Sometimes, a bird-brained misadventure is all that’s needed to remind us that in a world that often seems heartless, kindness can be found in the most unlikely of circumstances. I drive a diesel car. Yes, I know this makes me a dinosaur, and in some circles, something approaching an environmental vandal.
Tony Wright with his rescuer, Chayce McCubben. My defence is that I drive long country miles frequently, and the vehicle uses a lot less fuel than a petrol machine on the highway. Anyway, I fear I’d be too impatient to sit for extended periods at charging stations during those long drives if I were tempted to move to an electric vehicle.
Which I’m not – at least, not yet. I’ve liked the thrum of an engine since I was a kid. It turns out, however, I’m not only a dinosaur, but a blockhead.
Heading from Melbourne recently to attend a family funeral in Canberra, the car packed to the roof – OK, it’s a largish SUV – we pulled into a service station in the early hours to top up the fuel tank. More than 250 kilometres later, we made another stop for a picnic at a riverside park in Albury. When we were ready to continue, the car wouldn’t start.
Sweating, I spiralled through the likely reasons ...
and with heart sinking to my boots, came to an appalling conclusion. Back in the dawn, all those kilometres ago, I’d topped up the tank with petrol. This was a very bad idea.
Petrol, diesel – don’t confuse them. Credit: Bloomberg We shall spare the technical details, but petrol is a different fuel than diesel, lacking lubrication, and it can quickly cause catastrophic damage to a diesel motor. And I’d driven 250 kilometres or so with half a tank of diesel and half a tank of petrol! It was Saturday morning, approaching noon.
Slightly delirious, we placed a call to the local Albury dealer of my car’s brand, banking on the outside chance that someone might advise us about what we should do. The dealer’s workshop was closed, naturally. A salesperson answered and said he’d talk to his manager.
And while we were trying to get through to a car-rental company and I was frantically checking whether I was still a paid-up member of the RACV, a young man loped across the park and introduced himself. He was there to put our frazzled emotions at ease. “No need for stress,” he soothed.
“I’m going to get you back on the road. Relax.” Chayce McCubben turns up with a new luxury vehicle to ensure the Wright crew can get to the funeral in Canberra.
It was the principal dealer of the car sales business, which happened to have its showroom no more than a few hundred metres away from where my vehicle sat stranded. I’m not in the habit of using this column to offer commercial endorsements. But what happened next still seems so astonishing that it would be peculiar not to mention the name of the business and the fellow who runs it.
His name is Chayce McCubben, of Albury Mazda. He calmly advised that we should arrange for a truck to haul my vehicle to his business’s workshop, where it would be safe until mechanics could inspect it after the weekend. Meanwhile, he’d put an end to our problems, he promised.
With that, he disappeared back across the park. He returned a few minutes later. He was at the wheel of a brand-new Mazda CX-90, a big luxury vehicle with about 50 kilometres on its odometer.
It was large enough to easily accommodate our luggage, he explained. And it was, he declared, ours to continue our journey north. We were perfectly dazed at this swift turn in our fortunes.
Loading Lest you imagine Chayce McCubben was looking for favourable publicity from a journalist, he was quite unaware of my occupation, and did not even know our surnames until we produced driver licences. We were strangers to him. Our mind-blowing luck held further when I discovered, glory be, that my RACV membership had precisely one day to run before it would expire.
A tow truck was sent our way. The truckie mercifully refrained from mocking my brainlessness. “Someone puts petrol in a diesel on average every day just around Albury-Wodonga,” he said.
“Keeps us busy.” The petrol-diesel confusion happens about once a day in the Albury-Wodonga region. Credit: David Gray/Getty Images And as the truckie drove away, my incapacitated vehicle sitting forlornly on his truck’s tray, Chayce McCubben bid us farewell.
“You’ve got a funeral to attend,” he said. “Consider the car as your own for as long as you need it.” Four days later, Albury Mazda’s service manager called.
“We’ve drained your fuel tank, the car’s fixed, and it’s good as new.” We returned the big shiny loan car on the way back from Canberra, and discovered the repair job on my SUV added up to no more than a few hundred dollars. The world, which for a short time had appeared a dark and confusing place, settled back on its proper axis.
All because a nice bloke cared enough to leave his business on a Saturday morning, leg it across a park and help out stranded strangers with what we might associate with old-fashioned country open-handedness. I sent Chayce a message expressing our bottomless thanks. He texted back words that you’d like – in what sometimes seems an indifferent world – to be repeated everywhere.
“It cost nothing to be kind and I’m glad we were there to help when you needed it,” he wrote. Yes, and clod that I am, I look very closely now for the diesel nozzle when visiting a service station. Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own.
Sign up for our Opinion newsletter . Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. License this article Real life For subscribers Road trips Canberra Albury Wodonga Insight Tony Wright is the associate editor and special writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
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