The management staff’s trip to St. Louis this past weekend was highly informative and we met some interesting people; but as I stood on the side of the highway with my peers watching the tow truck winch up our ride home all I could do was laugh.

We had made the five-hour drive up to St. Louis for a conference and had, for the most part, a constructive weekend. We loaded into our executive editor’s Crown Vic, and were about 50 miles out when we started to notice the smoke. Minor panic ensued; we took the nearest exit and promptly stopped the car. All hopes of it being a minor overheating issue were dashed as we watched the strawberry colored fluid bleeding all over the pavement.

Everyone had just begun realizing we were sitting smack dab in the middle of, to put it mildly, a serious SNAFU when a camo-clad deer hunter pulled off the road.

Now the initial reaction to a complete stranger with deer horns on the back of his truck stopping to ‘help’ three stranded young women should be fairly obvious. Everyone’s heard of the Zodiac killer, right? But almost immediately this elderly gentleman was down in the dirt looking under our car, explaining in detail what had happened and calling his friend at the local Mobile Zone to come tow us out of automotive Hades. While the tow truck driver chatted with our roadside warrior about the six-point buck he nabbed that morning, we called the necessary reinforcements from back home and settled in for the four-hour wait for our ride.

As we rode in the tow truck to the repair shop (with our managing editor in my lap) how bad it could have been settled in.

Currently we live in a society where women are told to never walk alone, but we carry pepper spray. We are told the streets are dangerous but I would rather face a mugger than a right hook or a switchblade from two women I know.

I’m always the first to raise the feminist flag and even if we had truly been ‘stranded’ we have cell phones, and emergency credit cards and common sense. But it’s nice to know not everyone will pass you by.

“Could have been one of my daughters,” he said. I’m sure our fathers appreciate it.

[Editors note: This was written sitting in a McDonalds along Interstate 44 waiting for our ride. The right hook and switchblade belong to my two best friends, and the pepper spray is in my left pocket.]