Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Miracle Mart.


Somewhere just inside the North Dakota border, my mom and I passed "Miracle Mart." I think it was a big, cheap grocery store, but the name made me laugh because it reminded me of Miracle Max in The Princess Bride. How amazing to think that you could just walk into the store, plop your money down and get yourself a miracle!

We didn't need to buy one, though; a few miles down the road (a few hundred, actually), God granted me and mom a miracle. Mom was driving, and I thought I heard the car's engine making a funny noise, so I glanced over at the dashboard console. What caught my eye was the light that comes on to tell you that your gas tank is empty.

Now, if you haven't ever driven across North Dakota, let me explain something to you: it's barren. On the East Coast, you can pull over for something almost whenever you get the urge. In ND, if you think you might run out of gas in the next 150 miles, you stop and fill up your tank. And here we were, in the middle of nowhere with nothing but fumes in our tank.

My poor mom just about had a heart attack when she realized it. Her heart was still pounding several hours later. The gas gauge in her car is in a different place, and although she had noticed earlier that we were starting to get low on gas, it hadn't entered her mind since then. Only God knows why the very dim light caught my eye.

Meanwhile, I had been amusing myself by taking pictures of everything within my vision. I'd been trying to take a picture of signs for the town of Hebron, because I thought it was amusing. Now, we held our breath and tried to sit "lightly" while driving into this little two-gas-station-town that was a few miles off of the highway.

We put 22 gallons of gas in the tank. This was significantly more than I'd ever put in before. Interestingly, it's also 2 gallons more than the capacity of my gas tank. Huh.

I like to think that was the most tangible of the countless miracles that it took to safely convey me, my mom and all my stuff almost all the way across the country.

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