park-n-Ride lot at Church Ranch Boulevard and West 104th Avenue. It was sort of, kind of, on my way.
Get in, I told him. Two hours later, or some two-thirds through our time together, I would regret ever saying those words.
It wasn’t Boone’s fault. He is funny and completely polite, two essential qualities for a man riding shotgun with you through a blizzard.
The problem was that on a normal day, this slightly out-of-my-way trip would not take 15 minutes. As it turned out, we would spend twice that amount of time stopped somewhere on a road, contemplating the relative comfort level of the cows staring at us through a fence.
Boone is 41 years old and the office manager at a Boulder mortgage firm. He usually takes his 2000 Mazda Protege — “you know, a tiny, little grocery getter” — to work. But it has bad tires, so after hearing the forecast, he decided to take the bus. He rose early and drove from his Thornton home to the RTD lot, where he discovered only six cars parked.
“That should have been a sign,” he said ruefully. “Nobody is going to work.”
Even at 11:30 a.m., every eastbound route out of Boulder is at a standstill. The Boulder Turnpike, littered with stalled and wrecked cars, has been closed since about 9 a.m.
We find no good alternatives on Baseline or South Boulder roads, each littered with half-overturned cars, not totally unlike, I remembered, Highway 1 between Amman and Baghdad in the early months of the Iraq war.
There is nothing to do but chat.
Five people were on his bus. Getting up the on-ramp to the turnpike took 20 minutes. The bus once nearly slid into a ditch. It took nearly three hours to reach his stop.
Boone was at work for about two hours when his boss told him he could leave.
As we creep past another stalled bus and maybe the ninth Ford Mustang sitting at odd angles on the shoulder, I decide Boone is absolutely the guy I would want if I owned a business.
“Clare, one of the bosses, even called me when I got off the bus,” Boone told me. “She said to go pee, get a cup of coffee and get right back on. I couldn’t. I had to at least show up.”
Almost three hours and a tank of gas later, we pull into the RTD lot and next to the grocery getter.
“What can I pay you?” he asks. I wave him off. “What do you drink?” I think about this but wave him off again. “Well, at least this will get you good karma.”
Is he going into work tomorrow? I ask. Not if it snows all night, he says.
What would make him go in?
“A ride, someone to drive me to work and pick me up. It’s not going to happen.”
No, Bradley Boone, it’s never going to happen again.
Bill Johnson’s column runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
