April 26, 2005
Weird Street
They come in threes.
1. Read this story. Now realize, that I live within 50 yards of that house.
2. A few nights ago, I heard a scary noise in my backyard.
3. Now this . . .
"Is your house on fire?" our church treasurer asked.
Beth and I were working in the office at church Saturday afternoon, and Mr. H startled us with a pretty uncommon question. He passes by our house on his way to our church, and because of fire trucks and ambulances in front of our house, he had to take a different route.
"I don't think so," I joked.
It's not everyday that someone asks if your house is on fire, so we hurried and finished off our stuff to check out what was happening on our street. There were some police cars blocking the road about 200 yards from our house, so we explained the situation to the officer, and he let us pass through. The first thing we were glad to see was that there were no flames anywhere near our house. But, there were the fire trucks and police cars. One glance to the left, and we discovered the commotion. Buried in a grove of bushes and trees was a mangled Saturn. A large tow-truck was winching it out of the ditch, and all our neighbors were watching the show. We met some of them for the first time. A regular block party. The driver was not in the car. We found out later that he had escaped from the car which burst into flames right after the collision. He had been taken away in an ambulance before we got there--no injuries, just wanted to check him out.
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“This is quite the neighborhood. We got the dead guy over there, we got the burning car over here…whats next?” my neighbor asked.
We found out from talking to our neighbors that a teenager, who we think Beth knows from the High School, was flying down our 25-mph road. I say flying, because as you can see from the pictures, he traveled out of control for quite a while before his car finally came to rest across the street from our house. One neighbor who was working in his yard when it happened said the car was traveling around 90mph when it left the road. Amazing. I offer you my humble assessment of the situation. Please feel free to call me Sherlock Holmes after reading the following case: the driver missed the curve in front of my house, ran off the road in my yard, overcompensated for the turn, crossed over the street, skidded through two yards, sheared a 6” diameter tree off, and landed in a heap in our neighbors front yard.
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The tow truck after much strain and nearly flipping twice managed to roll the mangled beast up the hill to his waiting truck. I managed to snap a few shots of the evidence. As I was surveying the damage to my neighbor’s yard, I spotted something that caught my eye. It was the shiny plastic oval from what appeared to be a Saturn rear-view mirror. I looked around some more and to my glee I discovered the rest of the rear-view mirror assembly. I fulfilled my civil duty by handing my find over to the good men in the red tow truck. Job well done.
Nothing like a strange situation to add some excitement to a Saturday afternoon. We met some neighbors, got a story to tell, and found a rear-view mirror. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What a day.