One of my friends, a Mainer, had a blown tire earlier this year.

The spare was deep in the trunk underneath a pile of loose items, so he unloaded things onto the roadside. That was about as far as he got though. He has only one leg, well, one and a half, and his prosthesis is new, so he’s not able to get up and down off the ground easily.

With those constraints, he didn’t get the car jacked up or the tire swapped out. The towing company said they would be there in an hour or two. This gave him a while to wait on the side of the road.

He leaned against his car and watched for the tow truck, wearing shorts and a prosthetic leg. Cars went by, quite a few actually. Toward the end, one driver did stop and offered to help.

The jarring image of an older man standing on one leg, while cars continue to pass, has not left my mind easily.

During the last 20-some years living in Soda, I came across more than a few cars and trucks off the road. Slid off, rolled off, stuck, broken down, crashed, or out of gas. And I saw an interesting pattern.

Within a few minutes, someone else also stopped. Then another. And another. Usually almost everyone slowed down and pulled over until the roadside was pretty filled up.

One person would rummage around for a tow strap. Another would be managing traffic. Someone would pull out two shovels, hand one over, and start digging in the snowbank. Another person would go check with the driver and sit with them.

If the weather was bad, this neighborliness was sometimes directed toward me. When a big thundercloud passed Soda Point and headed toward Barker’s, and I was pedaling in the middle, I never got far without a truck slowing down, window rolled, and someone hollering wondering if I wanted to jump in.

I know people feel they have reasons for not stopping along roads. But it is different in Caribou County. There is this unflinching helpfulness and a can-do attitude that seems to overcome any qualms about who is local and known and who is not, whether someone should have been better prepared or a better driver, or whether they were in church last week or who they like to vote for.

None of those secondary issues seem to matter much.

It is enough to give me a lump in the throat just remembering the simple heroic muddy inconvenient spontaneous willing and generous roadwork I have seen in that southeast corner of the state, all by volunteers.

And I think there’s room for a little pride in that because this helpful spirit does not show up so commonly in other places. It is one of the things that makes Idaho so unique.