Moral Dilemma

I despise huge SUV's. I get angry when I see them but I wonder what I would have done in this case.

From the Sunday Portland Oregonian. By Matt Love

Recklessness gets its comeuppance, which a bystander allows with a twinge of conscience
Several weeks ago on a glorious fall afternoon on the Oregon coast, a friend and I walked our four dogs down the wet, packed sands of Nestucca Spit. As my friend and I, both longtime coastal residents, discussed the finer points for retaining one's sanity during the impending rainy season (literature, red wine and human intimacy), a pickup truck with two male passengers blew past us from behind at something like 50 miles an hour.

The driver never once slowed down and nearly ran over my husky.

This all unfolded in Bob Straub State Park, named after a man who about 40 years ago helped defeat a proposed and obscene relocation of U.S. 101 that called for sending the route down Nestucca Spit on pilings.

I love this park because it's free to visit, uncrowded and inspires me to remember a progressive era when Oregon was different and didn't need a hip advertising agency contriving a brand name to market the state. We once existed as a brand.

Now it's legal to drive on the beach here and a passionately held tradition with Pacific City locals. I can say with complete confidence this truck was not a locally owned vehicle. A local, even a drunk or insane one, would never drive a brand-new, white Chevy Tahoe Z71 (tank) down a beach, especially with the tide coming in. Locals drive rusted beaters and know their tides. They also don't speed.

I cursed the driver and his companion. Turning to my friend, I wished aloud for something specific and cosmic to take care of this reckless American arrogance, a wantonness that seems like an epidemic disease these days.

About 15 seconds later, the driver made an abrupt turn eastward to avoid a wave. He left the wet sands, found the dry, and his truck instantly ground to a halt. He was stuck. The tide was coming in.

I thought "sometimes you can get what you want and what you need," and there's truth in John Lennon's line about, "instant karma's gonna get you."

My friend and I simultaneously let out exclamations of joy, sprinkled with a few favorite epithets for emphasis.

We stood about a quarter mile from the men and stopped walking toward them. The driver emerged, surveyed the situation, looked west and began searching for driftwood to jam under the submerged wheels. A minute later, the passenger got out to help. Five minutes later, a mounting sense of futility hung in the ocean air: The truck remained stuck.

The Z-71 rested about a mile and a half from the parking lot. From a distance, the men appeared typically American, meaning physically unfit. I doubted their stamina to walk to a phone and call for help. I saw no cell phone in use.

"Should we help them?," I asked my friend. "No," she said. "They deserve it." I mulled over my answer. There seemed so much at stake on many levels.

I wondered, "What could be taught here by doing something? Or nothing? What would my pure Oregon instincts have me do?" I played out a half-dozen philosophical scenarios in my mind, eventually using my ultimate test for deciding matters of conscience: What would my mother, a retired master elementary-school teacher, do?

My friend and I turned around and headed to the parking lot. I didn't call anyone. I don't know the fate of the truck. I do like to think of it floating to Asia or dropping off the continental shelf.

I went against Mom on this one. Instead, I followed the advice of my father, a retired master secondary-school teacher. In some teaching situations with reluctant learners, he often counseled that doing nothing was the only way to educate. Allow the student to learn the lesson himself.

I wonder if these guys did.