There was a light knock on my door one recent evening just as my guests and I were thinking of turning in.

I almost missed hearing it, but as it turned out, I was glad I opened the door to the polite young man (early 20s, I’d guess) who was standing there in his winter gear. A snowmobile was parked at the top of the drive, at the edge of the circle of light cast out toward the woods by the outdoor spotlight.

He was lost.

What he was asking for was directions to Rick’s Market in Dryden. My knowledge of local trails has not kept up with changes in past years since the trail was rerouted and no longer crosses the west section of my woods. I was at a loss as to how to help him. I tried to think who would know, but I suspected, too, that my neighbors would already have turned in.

I asked him to step inside, and as his story unfolded, it became clear that directions alone weren’t going to be enough to solve the problem.

He’d been out snowmobiling with a couple of friends all afternoon. They’d covered a lot of miles and it was already early evening when they parted at a crossroads to go their separate ways home. He’d been over the trail before, and thought he knew where to go, but alone in the dark, things looked different.

Besides, it’s been a peculiar winter. Despite heavy snow cover, there were parts of the trail that were muddy and rocky, and he doubted he could get his machine through. If that was the way home he told me, he couldn’t take it. Also parts of the trail had not been used since the last storm.

“You got a lot more snow than we did,” he said ruefully, confirming my sense that though Wilton and Temple border each other, when it comes to weather, it can be like comparing the tropics to the arctic. In some spots in Wilton, spring can come a full two weeks earlier than it does to the Temple hill country.

Unbroken trails and steep terrain meant that my young stranger’s snowmobile was overheating. He had stopped several times to pack the engine in snow, but he was wondering just how much more it could take.

Next, he was running out of gas. All I had on hand was less than half-a-gallon.

His feet were wet and he was cold. And he was scared. The prospect of spending the night alone in the frozen woods was singularly uninviting, and once he had stepped into the warmth of my house, became impossible to contemplate.

He had come around, as far as I could make out, from another back road north of me, where he had asked directions and been told encouragingly, “You won’t have any problem.” It had taken over an hour to go what was probably less than 2 miles. My house, with its lights still glowing, must have seemed to him The Last Outpost of Civilization.

I was very reluctant, learning all this, to see him go back out into the night and try to find his way, but I needn’t have worried. I was no more reluctant than he was himself. I handed him the phone and he decided to call someone for help.

I frankly expected him to call one of the buddies he had been with that day, but instead, he called his grandparents. He thought that his grandmother would still be up, and indeed, she answered the phone. He explained what he needed and asked her to wake his grandfather.

While she was off doing that, he said to me, “He’s the person I can count on the most.”

His grandfather got on the line and they talked a few minutes. The young man explained where he was and I had to suppress a smile because he told his grandfather, “Yeah, people actually live out here.”

They arranged to meet with a truck to haul the snowmobile at the Post Office in the village.

But wait a minute here – scroll back up and let’s look at that again.

This young man called his grandfather late at night asking him to get out of bed and come out in the cold because he was in a fix, and because his grandfather is “the person I can count on the most.”

It warms me to think that there is a family in Wilton in which the Generation Gap is merely fabled myth. That there’s a grandfather who went to the trouble of making sure his grandson knew he could count on him.

Generation upon generation, may there always be such grandfathers.