I hadn’t quite finished pulling in behind the van when from its driver’s seat hopped a woman, a little Filipina in a huge denim shirt and with a band-aid under her left nostril. She wanted a jump.
Photo Credit: jstangroom's flickr page
Sure, I said. Something about her seemed a little strange, but a dead battery is a dead battery. I drove my shiny little red box of a car around so it was nose to nose with her hulking van, which, I now noticed, was more than a little dirty and piled high in the back with stuff. She produced a set of jumper cables and she mumbled something about being in town to visit her daughter, who is in the Navy, and her battery being dead because she’d left a light on overnight.
So I connected the red end of the cable to the red lead of my battery and the black clamp to the black lead, just like dad taught me, and experienced the same pang of doubt I have no matter how many times I use jumper cables. Wait – is it positive to positive and negative to ground? Or negative to negative and positive to ground? Or does it need to be grounded at all? The hell with it. Let’s see what happens. I got back in my car and turned the key.
She climbed in behind her wheel. Nothing happened for a moment. Then I saw smoke curling gently from the seams of her battery. Smoke began to drift up from other parts of her engine compartment too, and I quickly switched my car off before something caught fire.
The air smelled like fried wire and when we got out to look the reason was obvious: every piece of cable we could see in her engine was smoking, its rubber housing melted off. The jumper cables were hot to the touch. As I wincingly removed them from my battery I noticed that cable itself had gone soft and melted a black smudge on my grille.
She had mistakenly attached the red to the black and the black to the red, so instead of charging her battery I had given her a giant power jolt, like a child sticking her finger into an electrical outlet.
“I think, uh, I think your car might need to be towed to a repair shop,” I said, feeling apologetic though I hadn’t actually done anything wrong. “A jumper cable isn’t going to do a lot of good.”
“Yeah, my car needed a jump the other day too,” she said, unperturbed. “I ran out of gas and it just died at the station. Can you believe it?”
Do you need some help?
“No, I’ve got a friend coming. We stay sometimes on 14th Street in West Sacramento, at the homeless shelter. Do you know it?”
I shook my head, no. I got back in my car, which has its insurance paid and tags valid and its oil changed recently, the kind of little measures that assure me my car – and life – is in good working order. I knew a little problem with my car could turn into a big problem. She didn’t seem to have the same foresight. And she’s homeless.
Which makes me wonder. Maybe a person ends up homeless not because she’s lazy or unlucky, but because somewhere in her circuitry a fuse blew out. Maybe a disturbance like that makes a person blind to a small problem becoming a big one.
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