Good morning, road scholars! There’s not a lot of dirt for the dog to divulge on this day. It’s an easy drive with no rocks, no fog, no rain, no ice, no snow, no Mongol hordes, no potholes. HAAA! No potholes?! As if… I’m pretty sure that Crestline roads are more pothole than pavement… As I drive around, it’s just sort of a tightrope walk on the remaining honeycomb of asphalt in between the holes.
Oh, and while the past month or so has been nice, it looks like the 40th Street traffic signal for early morning commuters has returned to its apparent default setting: Waterman Avenue traffic—with all of the mountain commuters—gets a 75-minute red, while it’s a green for the usually-absolutely-zero cars cruising east/west on 40th. The traffic backs up on Waterman, as car after car after car joins the parked parade, getting zero MPG, whiling the hours away, as we gaze at the red light. Why the city can’t fix that thing, and make it STAY freakin’ fixed, is apparent testament to the municipality’s marvelousness. Oh well, I imagine they’ll have the thing fixed again in short order, optimistically in less than two or three years. In the meantime, it’s back to the Starbucks Scenic Byway, as this can save a driver 74 minutes.
Today is Fat Tuesday… does anybody NOT think it to be ‘random coincidence’ that it is also National Cheese Doodle Day? Hmmm…
Well, not a lot to report today, so we’ll go with random story time… just because.
Way back in the day, when I was a young and wild pup, I’d gone out drinking one night with a couple of the fellas. For a rare treat, I was NOT the designated driver that night, so I took advantage of the opportunity to get all liquored up. We had a good time, we partied like rockstars until 2AM, and then we headed home.
I was in the back seat, which I had to myself. I even dozed off for a while, as the drive home was about 25 miles of empty, rural highway. The other guys were tired too… nobody was in a chatty, energetic mood. No reason NOT to take a nap.
However, at one point I sat up, and asked the guys to pull the car over. They questioned why drunk guy was making such a request, and I really had no answer, other than that I thought there was a car accident nearby. Well, the guys thought that was a silly request, and as the words came out of my own mouth, I had to agree… I simply had no reason whatsoever to think such a thing… especially given the fact that I had been asleep in the back seat and had not even had the opportunity to have seen anything at all. Maybe I dreamed something, maybe booze was just addling my brain, maybe I just needed to get on medication. Whatever. My request was denied. We drove on.
A few minutes later, the guys dropped me off at my house and I headed for bed. Only, I couldn’t sleep then… I kept thinking that there had been a car accident “out there.” Finally, after a half hour of tossing and turning, I got back out of bed. I went next door, where a friend of mine lived. Since everybody likes being awakened at 3AM, I knocked on her door. Soon, I found myself explaining to her the reasons why I was asking her to drive me out to that section of highway. I was still not in a driving state of sobriety, but just needed to go see for myself that there was nothing there. And… she was a good friend. She agreed to this drive.
Around 3:30AM, we were on that same stretch of highway. There was nothing… no cars, debris, not even a skid mark. Buuuuuuut… just to really cover all of the bases, so that I would be able to get some sleep, we pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway, to have a lil’ looksee over the edge of the embankment.
When I stepped out of the car on that dark and deserted stretch of empty highway, the most amazing thing I have ever witnessed came into view: a bloody, battered guy came crawling up the embankment.
“Oh, man, am I glad that you stopped! I just wrecked my truck. It’s way down over the embankment, down in those trees. I swerved to miss a deer, and damn if it didn’t go all to hell from there!”
I could not believe my eyes… and neither could my chauffeur.
And, what made this even more strang was that the guy explained that he had only crashed a few minutes before we pulled up… he figured five minutes, at the most. That means that the first time I cruised past that area, this accident had not even happened yet… there was about an hour’s time from my revelation of random weirdness until the time this guy dodged a deer.
Now, before anybody gets all crazy and declares this a miracle from God, I need to point out that our arrival did not save anybody’s life, or anything that grandiose at all. The guy was a little torn up, but there were no serious injuries at all. In fact, he did not even feel like bothering with seeking medical help. The weather was nice, and nobody would have frozen to death or died from the elements. A gas station was only a mile down the road, along with phone booths (those, kids, were actual Tardis-like devices, used by Superman, or by people who would place metallic discs into a slot, which would then activate the device to summon others, by pressing a code into a keypad, or even by rotating a wheel ringed by fingerholes). He just had us drive him to his house. Thus, all we really did was make things a little more convenient for him… maybe we saved him some walking. Not a big deal… not the stuff of miraculous intervention from the creator of the Universe.
Can I explain it? Nope. Do I believe it was some sort of supernatural occurrence? Nope. But… is it so strange that it seems to defy all rational explanation, other than extreme random chance? Yep.
My tale of ‘whoa’ has no resolution, no point, no grand finale, no argument claiming victory or knowledge. It’s just an odd and random thing that happened, that I’ve never been able to explain.
See y’all tomorrow… don’t go crazy with the cheese doodles, because I’m not sure that Fat Wednesday is a thing.