I was driving along a two lane road, heading uphill just after the sun had set. Up ahead I could see that a car had pulled off to the side at an angle with part of the vehicle still in our lane. Cars ahead of me were pulling around him, but they seemed to be going well out of their way. I found out to my surprise why that was. There was a huge boulder sitting in the middle of the lane, and I was headed straight for it. I swerved violently to the left, striking the tapered end of it, and my car flew up in the air, causing a little damage to my undercarriage.
The car behind me saw what had happened and stopped in front of the stone and presumably secured the situation until the police arrived. That is what I would have done had I seen the rock in time. All this because some idiot trucker was proceeding along with an unsafe load. A motorcyclist would have been killed had he run into that rock.
That got me to thinking about being surprised by things in the road that we are not expecting. I wondered how often this sort of thing might happen, and perhaps there might be a website dedicated to these events. I found http://www.truckspills.com/. I also got far more than I expected.
There were sixty-three entries, and basically, anything that you can imagine that is carried by road, has ended up in the road. In my mind the most horryfying was a load of alligators that were thrown into the road because the truck crashed. As you can see from the above picture, how would you like to have been confronted by the image of several alligators facing you. On the light side, they were already dead and frozen.
A happy and exciting situation to suddenly drive into was the siht of bags of money lying all over the place, and people engaged in a free for all trying to scoop it all up. Or, there were all those scratch and claim lottery tickets flying about in the wind after the truck carrying them caught fire.
We know that something strange is happening in the Bee world that is causing a shortage of bees. That is making it necessary to transport bees from one location to another, and in two accidents twelve, and fourteen million bees were released onto the highway. That's a lot of very pissed off bees.
In Colombia, South America a truck rolled over on its side, spilling cocaine that had been nicely wrapped and stored in its side and roof. The report said that the driver was not injured, but we can bet he was still killed.
Beer, fruit, animals, both live and dead, molasses, vodka, a Tomahawk Missile, a massive ship engine that fell off the truck onto cars, and sunk into the road; and perhaps most peculiar of all, a modular house that was being carried on a flatbed, tipped over backwards on an uphill area that had the driver staring straight up into the sky.
What a fascinating visit that was to http://www.truckspills.com/ that was for me, and a wake up call to never let my guard down. Next time when something up ahead is happening that I am unable to be absolutely certain about, I will slow down.
You never know what it might be. It could turn out to be something that just sucks the breath out of you.
Copyright (c) 2011 Eugene Carmichael
