The Angels of Dairy Road

If you ever - by some miraculous circumstance - find yourself at the entrance to Dairy Road, just ignore the “Road Closed: 600 feet” sign. (It refers to a different road that forks off to the left). Dairy Road, which curves up to the right, is open for business, running slightly uphill for precisely one mile before it ends at a gated industrial driveway.

Although seven blue-collar businesses – a speedometer service, an engine shop, an ATV dealer and the like - line one side of the northern tip of Dairy Road, it carries very little traffic. Most important to me, Dairy Road is practically deserted on Sundays, which was when I sometimes buckled into a pair of Rollerblade inline skates for a half-dozen or so 2-mile round-trip circuits.

Back in the days when I used to Rollerblade 500 miles a year, Dairy Road – with its smooth asphalt surface - was one of my favorite places to skate, especially on those quiet Sundays. If I saw 3 cars during my typical one-hour workout, that was a lot.

I’ve skated since my early teens, and crossed over from skating on ice with a stick in my hands to skating on hard roads with my life in my hands about 10 years ago. I always wore a helmet and wrist-guards, and took every logical precaution when I skated.  The aura of safety from Dairy Road’s lack of traffic was a key part of its appeal.

I also brought my skates on business trips and vacations. One morning, after skating shortly after sunrise on Bourbon Street in New Orleans before the cleanup crews arrived, I thought: “I’ve got to get a picture of this.” I sat on a curb with my right skate and several broken bottles in the foreground, and captured the perfect New Orleans Rollerblade selfie. And so began a routine in which I took a selfie of one or both of my skates anytime I was in an interesting place or passed an interesting background.

Since then I’ve skated by the Eiffel Tower, Lucy the Elephant, the guitar fountain at a Hard Rock Hotel in Florida, and a bunch of other majestic or quirky backdrops. I’ve got the pictures to prove it.

For the longest time my collection lacked a Rollerblade selfie of my hometown for the past 36 years – Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was time to fill that blank page in my collection and since Lancaster is abundant with farmland it just seemed right that I should include a cow in that picture.

There happens to be a dairy farm – go figure – just past the entrance to Dairy Road, and the farm’s cows – Holsteins, I believe - were often the only spectators on my Sunday skates, turning their heads with languid interest as I rolled on by. 

On one warm and bright Sunday afternoon, I slowly braked to a halt, sat right in the middle of Dairy Road, laid way back, lifted my right leg, and captured a selfie of my right skate against a quintessential Lancaster background, a large white Holstein resting in the grass, just as we made eye contact.

About twenty minutes later, as I neared the end of my workout and was gliding downhill towards the entrance to Dairy Road, I saw a late model, high-end silver Mercedes sedan slowly making its way in my direction. As the Mercedes approached, it slowed noticeably and then stopped as the woman in the passenger seat rolled her window down. Both the driver and the passenger were finely dressed, perhaps on their way to a wedding, completely out of place on Dairy Road. I was sure they were lost, so desperate for directions that they hadn’t seen the “Road Closed” sign. I was ready for a break and was happy to help.

The woman in the passenger seat startled me though when she asked: “Are you alright?”

“Alright? Yeah, but ...?”

“My husband and I saw you from 283, and noticed you lying in the road. We thought you might be hurt.” [If you look back at my picture of the cow, you can just see a guardrail at the top of the hill behind my bovine friend; that’s Route 283]

You should know that as forbidding as the entrance to Dairy Road might appear, you really have to work hard to get there – especially from Route 283. But somehow this couple was concerned and determined enough to corkscrew their way to this barren road, intent on helping out the screwball they saw lying back on its yellow line.

I babbled. “I’m fine. I’m sorry. I’m just an idiot. This is just so incredibly nice of you. I have this weird thing I do where I take pictures of my skates against different backgrounds. And there was this cow…”

They laughed and expressed their relief. Before they made a slow U-turn and drove off to their elegant destination, I did my best to express the absolute deluge of heartfelt appreciation that I felt for their act of thoughtful concern.

To this day it’s still hard to find words to describe the stunning lift to my spirits from this unexpected and striking act of kindness. I can tell you that I skated another couple of laps and felt that my wheels never touched the ground. It was almost as if someone had loaned me their wings.

Originally posted to LinkedIn on February 6, 2020