Reflection on a moment's panic

Now I know why a viking's most reliable weapon was a rock....

It all started benignly enough, as I suppose these things do. What you see above is the temporarily “boarded up” window in the door of my friend’s house. I broke that window. On purpose. It was the culmination of a couple hours of frenzied panic that has made me think about our vulnerabilities and who we are in our current social milieu.

Last week, I was house sitting for friends who went to Europe. I was also chicken sitting for Luna, Pepper, and Rosie, my friends’ beloved fine-feathered “babies”. Despite what you see in the photo, these girls don’t live in the house. They have their own “house” (coop), and so I went to put them in theirs for the night around 3:00pm one afternoon. And that’s when the fun began.

The wind decided to blow that blue door shut when I was out in the yard with the girls. Not only shut, but LOCKED. The key was in the house. So was my phone. So was my coat. So were my car keys. So was my I.D. And there I was, in the rainy, windy, gray Pacific Northwest with about 90 more minutes of daylight left in a city about three hours from my own home. Alone. Except for three chickens. My first thought was “What the f**k do I do now?”

My next thought was I need to call my friends ASAP and see if there’s a key hidden somewhere. I recalled there was from an earlier house sitting stint, but couldn’t remember where. But 3:00pm where I was meant 12:00am where they were, and thus unlikely reachable, but I had to try. The question was, how do I do that with no phone?

Problem #1 with our current social milieu: If you’re like me, everyone’s number just lives in my phone in a list of contacts which means I don’t commit actual phone numbers to memory anymore. Even if I did have a phone to call my friends with, I don’t know their number. And these are people I have known for 27 years.

I needed to get ahold of my husband stat so that he could contact them, but how? I decided to try a couple neighbor houses whom my friends had listed, thank god, as “emergency contacts”. Knock on door #1. No one home. Or maybe there is, but no one answered. House #2, I see the owner through the window. I also hear her kids inside watching TV. I ring the doorbell. No answer. Ring again. No answer. I knock. No answer. Knock again. No answer.

Problem #2 with our current social milieu: Everyone has a doorbell camera and can see who is outside which often translates into not answering the door if it is not someone they know. I can relate to this, as I’ve done it myself. But what does that mean for us as a community when someone is in legitimate distress and needs our help? I’ve never felt so among people and yet so isolated before.

I decided to try a third neighbor. Again, no answer at the door even though I could see someone in an upstairs window, working on a computer. Luckily, she was facing outward, so I began waving my arms to get her attention. I was desperate. Thankfully, she decided to come down and let me in. I explained to her what had happened and asked if I could use her phone to call my husband, and she generously agreed. She told me to make myself at home and even offered me water and tea. But then….

Problem #3 with our current social milieu: My husband did not respond to my calls or my text messages. Something that I thought would take only a few minutes turned into almost an hour of anxious dread. For those of you who are regular readers of my posts, you’ll know we own a Christmas tree farm, and this is the busiest time of the year. I assumed he might be busy, but the more pressing, nagging thought was that he wasn’t answering because I was calling from an unknown number. In our ridiculous world right now with spam and AI scams, we have all learned to block unknown callers or to ignore numbers we don’t recognize, and yet we rarely think that sometimes the person on the other end is going to be someone we know who is actually in need or in trouble.

I tried calling and texting repeatedly for about 45 minutes, pleading “please respond!” and “please call me back on this number!” I even took photos of myself and our friends’ house to prove it was me. Nothing worked, and my state of panic was increasing as the options for what to do seemed to be diminishing with every passing second. FINALLY, he decided to answer a call. He then tried to call our friends and, just as I had worried, he only got voice messages because it was the middle of the night for them.

Shit. Now what?

Perhaps I could just sit outside on their porch until about 10:00pm my time when it would be first thing in the morning for our friends. Then I could reach them to find out how to get in the house, but that would involve me being able to highjack the neighbor’s phone for like six hours. Generous though she was, that obviously would have been too much to ask. The feeling of utterly helpless isolation was being compounded by the fact that beyond this temporarily borrowed phone, I had literally NO way for anyone to reach me.

My husband then floated the idea of calling me a Lyft that would take me to a nearby hotel where at least I’d be inside for the night and reachable, but I wasn’t so keen on that. Despite the desperate nature of the situation, that still seemed like too much of a hassle, and besides, how could I check into a hotel with no I.D.? He then asked me to check and see if maybe there were windows in our friends’ house that were unlocked, but I told him I knew that wouldn’t be the case. Our friends are very diligent about keeping things secure. It really left only one choice.

Time to break a window.

Luckily, the little panes in the door meant I only had to break the one nearest the doorhandle so I could get my hand through and unlock it. I still had the neighbor’s phone with my husband on the line. He told me “Put the phone down. The window won’t break easily. It will probably take more than one try.” I picked up a rock from the yard that I thought was big enough to break the window but small enough to fit in my hand, about the size of a softball. Time to go authentic viking shieldmaiden with it.

BAM!! Attempt #1, no dice.

BAM!! Attempt #2, no dice.

“You need a bigger rock,” my husband said.

Okay, found one and BAM!! Third time was the charm. And the result is what you see in the picture. A nicely shattered window with just enough of an opening to fit my hand through. I unlocked the door and got in. What an unbelievable sense of relief. And I still had a bit of daylight left to burn.

I ran back over to the neighbor’s house and returned her phone, just setting it inside the door. I did not see her, but just yelled into the house, “I’m leaving your phone on the table. Thanks!” She may likely never fully appreciate just what she did for me. I mean seriously. All these things seem so very unlikely in our current social milieu.

She…

1. Answered the door and offered to help

2. Gave me not only her phone, but told me the code to unlock it if needed

3. Allowed me to leave her sight with it while I went back to my neighbors to overturn every rock and potted plant in a frantic search for a hidden key. I noticed at one point the back of the phone had a sleeve attached to it that clearly had some form of I.D. or a credit card in it.

4. Allowed me to commandeer her phone for almost an hour while I tried to reach my husband, as she attended a video meeting in her upstairs office, which meant she let me do all of this sight unseen.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

Never leave the house without a key AND a phone. As a matter of fact some of the billionaire tech bros need to get going on inventing a way to simply have the phone implanted in my arm, like a chip or something (I’m only half kidding about that. It’s probably coming soon enough anyway….).

Figure out a code word or phrase to use when calling or texting a loved one so they know it’s you and you need help. The scammers are very good at what they do, but we have to figure out ways to work around this. At some point you or someone you know will need help and they might be calling from a phone that’s not theirs, AND they need to know you will respond.

And the most important takeaway of all….

There are still good people in the world. I have long said that, compared to many places where I have travelled, America seems to have a culture of fear. There are lots of reasons why I think that, but suffice it to say that we really need to get beyond it. Sure, there is being reasonable and cautious when necessary, but that’s not necessarily ALWAYS. We have to accept and acknowledge our common humanity and be there for each other sometimes. Even for people we don’t know.

If the stories on the news and social media are to be believed, what my friends’ neighbor did could have turned out very badly for her. But she chose to trust and help me in a moment of clear distress. It was the kindness of a stranger that I will never forget. The next day I left a thank you note and bouquet of flowers at her door. I never saw her again after that stressful afternoon. I don’t even know her name.

But she makes me think there is hope for us yet.