To them, a car on the road was like a ship at sea; to have withheld help would have been unthinkable.

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 176.  Norwich has been posted to Yugoslavia, based in Belgrade.  He is describing traveling the country a mere decade after World War II but in many ways astonishingly undeveloped.

Soon my Serbian was fluent, which helped a lot; what helped even more was our Land Rover, with its four-wheel drive and its reserve petrol tank. Petrol was always a problem. There were no filling stations, only occasional petrol dumps somewhere on the outskirts of the major towns. We had a list of their addresses, all impossible to find; so almost as soon as our first tank was empty and we had switched over to the second, the hunt would begin.

The other problem was the roads themselves. Most of them, being unsurfaced, were a cloud of dust in summer, a sea of mud after rain; time after time the four-wheel drive got us out of tight spots—though more than once, when there was a small river to be forded, even that failed and we had to suffer the ignominy of being pulled out by teams of horses provided by the local peasantry. The peasants could always be trusted in an emergency. To them, a car on the road was like a ship at sea; to have withheld help would have been unthinkable. It was the same with the lorry drivers. There were not many—one could easily travel for an hour or more without seeing anything other than a few peasant carts—but they believed firmly in the fellowship of the road. Whenever we had a puncture—which, with the tracks invariably covered with nails from old horseshoes, was often—every driver would stop without being hailed, and not only insist on helping to change the wheel but pull out a pocket vulcanizing kit and repair the inner tube on the spot.

I remember those vulcanizing kits but for bicycles not trucks.  Bicycling around Denmark in the early 1970s, if you were on the road more than two or three days, someone would have a flat.  Most the bikes had a small tool pouch behind the seat and included a vulcanizing kit.  You'd pull over and spend half an hour cooling off and repairing, then on the road again.