Summer Of What?
I would say this summer has yet to be identified as the “Summer of” anything really. We are already in the last real month of Summer 2020, and just about the time you’re ready to go to sleep …
My S.O. always makes her trip out to the chicken coop after dark, does a headcount and shuts in the coop for the protection of our eleven chickens. Last night was no different until it became strangely different.
I wasn’t there, but as she describes it, she saw headlights coming on straight into the coop from a distance. Our spread backs up against a quaint little church parking lot, and looking straight as an arrow down the parking lot toward the east, is the road that dead-ends into the parking lot and then our property. That street is crossed by a major north-south street forming the corner for the church and a nice little buffer for those who do go straight and are lost, if not lost souls.
This night these hot young spirits didn’t bother with that stop or intersection. They kept coming, straight for the chicken coop, and the S.O. began to shelter in place. Now, she and the chickens weren’t particularly vulnerable in reality. A couple of unforgiving trees and a concrete retaining wall about twenty-inches high would have seen to a sudden and extremely violent dead-end to their ride.
He or she must have realized that – and broke down on the brakes in the smallish church parking lot, and resorted to doing three of four donuts in the lot, and then came to a stop parallel to the chicken coop facing south now. What next she wondered? Eye-to-eye, but probably not seeing her, he or she hit the gas. By the time they hit, what we this morning see to be a new-sized power pole, she estimated their speed in a new Mustang to be as fast as they could go in a span of sixty feet. No brakes. No skid marks this morning … just full-on frontal impact dead center.
By the time she alerted me – the oblivious one, she was also on the phone with the 911 operator. She had seen two “yutes” (“My Cousin Vinny”) hobbling away in the dark, and one was left to, by the time I got my eyes on it, try and start the car and flee the scene. I knew from my vast experience, that once a modern car has been in a violent wreck, there is a trigger that shuts down the computer – rendering all systems useless. This “yute” hit full panic mode on his cell trying to figure out what to do out loud for all us old folks, hiding by the back fence, to listen in on. Finally, the police figured out (from another neighbor’s call I’m sure) where to go to find this hobbled Mustang and its hapless driver.
That was the end of the show for me. I just wanted to see the damages by the light of day. In the dark, we figured they had driven into one of the off-buildings of the church — it was that loud of an impact. In bed, into the early morning hours, I listened the tow truck work to separate the crushed car from the pole, and get it loaded on a flatbed. Two hours later, the diesel revved, and the Sunday night Monday morning show was finally over.
A fresh cup of coffee, and we, the nosy neighbors, both limped our way over to our back fence to get a look at the damages. The pole stood in perfect condition, and our high expectations of a giant hole in one of the buildings was not to be. A sip of the strong coffee, and back to replaying the night’s events … then back to the homework at hand. The thing left to roll around like a spinning-down hubcap in my head? Why stop, line up a power pole and hit it dead center with a new Mustang, as fast as you possibly can?
Category: Body-Mind-Soul, Life Observed
