Jimmy and I are driving home from an outing in the Wasatch in our white Tacoma (Matilda). At this juncture we are either still dating, or are newly weds.  We have just finished paddling at Echo Reservoir and are on our way home.  We are having a heated argument.  These are rare occurrences, especially at this time in our relationship.  I do not remember the source of the squabble, but I know it is a real voices raised conniption.  The whole thing is headed in a bad direction.  We are driving on 7th East at Trolley Square. Maybe we are going to Whole Foods to get dinner supplies?  What catches our eye, amid our rage-state throw-down, is an elderly woman walking erratically in traffic at the intersection of 7th East and 6th South.  As ER docs we are intimately acquainted with disorganized and “spirited” behavior.  Not easily impressed in that department, I’d say.  What stands out about this woman is that she is quite old and her state of confusion does not seem to be coming from a place of, well, meth.  In my memory she is wearing a trenchcoat and a babushka.  Jimmy and I stop our arguing, mesmerized by this woman.  Cars are stopping as she wanders aimlessly in the intersection, however no one is helping.  We make a pinch decision that this woman is in peril and not a danger to anyone (but herself).  We stop our car in the middle of the intersection, jump out, unsuccessfully attempt to communicate with her.  It seems that she is speaking Russian.  Without further recourse… we kidnap her.  We lift her into the back of our pickup and pull onto a side street.

We may be breaking the law.  We just lifted an elderly woman into our pickup and DROVE AWAY with her.  She cannot answer our questions because… Russian.  And also there seems to be a modicum of general confusion muddying the whole picture.  We are trying to figure out where she has come from:  She is able to articulate that she walked to Whole Foods to buy “fancy magazines”.  We are trying to figure out where she is going:  Home to her apartment on the “13th floor of the tallest and grandest building in Salt Lake City”.  Where is this building?  She has no clue but seems certain that we should know where the most beautiful and tall building is.

At this point, we cannot decipher an address or even a neighborhood. We are using Google translate and getting NOWHERE.  We have gathered that she walked to Whole Foods from her residence, so we start a grid search of the nearby streets, trying to locate this building, without avail.  She does not know what direction she came from or any nearby businesses or cross streets.  I am using the interpreter to ask if she has family nearby and she says, why yes, a daughter.  Does she have the daughter’s phone number? No.  This goes on for well over an hour.

Jimmy and I are starting to sweat a little.  We have captured a Russian Baba Yaga from the wilds of Salt Lake and have no idea what to do with her.  I suggest we drop her off at a fire station (like a baby?).  Jimmy is not as enthusiastic about this plan.  I seize the old woman’s purse and start frantically rifling through it looking for an ID with an address on it.  What I find when I open the purse is LOTS of $100 dollar bills.  I am pretty sure she thinks I am robbing her so she starts gesturing to me that I should take the money. Which I obviously do not do.

The clock is ticking and I think we are both wondering how our evening has taken the turn that it has.  We come up with a plan to take her to the University of Utah ER, where we will ask our colleague Rob Stephen, who speaks Russian, to translate for us in real time.  He walks out from under the neon Emergency Department sign and greets us with an expression that could only mean “what in the actual literal fuck.”  He attempts to translate but is unable to discern this woman’s confused dialect. What he can gather is that yes, she has a daughter in town, and yes she does know the phone number for her daughter but that she will not give it to us because she “will be in trouble.”  We move on to a video interpreter service (the very same that does interpretation for ED patients), which we have wheeled into the ambulance bay.  Again, the interpreter confirms that she does in fact know her local daughter’s phone number but that she will absolutely not spill the tea on how to get ahold of said daughter.  This goes back and forth and back and forth for god only knows how long.  We are begging and pleading with her.

Finally she acquiesces and we call this daughter, who speaks great English under the blanket of a thick Russian accent.  She provides the address to Salt Lake’s grandest residence and asks us to wait there for her.  We navigate to this locale and sit in the parking lot, in our final moments with our little old  Ruski captive.  The daughter rolls up in a pimp ride, maybe a Mercedes.  She also offers us a large sum of money.  We decline, as reclaiming our freedom from this situation is payment enough.

We drive away, bewildered by the direction our night has taken.  Our argument has come to an end, never to be resumed.