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It’s a mega-watt moon shining down on western Tanzania.

That ragged ribbon of moonlight you see is a rough-and-tumble highway known in south-central Africa as the Hell Run. From Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean, this 1500-mile lifeline serves the heart of the continent.

A 5-ton truck speeds westward with its load of car tires in a metal cage. At the wheel, a hungry-looking Tanzanian, and beside him an over-stuffed Sikh bending a tire iron just for the hell of it.

Ten miles ahead, beyond a sleeping village, three youths are running along the road. What are children doing up at midnight? The boys stop where the road descends into a wooded valley and shout to someone on the verge of the gloom. That someone is a mzungu, a white boy. Me.

“Habari gani?” I say. I have no idea what they want.

I’m returning to Zambia after traveling north to Uganda, then hitchhiking south-eastward through Kenya and into Tanzania. Now it’s westward as quickly as possible to resume my duties as a hydrologist in Zambezi country. I’ve been gone too long, six weeks, so I choose to keep moving by the light of this impossible moon. I don’t get far. Those boys are waving excitedly.

“What’s up?” I shout. “Unitaka nini?”

“Simba!”

Everybody talks about simba but how many have seen a lion with their own two eyes? Exactly. But I appreciate their concern.

“You saw the simba?” I ask.

“Simba eat man!” the oldest kid shouts.

“Yeah? Where?” I ask, skeptically.

“Just here!” He jogs down the hill to join me and points loosely, vaguely, into the near distance.

“When?” I ask.

“Yesterday, Bwana.”

While still not convinced, neither am I a fool.

The boys are brothers, children of the farmer who dropped me roughly in the middle of nowhere. As we approach the village I hear someone calling “Tobias!” The boys bound toward the village like jackrabbits. A vehicle is approaching. They’re waving it down, bless their hearts. The truck is stopping.

The older kid leaps onto the running board to negotiate the terms of this hijacking. The truckers step down to examine Tobias’ bribe, a tire, which the Sikh inspects in the light of the headlamps. He kicks it and growls and spits on it and tells me to climb aboard, not in the cab but in the cage, which he locks once I’m in, and I wonder if my odds of survival weren’t better with Simba.

Tobias and I shake hands through the bars as the truck moves ahead. It’s a mental snapshot that hasn’t faded all these years later—those boys as my guardian angels. It’s a romantic notion, isn’t it—angels. I don’t honestly do angels, and it’s just as well, or my life story would soon become tedious for its endless interventions of a divine nature.

Down into the valley we go. That laughing hyena at the wheel is targeting every pothole in the road. I’m safer the higher I clamber within that jungle of tires where I hang on like a monkey in a cage. Why do I get myself into these situations? Seriously, what is wrong with me? Let it never be said that I’m too smart for my own good. I’m just that little bit stupid, blessed with the essential naiveté that marks a fictional protagonist. Otherwise those angels I don’t quite believe in would have no cause to show up in my life. Not that I’m looking for trouble—who looks for trouble?—but if you were to accuse me of harbouring an urge to escape the gravity field of the known world, I would plead guilty without hesitation.

By the time we rise out of the valley I’ve made peace with the tires. They cradle me now. Peace is open savannah country by night, moonlit mile after magical mile. The earth is unearthly. I doubt heaven compares with this. Giant leafless baobab trees resemble elephants, mute herds standing guard on the grasslands, benign and protective. I have never felt so far from home.

The truck slows then stops for no apparent reason. The Sikh unlocks the cage and I reckon this for the scene where I’m murdered and robbed. Instead, he crosses the road to exercise his tire iron on a Mercedes abandoned in the ditch, stripping it of its tires in minutes. Welcome to the Hell Run. The African heaves each Michelin into the cage and off they go unaware that I’ve slipped away without a word of thanks.

The back seat of the Mercedes makes a perfect bed for the night.

I’m woken by the sound of a motorcycle, not the guttural rumble of a Harley but the unforgivable racket of a two-stroke Kawasaki. The sun is up and so is the hood of the Mercedes behind which someone is having a go at the engine. Someone dressed from head to toe in black. Father Manon, he calls himself.

“God helps those who help themselves,” he says, as he stashes a handful of electrical leads his saddle bags. He sets his goggles in place and says, “Allons-y! Let’s go, my son!” Saved again! This time by a priest from Chicoutimi, Quebec.

Father Manon drives as if he were immortal. He drives that Kawasaki with one hand so he can bless passers-by without slowing down. He blesses the chickens and the cows and the baobab trees. He blesses the ant hills! We speed along roads cluttered with people who lack the road-wise flow of urban traffic. Cyclists packing enormous sacks of charcoal waver and wobble within a spoke of death, and women balancing colourful bundles half again as large as themselves lead children-in-tow aside to allow us through.

I’m not sure if I’m being saved or not. Or if I want to be saved. I mean, why do I leave home in the first place if not to become lost? Think about it—doesn’t the human condition seem to demand our own undoing? The sages have been telling us since forever to risk everything, to leave everything behind.

I know, I know, easier said than done.

You’re reading this, you tell me—isn’t there something compelling about this picture of a young mzungu hanging onto the robes of a fake priest as he vanishes over the horizon deeper into the heart of Africa? To what end we can only imagine.

Maybe the real angels save us by leading us deeper and deeper into the heart of our own story. I don’t know, I don’t do angels.

But I seem to run into a hell of a lot of them.

(An earlier version of this story appeared here almost two years ago. In response to readers who have asked for more of these road stories, this will be an ongoing series. It’s time I got them all written down. But I don’t want to waste your time, so, please let me know if they speak to you.)