The Power of One - Evan Tanner.
It was the 1970s, somewhere in Arkansas. He was about six years old, riding with his mother in the family’s Volkswagen van while his stepfather, a man he regarded as a stranger, sat at the steering wheel. A tire blew out, forcing them to the shoulder. On closer inspection the parents realized they didn’t have a working jack.
“What we need is a big, flat rock,” the mother said.
The quiet boy spoke up. “I saw a big rock back there,” he said, pointing back down the road.
“Get back in the car,” one of the adults said. They returned to the task of lifting the crippled car.
It’s impossible to say what passed through the boy’s mind in that moment, beneath his buzz cut. Almost certainly, though, he sensed in those days that his family was fracturing around him. His father had left when he was a baby, and his mother moved in with his stepfather, but the boy and the new man never developed a relationship. Later his mother, who struggled with depression, would move out when Evan was in high school, leaving him to more or less raise himself while living with his older brother.
On this day, though, on an Arkansas roadside, Evan could do something.
His mother looked up and saw her little boy staggering toward them. In his arms he carried an enormous, flat rock, so heavy that his legs bowed under the weight. A rock that could, he hoped, solve their troubles. A rock to prop them up, if only for a little while.
(Excerpt from the Men's Journal article "Evan Tanner's Final Test" by Matthew Teague)
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