A True Story

“...a little story, a true story: it’s about an experience I had in 1970, when I was twenty-one years old...

     One day in late winter, I was visiting friends who had just moved to a house in the high hills of Quebec about sixty kilometers north of Ottawa. My friends knew no one else in the area, nor did I. I planned to stay overnight with them and return to my family in the city the next day. The friends’ new home was beside a river in a relatively wild region where few people lived, just a few lonely farmhouses and cabins. One could easily walk for an hour on the narrow snowy roads winding through the forest, without seeing a single person, a house, or a passing car. It was the same on both sides of the river.

     I had my drawing pad and some sticks of charcoal with me because I wanted to spend the whole day alone, walking for hours and stopping from time to time to sketch the winter scenes. The weather was cold but sunny, the entire world a wonderland of whiteness. The best landscapes were on the other side of the frozen river, so I decided to cross over on the ice, because the closest bridge was several kilometers away. The ice usually begins to thaw at this time of the year but I thought it was probably still thick enough to walk upon without falling through into the cold water and drowning or dying of hypothermia. It was an added risk because this river flows very swiftly, which wears away the ice from underneath. Even as I walked across, I could hear the ice splintering like broken glass beneath my feet. However, it supported my weight and I made it to the other side without any accident.

     All day long I walked and walked on poorly plowed roads, going ever farther into the hills. I didn’t see a single person or any passing car. When the afternoon sun began to sink toward the horizon I turned around and headed back to the river, where I hoped to again cross over on the ice. I hesitated a little because the sun had been beating on the ice all day and it was now a greater risk to walk on it. But I was tired and hungry and to walk more kilometers to the bridge would mean I would have to go a part of the way in the dark.

     I had just reached the edge of the river and stepped off the road when a car came rumbling along the road behind me. It stopped beside me and a door opened. Inside the car were three young men, maybe about twenty-one to twenty-five years of age. Two in the front and one in the back.

     “Where are you going?” asked the man in the back seat.

     “I’m going to cross the river on the ice, and get home before sunset,” I answered.

     “Come with us,” he said, “we’ll drive you to the bridge.”

     So I got into the car beside him and for the next fifteen minutes as we drove along, I observed the three men closely. They seemed to have come out of nowhere, and also they looked rather unusual. I should say that they looked totally like real human beings, yet some aspects of their appearance were like nothing I had seen before. They were all exceptionally handsome, with manly, shining, wholesome faces. They all kept smiling but said nothing to each other or to me throughout the journey. In those days (the awful 1960s and that year of 1970) almost all young people tried to look like hippies, with long hair, unshaven faces, ragged clothes, etc. During that time of social revolution, youth tried to cultivate expressions that were usually cynical or smirking or sarcastic or angry, dark with sinful experience, drugs, lack of faith in anything. But these three young men looked entirely different, as if they had stepped out of an older era of history. Their clothing was neat and clean, their faces were flawless, their hair was clean-cut and short; their mannerisms and facial expressions were full of politeness, kindness, open-hearted goodness. In those days they struck me as extremely rare kinds of persons.

     Finally the driver stopped the car at the entrance to the bridge. I opened the door and stepped out onto the road.

     “Thank you very much,” I said. “God bless you.”

     All three of them looked at me with their shining faces, and one said:

     “God bless you, Michael.”

     I was startled, because I certainly had not told them my name. Moreover, no one in that entire northern region knew me.

     “How do you know my name?” I exclaimed, astonished.

     Without answering, they all three gave me warm smiles, and drove away.

     I crossed over on the bridge and made it home to my friends’ house before dark. The next morning, I went down to the river and saw that during the night all the ice had collapsed and been swept away by the roaring waters. It is quite possible that if I had tried to walk back across the second time, yesterday afternoon, I would have died.

     Were they angels, like the “three young men” who visited Abraham and Sarah? Or were they human beings whom divine Providence had arranged to come to my rescue at exactly the right moment? I do not know. But to this day I remember their extraordinary faces—especially the quiet but powerful light in them.”

~Michael O’Brien