Nobody passes me going down Boulder Canyon.
That’s not a brag. It’s just that when we lived in Nederland, I drove that road to work every morning, and I drove it fast. Faster than the speed limit. Locals’ privilege.
So when a minivan blew past me at 7:30 on a summer morning three years ago, I noticed.
Half a mile later, that same minivan was pulled over on the shoulder. And something in me said: I wonder if they’re okay.
I still can’t tell you where that came from. A car on the shoulder is nothing. I’d passed a hundred of them without a second thought.
I turned around at the first pullout and drove back up. A man was standing in the road, waving me in. Frantic. Yelling for help.
I got out in my shorts and flip-flops and walked up to the car.
In the passenger seat: a woman, very pregnant, baby crowning.
I heard myself say to the guy, “We’re delivering a baby right now.”
Zero Training
Let me be clear about my qualifications at that moment: none.
Not a doctor. Not an EMT. No training of any kind. Just a guy in flip-flops on his way to work.
The dad was freaking out, which seems fair. So I reached down, took the woman’s hand, and told her, “You’re having this baby right now. I need you to push.”
“I can’t. I can’t. It hurts.”
“You gotta push now.”
She pushed. I held her hand. “Okay. Okay.” She was exhausted. “I can’t. I can’t.”
“Honey, I need you to push now.”
She bore down, and the baby came out into my hands.
Come On, Baby
The baby wasn’t breathing. Wasn’t crying. Wasn’t moving.
I rubbed its back. Patted it. “Come on, baby. Come on, baby.”
Nothing.
I cleared its mouth with my finger and blew a breath into it.
Nothing.
Rubbed again. Nothing.
One more breath—
and the baby coughed, sputtered, and started crying.
I have never felt relief like that. Not before, not since.
I put the baby on the mom’s chest and hugged that man like he was my brother. “Oh my god, you got a baby.” Total adrenaline dump, all three of us.
Five minutes later an ambulance showed up. I told the paramedics what happened, and they said, “Well, you did everything right.”
They took the family down the hill. I got the dad’s number and texted him later that day.
Baby happy and healthy.
Then I drove to work.
The Question That Wasn’t
Here’s the thing about the title of this post.
“If not me, then who?” sounds like a question you ask yourself. A deliberation. A weighing of options.
There was no question. There was no deliberation.
Something older than thinking took over. My hands knew what to do before my mind had an opinion about it. Rub the back. Clear the mouth. Breathe.
I’ve spent a lot of my life in my head. Building systems, playing the long game, optimizing. Layers on layers of abstraction and complexity.
None of that showed up on the side of that road. What showed up was simpler, and it was already there, and I didn’t put it there.
I think it’s in you too.
The Part I Can’t Explain
Run the odds with me.
I drove that canyon every single morning, and nobody ever passed me. The one morning somebody did, it was a couple racing a birth down the mountain.
They passed the one driver who would wonder about them half a mile later. Who would turn around. Who would roll up in the narrow window between crowning and catastrophe, with steady hands he didn’t know he had.
I’m a skeptic by wiring and by generation. I build systems for a living. I know how good the human brain is at finding patterns in noise, and I know the word “coincidence.”
And still. Three years later, I can’t make that morning lie flat.
Call it God. Call it the universe. Call it luck with immaculate timing. I’ve quit trying to name it.
All I can tell you is that for a few minutes on a road shoulder, something bigger than my plans was running the show. And it seemed to know what it was doing.
The Thin Veil
Yesterday was the three-year anniversary of that morning. I mark it on my calendar every year, and every year it works on me a little more.
There’s a toddler out there somewhere learning not to poop his pants because I was the right guy in the right place at the right time.
I wrote a while back about losing my buddy Billy, and how death has a shocking way of reminding me about the finite, fleeting nature of my own life.
Turns out birth does the same thing, from the other direction.
Both of them rip the veil back. Both of them drop you out of the noise and into base reality, where the actual stakes live. The veil between life and death is thin. That baby spent a long minute on the wrong side of it, in my hands, on a road shoulder.
And here’s what that moment made embarrassingly obvious: beneath all the complexity we swim in, all the plans and feeds and projects and noise, what truly matters is pretty straightforward.
Breath. Presence. Each other.
That’s basically the whole list.
What It Left Me
I don’t know what happened to that child. I don’t know that young couple’s names anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever know the rest of the story. That part stays a mystery too, and maybe that’s right.
But I know what it did to me.
It was a slap in the face to open my heart. An involuntary firmware update. Get really present, it said. Stop mistaking the noise for the signal.
I keep forgetting, of course. That’s the human deal. The complexity creeps back in, and I climb back up into my head, and I start optimizing again.
But once a year, the calendar reminds me: you already know what matters. You’ve held it in your hands.
Aho.
~capshaw
Great story Casey