Well...that was interesting...
Southbound on the 5 freeway, still on the valley floor just before Grapevine and the long climb into the Tehachapi mountains. It's dark on this stretch of freeway at 5:45 am. Got the cruise control set at 80 in the leftmost lane (having just passed a pickup truck in the center lane), the Wall Street Journal Report playing on the XM radio. Coffee is hot, all is well. I glance in the rear view to make sure nobody is coming up fast.
Suddenly a shape looms at me. Huge and stopped fecking dead. The truck I had just passed was there, but I figured I had just enough room to zip over provided I stay the hell off the brakes. I was successful...w00t.
I was only able to identify WTF it was as I came by it...two pickup trucks had apparently attempted to occupy the same piece of airspace at the same time. A dark colored pickup had apparently slammed into the back of a lighter-colored one hard...the nose of the rearmost truck splattered over the crumpled and twisted bed of the hittee, hard enough to apparently destroy the battery as there were no lights at all. I also saw out of the corner of my eye a migrant worker standing in the middle of the fast lane, waving one of those woven white cowboy hats, directly in front of the wreck. Dumbass!
Scared the sh1t out of me, it did. If I would have been unable to clear the lane change, there would have been no way to make almost two tons of rolling Goat stop in time. Not a chance. Not with the puny brakes Holden nailed to the axles in the '04. The shoulder was taken up with wreckage as well, so that was not an option. I would have squished Pedro like a tube of Crest.
I looked back as I came by just in time to see a flame erupt in the remaining nose of the rear pickup truck.
I contemplated stopping, but remembered that the CHP substation was just a few hundred meters up the road. I called 911.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to buy a new pair of BVDs.
Southbound on the 5 freeway, still on the valley floor just before Grapevine and the long climb into the Tehachapi mountains. It's dark on this stretch of freeway at 5:45 am. Got the cruise control set at 80 in the leftmost lane (having just passed a pickup truck in the center lane), the Wall Street Journal Report playing on the XM radio. Coffee is hot, all is well. I glance in the rear view to make sure nobody is coming up fast.
Suddenly a shape looms at me. Huge and stopped fecking dead. The truck I had just passed was there, but I figured I had just enough room to zip over provided I stay the hell off the brakes. I was successful...w00t.
I was only able to identify WTF it was as I came by it...two pickup trucks had apparently attempted to occupy the same piece of airspace at the same time. A dark colored pickup had apparently slammed into the back of a lighter-colored one hard...the nose of the rearmost truck splattered over the crumpled and twisted bed of the hittee, hard enough to apparently destroy the battery as there were no lights at all. I also saw out of the corner of my eye a migrant worker standing in the middle of the fast lane, waving one of those woven white cowboy hats, directly in front of the wreck. Dumbass!
Scared the sh1t out of me, it did. If I would have been unable to clear the lane change, there would have been no way to make almost two tons of rolling Goat stop in time. Not a chance. Not with the puny brakes Holden nailed to the axles in the '04. The shoulder was taken up with wreckage as well, so that was not an option. I would have squished Pedro like a tube of Crest.
I looked back as I came by just in time to see a flame erupt in the remaining nose of the rear pickup truck.
I contemplated stopping, but remembered that the CHP substation was just a few hundred meters up the road. I called 911.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to buy a new pair of BVDs.
