"ROAD CLOSED"
-says the line of barricades blocking the forest road to work one damp afternoon. Snap decision time: be fired for showing up late a 3rd time in the same month due to unanticipated water disasters, or cross the fucking barricade.
There's something very The Walking Dead about pushing a bicycle up a normally-congested roadway now eerily vacant of humanity. There's a certain freedom to realizing you can be in any part of any lane you feel like because no one else is coming - but it is tinged with the anxiety of an unexplained threat which could make itself known around any turn. No sign of trouble yet, since the road stretches off more than a mile over the Sisyphean hill of bicycle-eating death I take 6 days a week, which is barren save for rotting coyotes and plastic flowers memorializing where people died - but those are there every day. After taking the long bend down and through the rocky valley, the threat materializes:
TURKEY APOCALYPSE. Hordes of wild turkeys have overthrown the city. I may be the only human left. But I've been infected... I don't know how much time I have... Soon I too will be a turkey prowling the street for living giblets. Gobble gobble.
lol j/k. It was a horrible traffic wreck with an overturned semi truck.
Those things draped over the trees are downed power lines. Not pictured: a fleet of 5+ PG&E trucks and the police. Apparently this fellow lost control descending the moist death hill, swerved into oncoming traffic and then off-road, cutting super-deep tire gouges in the surrounding hillside, flipped on its side and hit a utility pole - possibly to avoid a turkey. The driver was implausibly fine. On approach I started quickly composing stories in my head of what to explain to the cops guarding the site. But they weren't interested, so I was neither fired nor arrested and neither were there any manhunts for wanted killers. Least worst day ever.
There's something very The Walking Dead about pushing a bicycle up a normally-congested roadway now eerily vacant of humanity. There's a certain freedom to realizing you can be in any part of any lane you feel like because no one else is coming - but it is tinged with the anxiety of an unexplained threat which could make itself known around any turn. No sign of trouble yet, since the road stretches off more than a mile over the Sisyphean hill of bicycle-eating death I take 6 days a week, which is barren save for rotting coyotes and plastic flowers memorializing where people died - but those are there every day. After taking the long bend down and through the rocky valley, the threat materializes:
TURKEY APOCALYPSE. Hordes of wild turkeys have overthrown the city. I may be the only human left. But I've been infected... I don't know how much time I have... Soon I too will be a turkey prowling the street for living giblets. Gobble gobble.
lol j/k. It was a horrible traffic wreck with an overturned semi truck.
Those things draped over the trees are downed power lines. Not pictured: a fleet of 5+ PG&E trucks and the police. Apparently this fellow lost control descending the moist death hill, swerved into oncoming traffic and then off-road, cutting super-deep tire gouges in the surrounding hillside, flipped on its side and hit a utility pole - possibly to avoid a turkey. The driver was implausibly fine. On approach I started quickly composing stories in my head of what to explain to the cops guarding the site. But they weren't interested, so I was neither fired nor arrested and neither were there any manhunts for wanted killers. Least worst day ever.