> Not sure what's going on here, but this reads like 90s cosplay.

This reads like Reddit-style "debunk" culture to me.

Improbable things happen. They happen often, because even if the individual improbable thing is itself improbable, the sum total probability of improbable events is high enough that some improbable event happens to all of us with regularity.

Yes, people actually used to get lost. Take a wrong turn, lose your bearings, and you're on some dust road in a corn field. Car GPS did not meaningfully exist. Many people (then, as now) can barely read a map. Highway signage can be busy and confusing. People are young and inexperienced and tired.

Literally any single person who drove before the smartphone era will be able to recount a story to you of getting lost at least once.

> This was certainly before the opioid epidemic and probably also before the heyday of meth. So shirtless guy was probably just a shirtless Kentuckian checking if OP was OK.

Note how this sort of thing is not actually debunking anything in the article, OP said nothing about opioids or the shirtless man's motivation. All we know is that (a) OP awoke in a car in an unfamiliar place, (b) a shirtless stranger hovered over OP, (c) OP found this disconcerting. It's such a tell-tale sign of Reddit-style debunk culture to "fact check" recounts by inventing details, wildly hypothesising, and then "fact checking" their own wild hypotheses against a Wikipedia-level understanding of the situation.

It profoundly annoys me to see such a pedestrian response to an interesting and thoughtful piece. It adds nothing. It actively detracts, in that people with interesting things to share equivocate over doing so, because they cannot be bothered dealing with this lowly form of engagement. And so we get a sea of Redditors and their worthless "well akshually"s drowning out the actual human experiences that are actually worth reading.