The story below is from our March/April 2019 issue. For the full issue Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
Photo Courtesy of Diane Rumbolt
Meet three more local female trailblazers! Read about Sinkland Farms owner Susan Sink here; Roanoke arts and culture icon Pearl Fu here; and Carilion emergency medicine physician Dr. Jessica Gehner here.
Rumbolt aims to keep Roanokers safe on the road with Big Lick Boomerang.
“Well, kiddo, you’re going to have to drive home.”
In the early hours of morning, 10-year-old Diane Rumbolt watches her father, David Melanson, dry off in a hotel room in Leamington, Ontario, and drink another beer. The two are back in the room after spending the morning on Leamington’s shark tooth-shaped coast to see Lake Eerie.
Melanson is dripping with the lake’s cold water, having been knocked off a rock by a wave. His glasses and driver’s license are gone, lost in the lake. And the beer, a 24-ounce tall boy, is not his first — it’s more like his sixth. It comes in the middle of a drinking binge that began the night before, when Melanson, a truck driver, finished a job delivering flowers to grocery stores, with Rumbolt tagging along for the trip. Beer in hand and vision a blur, Melanson knows he shouldn’t drive his eighteen-wheeler the three hours home to Mississagua. So does his daughter.
He asks her to drive, and she agrees. They get on the highway, Rumbolt steering from atop her father’s lap. He guides her shifting and manages the clutch, because she can’t extend her leg far enough to push it all the way down. Still drinking, he pulls on the horn, and she swerves once or twice. “It’s not something that your parents train you to deal with,” says Rumbolt, now 35.
Rumbolt cites the events of that morning as a low point in her father’s long struggle with alcoholism. Her childhood seems marked by life-altering events involving drinking and driving: on top of the Leamington incident, when Rumbolt was eight, a drunk driver T-boned her mother’s car and left her mother seriously injured. But Rumbolt revisits them with frankness and empathy, and without anger.
To her, those events, as well as her work in emergency medical services and her experience as a mother of three (with a fourth child on the way), are all part of a path. In 2016, six years after moving to Roanoke, Rumbolt started Big Lick Boomerang, a designated driving service designed to help get people, their families and their cars out of tough situations.
Big Lick Boomerang specializes in transporting people home in their own vehicles. When booked (online or by phone, hours ahead or on the spot), the service sends two drivers out: one to take clients home, and the other to pick up the first driver at the destination.
One of the service’s key niche roles is assisting people who drive downtown and plan to drive home at the end of their evening, until a few too many drinks derail their plans. Big Lick Boomerang offers a safe alternative to those who consider calling an Uber or Lyft, but feel tempted — often by work and other obligations — to try to drive while impaired and skip the step of coming back for their car.
“Life happens,” says Rumbolt of the situations that lead to calls to her business.
She describes how drinking and driving can be catalyzed in part by small, last-minute changes. Maybe a quick hello at a bar turns into a night out. Or a designated driver abandons his or her post and has a few drinks.
“We’re just grateful to give you another option to get you home, that includes your car,” says Rumbolt. “It’s really important to have that last-minute, nonjudgmental aspect of safety.”
Rumbolt encourages the service’s use in situations that may demand more back-and-forth communication and compassion than the use of a ride-sharing app like Uber can provide.
“In terms of being adaptive to the needs of the community, I think it comes down to wanting to be able to help people to whatever extent that we can,” she says.
One evolving role that Rumbolt says Big Lick Boomerang can take: helping families ease the stress of moving vehicles and getting rides while navigating medical emergencies. She sees its potential to help after driving ambulances for 10 years, as well as managing her own sudden hospitalization due to kidney failure — with a car full of kids.
“We’re trying to fill all those gaps in transportation,” she says. “That makes it easier for families to help ease some of the issues that we’ve been in ourselves.”
At the same time, Rumbolt says clients can call Big Lick Boomerang simply for convenience or peace of mind: to book ahead and secure a ride on a busy night like New Year’s Eve without worrying whether they’ll be hit with surge prices, or to arrange for longer-distance drives that Uber, Lyft or cab drivers may not want to make.
Whatever the drive, Rumbolt says her goal is to build trusting relationships within the Roanoke community and treat people with kindness and respect.
“The first thing we tell them is: there’s no judgment,” she says. “This is what we do.”
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