The hotel parking lot. Early afternoon. He was packing his truck. Slamming toolbox lids. Reorganizing luggage in the rear cab. Iowa plates.

I’ve never met anyone from Iowa before. Or if I have, chances are they were so timid I don’t remember them.

Midwesterners, in my experience, are quieter than your average folks. They don’t enter a room like my people. Yelling, laughing, clapping everyone’s backs like a politician or a manure salesman.

They are humble people. Reserved. Kindhearted, but very hesitant to give away a free hug. In other words: they are Lutheran.

This man was late forties. Wearing denim and boots. Quiet disposition. He talked a little like Jimmy Stewart.

His wife was with him. Reddish hair. Pretty. They looked like they just stepped off the alfalfa farm. Good people.

I noticed the gas cans and chainsaws in the back of his truck. The entire bed of his Ford was weighted in heavy equipment.

The truck was towing an enclosed trailer with even more gear loaded inside. Lawn mowers, Weed Eaters, hedge trimmers, chains, axes, you name it.

There were garbage

bags full of secondhand clothes, boxes of diapers, and baby formula.

“I’m on my way to Fort Myers, Florida,” he said.

I asked what a mild mannered Iowan was doing traveling to Florida after a Category 4 hurricane had just struck.

He shrugged. “Way I figure, what Florida people need is help. I got the tools, I got the time, so I thought, why not?”

His wife added, “It’s what we’d want people to do for us.”

I can’t help but feel like heel. I am a Floridian. And yet I have never—not once in my life—traveled to Iowa after a tornado to help tornado victims. I’ve never asked myself what I can do to help blizzard victims.

For shame.

“You must have family in Florida,” I said.

That must be why he was going.

He shook…