A scare, and a possibly deadly Halloween night…

Here it is, late on Halloween night, with less than an hour left before November begins. Much has happened in one single day, some of it down right scary and disturbing. The weather here has been beautiful, even though it is warmer than usual. It seems the persistent La Nina pattern has starved this region of cold and precipitation for the last three years. But that hasn’t stopped people, including myself, from enjoying the dry and balmy conditions. I took care of some business earlier in the day, up until it was time to leave to meet my husband at the dealership where I would be selling my old car. I drove down there with the windows open, the sunroof down and the radio cranked up. For the last time, at least in that car. But on the way I heard something that drew my attention on the radio. Djs are always running off at the mouth about all sorts of things and often I don’t pay them much attention. But then I heard the words “Bay Bridge” and listened intently, wondering if I had actually heard that right. Surprisingly this particular station was actually promoting that walk across the bridge, saying they would be there that day covering the event and inviting people to attend. In the past I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything about that walk in the local media. How I found it was by accident, just a simple web search of anything I could find about the metal monster of the Chesapeake brought it to my attention. It’s also really funny that the monster has now been given a visual nod on those creepy license plates, which are all over the damned place these days. Yes, it seems that such is inescapable at this point. Just the other day I was at a client’s home, and his child was watching cartoons. I just happened to glance at the TV and noticed that a bridge was featured prominently, the plot of which concerned someone hanging from one of the cables, unable to get down. Even more weird was that the cartoonist(s) drew a cable stayed bridge, rather than a traditional suspension bridge. These bizarre and creepy bridges are even showing up in cartoons! However, the child did not appear to be paying much attention to the TV anyway.

But the Bay Bridge faded from my thoughts once I completed the sale of my car, and by then it was dinner time. We headed down the street to an Asian grocery store that has a nice restaurant in it that serves Korean food. I love spicy dishes so this was a perfect place for me to have a quick meal. But they do have some non-spicy entrees for those like my husband, who cannot stomach such foods.

Once we were done eating, we began heading back home. It wasn’t long before we were approaching an intersection and a car came flying out of the left hand turn lane right into our path. It was all my husband could do to mash the brakes and try to steer around the idiot to avoid a broadside collision. I know the front of our car came within about two feet of the back fender of the idiot’s car. There wasn’t even time to honk the horn. I was holding onto a metal water bottle and I swear I almost put some dents into it with my fingernails! This was a totally heart stopping thing to happen on Halloween night, and the kind of scare that no one wants to experience.

Once we got past that near miss, the sun faded from the sky and darkness was upon us. The rest of the drive home was uneventful until we came up to our street. We were met with a line of cars forming behind a sea of red and blue flashing lights, with all manner of emergency vehicles filling the two lane main road. I was thinking we could run the shoulder of the road and be able to make the right onto our street, but even that was blocked with police cars and a firetruck. We sat there for maybe ten minutes, with my husband giving me grief about wanting to get out and look. Finally he gave in and I started walking towards our street. A firetruck had just pulled away, and there were at least a half dozen police cars and an ambulance. With that many emergency vehicles surely there must have been a big collision, but strangely, there was no major wreckage in the road. I could only see one car, and there was only a little debris around it. Where the other vehicle(s) were I could not see. There was a cop walking around telling drivers to detour around the area, and I told him I lived on that street. He said they were doing an investigation and the road would be closed for a while. I got back in the car and my husband drove up and asked the cop if we could turn into our street. He repeated the same thing he said to me, and so he let us park on the shoulder to wait. It wasn’t too long before they said we could go around, once they had placed some flares in the road. Apparently someone on a bike was hit by a car, and that was why there was so little debris in the road. As we drove by there was a baseball cap laying in the middle of the road, and in a ditch nearby was the victim’s bike. There was a young woman crying as she was talking to some people who had pulled up near the scene. I have no idea if the bicyclist survived the accident, as most of the rescue vehicles had left by the time we got there. Only an ambulance remained on the scene. As we drove up our street a couple of children were still wandering the night, having gone in search of candy but instead coming upon a tragic event. It was a somber way to end the evening, to say the least.