Well, of course there have been no salt trucks down our street, even though it’s used like a thoroughfare by all and sundry.
Including a young moron in a Dodge Neon who didn’t quite make the curve, popped up into our neighbor’s lawn, mowed down the “BUMP 20 MPH” speed bump warning sign, and ended up in our lawn pointed out into the street pointed in toward the house, from what it looks like now that I’ve actually gone out to take pictures. So apparently he backed out, probably hit the ice again with the wheels spinning, and managed to spin the car 180 degrees on the ice.
So then I guess he got stuck crossways in the street without any traction and appeared to be backing into our driveway. I happened to walk through our front foyer just then, and through the curtain on the door it looked like a car pulling in. When I pulled the curtain aside, it turned out to be his backup lights that looked sort of like my wife’s headlights through the cloth.
At that point, neither the driver or his passenger were in the car. They were trying to push it out of the hole they’d dug in the ice. (That would have been interesting if it had actually gotten traction.) Finally the driver got back in the car and the passenger started pushing and the wheels started spinning, and they got it loose. Then they stood around for a few minutes trying to figure out if anything had come off the car (it did; there’s a big piece of black plastic still sitting next to where the signpost snapped off) and then they left.
What amazed me was that the signpost snapped about two feet above ground. Basically they just drove up the post and it bent over, and there must have been a weak spot where it broke off (or maybe they’re designed to do that, I don’t know).
At least the damn fool missed my rock. Most of the time the morons who come screaming into that curve get off into the lawn and hit the big rock next to the driveway that my dad put there years ago to discourage that kind of thing. Many were the teenagers who lost undercarriage parts on that rock. (Often they managed to roll the rock into the neighbor’s yard, to boot, which always created a fun job to roll it back.)
And once, after Dad died, Mom woke up to our retired police detective neighbor ringing the doorbell and asking if she knew that there was a car hung up on that rock 🙂 Turned out the car was stolen and the joyriders had hotfooted after they found they couldn’t get the car off. All the excitement sort of made Mom’s day. 🙂
Anyway, pictures in the extended entry.
This is what it looks like from the driveway. The reflector I’m standing next to is right in front of the rock. (I moved the broken-off part of the sign earlier as it was clear up in the middle of the lawn, so it’s not where I found it originally.)
This is what it looks like from the driver’s point of view.
A close-up of the snapped-off signpost. You can see bits of the car plastic lying on the ground.
Reverse angle of the previous shot.
The rock he managed to miss. (Damn it.)
