It took two hours to drive through the loving rapture of Mother Winter’s fanged breath to arrive 50 miles down the mountain at Colorado Springs. Once there, I deftly spun my car in pirouette against a tall curb at the velocity of a sleepy walrus — Ga-Whumpf! I felt the wheels land on the ground again (bellydown, noggin-up, fortunately), and I gave the pedal a squish but the wheels were not quite right. My little car wobbled into the parking lot of a Loaf and Jug gas station. I was trapped in the city!

I whipped out of my parked car to assess the damage, slammed the door shut on my idling vehicle, and watched in terror as the electronic sensors decided that for the sake of Homeland Security, for the privilege of living in freedom, and in the name of the HOLY GHOST, my doors should automatically lock while the vehicle is idling so that no precious children should be expelled onto the surface of asphalt and ice.

“Click-click-click-click-click!” went all five doors (it’s a hatchback). A demon was in control of my vehicle. The wipers were wiping. The heater was heating. The gas was combusting. The time was 7:30 a.m. A fat chic with night-time make-up and Christmas bobbles for jewelry stood behind the counter (why do the station attendants all look like they’re between parties?). I spoke with her. She lent me the use of the company shovel to dig slush out from under my chassis so I could look for the spare key holder. She supervised me in the back room where they store the big boxes of paper cups and cleaning supplies. I wanted to use some flattened cardboard to lie on top of the ice so I could inspect the belly of my faithful steed.

Yup, it was there. The spare key box was right where I had put it only two days earlier.

“Boy, am I smart!” I congratulated myself and snagged the little black box. The EMPTY little black box! No key! I had carefully purchased and hidden a magnetic box of special design in a niche inside my car’s secret areas in anticipation of such a situation. I had done this without putting a spare key in first.

Car running. Flippers flipping. Headlights beaming. Steamy warm inside the car now (I could tell by the way the ice melted from the roof and slid down the windshield). Fat Chic joined me. She was wearing a Christmas sweatshirt with a bad reindeer saying, “Dear Santa, define ‘GOOD’,” and one of those blinking Christmas light necklaces gas stations sell next to the cigarette lighters on the counter.

“You can use my cell phone to call Pop-a-Lock,” she said. She was darned sweet.

“I’ll be forty minutes,” the Pop-a-Lock guy said. An hour later, I called a second company on Fat Chic’s phone.

“Fifteen minutes,” that guy said. Another hour went by so I called another company.

“Thirty minutes,” said third billy-goat to the troll under the bridge (me). Fat Chic (so nice to me, the Grinch) allowed me to have a cappuccino FOR FREE if I would shovel the station sidewalks, which I did. I also sprinkled salt on the ice. In the course of the morning, I shoveled and salted the entire gas station twice. I mopped the floor around the cappuccino machine, too, so no one would slip, bash their skull open on the hot dog burner and pull scalding hot coffeepots on top of themselves this holiday season.

Donna complained to me that her replacement was a “No-showno- call.” (I picked up Fat Chic’s proper name somewhere between my cappuccino and an egg-and-cheese-NOT-burrito with small hard chunks of unidentified square, sponge-like items in it). I thought I better call my client — no, better call his secretary and avoid talking to him. (I am now also a “No-show-no-call,” after all.) First, I called my huzbun at his office to tell him I am OK. However, I carefully avoided divulging the extent of my situation because of this one point of fact: He knows that my new snow tires are sitting in white plastic bags next to the horse hay out back of our house down the hill under about two feet of snow. I never got around to having them put on.

For the next THREE hours, I was a hostage at a Loaf and Jug sitting at a purple and green Formica table next to a large, floor-length window with holly and snow flakes painted on the glass sadly noticing the many different kinds of lovely new snow tires on all the lovely new SUVs, likely all with lovely spare keys hidden in magnetic boxes under their chassis.

People pulled up, refreshed their JUMBO MUGS with gasstation coffee, bought petrified donuts and disappeared down the back hall to go wee-wee. I watched illegal immigrants drive Bobcat mini-tractors with snowplow blades around the parking lot until only one small square of slushy, lumpy, dirty glacier remained around — you got it — my little car with the decomposing bumper sticker that reads, “Can’t sleep — the clowns will eat me.” Its wipers were still diligently doing their job on squeaky clean (by now) windows.

“Hmmm,” I thought, “I bet that guy with the snowplow would appreciate it if I would move my car. I’m just too inconsiderate.” Eventually, the wipers got slower, the headlights dimmer, and when I went out to shovel the walk for the third time, the car was sitting strangely silent. Poor thing had run out of gas. The battery was keeping her heart beating, her breathing going, but her idleness was eerie. The lights were still on but quite dim now. It was a morbid thing frozen in the snow, dead with its eyes wide open.

In the midst of her routine, Donna made idle chat with me regardless of my apathy. Customers came and went asking for the bathroom, paying for gas, hanging out by the coffee machine and all the while, “Yak-yak-yak,” went sweet Donna. Near the end of my somber patience, she said to me, “SMILE — you’ve gotta smile at least once every day! Come on!”

“How do you know I’m not your invisible friend? Maybe I’m not really here. Maybe you’re imagining me?” She seemed seriously afraid for a moment looking at me with mouth agape and customers standing in line.

“Ask them if they see me,” I told her. The customers were ignoring me. Donna looked at them, searching their eyes to see if this was funny to them also. Did they SEEEE MEEEE?

I didn’t continue this amusing head game because two things happened: Donna’s tardy replacement arrived (on freshly shoveled sidewalks), and the original Pop-a-Lock guy finally drove up — the latter of which snaked a flat thing inside my window and snagged the door latch to open it in five seconds for 60 bucks.

I was free!!! My battery held its charge to start the car. I backed into a slot for gas (a droplet of fuel must have condensed in the reservoir). Donna disappeared into her office to count change. I never got the chance to thank her or say good-bye (if I was ever really there in the first place . . . ). A couple of weeks later, when I returned with a thank-you card and a little Christmas gift, I found she had quit. Her manager assured me she would get the card and gift, though, as she had yet to come in for her last paycheck.

I don’t think I had anything to do with her final decision there. Rather, I like to think she finally made it to the next party or ran off to a warm beach somewhere, perhaps with the Bobcat snowplow driver. I may run into her at a bar she owns in Bermuda one day. You never know.

Long-time contributor Michele Murray’s last piece for the MG was “Saloon State of Mind: Waiting Tables in a Mountain Bar,” which appeared in #160. She lives in Lake George, Colo.