When I think of Baltimore, I don't think of riots or injustice or cruelty — I think about how complete strangers helped two women reach John Hopkins in the blizzard of 1996. That was the blizzard that dumped four feet of snow on the eastern shoreboard and completely paralyzed Baltimore. My brother was in Neuro-Critical Care, recovering from major brain surgery, having just had a tumor the size of a baseball removed. My mother and I were staying at a friend's home in Bethesda. Like most people in the bubble of a crisis, we paid no attention to the weather and woke up the next morning to find well over a foot and a half of snow already on the ground.
We're from Michigan. Blizzards don't scare Midwesterners. We shoveled the car out and started our journey down I-95. For once there was no traffic. Occasionally, a plow or a salt truck raced by then there was nothing.
It was a white-out. The snow was so heavy that the windshield wipers couldn't clean the snow from the glass, so I sat on the edge of the open window, clearing the windshield and giving my mother directions. "Keep to the left and hold the wheel straight. That's it!" She was driving blind. I was the eyes, the wipers and the cheering section.
Underpasses were havens where we stopped, scraped snow, blew our noses and hugged each other. We had no idea how far we had to go — signs were obliterated by snow — but we had been driving for two hours and Baltimore was still not in sight.
Eventually, a salt truck raced by at over 30mph. Blinded by salt and snow spittle we sped up determined to dog it to the city that had finally appeared in a ghostly white shroud. It took a practically invisible exit ramp and so did we. We had made it! And that is when we got stuck.
Trudging slowly up a hill to the hospital the car sank into the unplowed street. Despite our hardy Midwestern roots and know how the wheels spun. There was no place to abandon the car — drifts covered cars along the side of the road. My mother began to weep. I jumped out to push. The wheels shrieked.
That was when the spirit of the Baltimore I know and love came to our rescue. I got out of the car to push and two men — thin as bone — on their way to the soup kitchen, stopped to help. We pushed, the car moved a whole half a block and got stuck again. Our hair was dripping. Snowflakes clung to our lashes. We shouted, "1! 2! 3! Push!" We rocked and pushed gained a few feet, but we were as effective as Sisyphus pushing that car up the hill.
That was when a dark blue SUV came up the narrow street. We waved for the driver to back up. There was no way he could get past us. He got out and smiled. "Want me to push you with my car?"
His wife was sitting in the front seat and shook her head. "He woke up this morning and said, let's go see if there is anyone we can help." We were just the people he was looking for. Nudging his bumper against our car, he pushed the car all the way up the to the hospital.
I hugged the men who had helped us and handed them a damp twenty-dollar bill, before chasing the cars up the road. At the parking lot, my mom tried to offer them money but he shook his head and his wife explained, "Helping is his reward."
White knights are not a myth in Baltimore — they are real flesh and blood. And in Baltimore white knights are black.
Heather Dune Macadam is the author of "Rena's Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz" and president of Rena's Promise Foundation, based in Columbia. Her email is hdune@heatherdune.com.