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One-Armed Driving Blues
I've heard that in Rome they drive like maniacs.
Never been there, though. So I don't know.
No.
I was stationed outside Los Angeles, 'Ol Smoke', we used to call it. Where people drive like absolute and complete freakin' idiots.
Pit a Los Angeleno driver against a Roman driver and you're bound to witness something pretty darn special. Right up until the moment one of the cars leaps a curb and piles into the foot of your viewing stand, bringing it, and you, down to the pavement, where the Los Angeleno gets to you first, alá Death Race 2000.
With their car, obviously, they wouldn't get out and walk over to you.
Now, we weren't out there for the traffic-watching, though you found yourself doing it a hell of a lot. I was one of the guys perched high above Highway 101, coming down from Up North, as they called it. In the old days they called it Lake Tahoe.
I sat there, most days, with the butt of my rifle on my lap, the tip of it, per regulations, on the edge of the viewing tower, the little bit of the barrel that flared out like bell-bottoms used to be portrayed in blocky old video games just hooked on the metal ledge, over which you could rest your cigarette for all of two seconds, on a non-windy day, most days a hell of a lot less.
I once challenged this guy in Tower 17, on the other side, the cliff-side, to see who could keep their cigarette, lit, of course, balanced for the longest on the ledge.
Since we were both over the walkie talkies, neither one of us could tell who won, really. The minor fires that broke out below both our towers weren't necessarily attributable directly to the cigarette butts crashing down into the undergrowth; they'd been going off every few hours at the time, before the heavy rains started hitting us. However, a fire did flare up on his side first.
For those of you just joining us, let me clarify. When I say Los Angeles, and Los Angelenos to describe the people from Los Angeles, I mean the region that used to be called Apple Valley and the people that lived in Nevada that bolted for the coast and the people that used to inhabit the hills around Apple Valley. This all came about when the Big One hit and, yes, took a huge chunk of what used to be known as California off the West Coast of what used to be known as the United States off into the ocean, where, stories claim, they grew into a land of peace-loving people dedicated to all sorts of things, and the whole lot of them down in what used to be known as Santa Cruz thumbed their noses at the rest of us 'Mainlanders' that were left behind who always made fun of them because they liked to knit and get in touch with the land and make things out of organic materials.
The coast from old San Diego up to Eureka just sheared right off after a not particularly impressive earthquake. And all of a sudden people standing in Apple Valley were looking over at their neighbours in Victorville just sailing right on away. Not literally, of course, but if someone had the washing hung out to dry, and, should luck have it that the clothesline be all on one continuous piece of land, it might look like they had a sail out as their sheets billowed in the sea breezes that were just then blowing up from somewhere down in San Diego, where the whole mess started.
If someone had thought of it, and I'm sure someone had, it might have been a lot of fun, in those first few seconds, to jump between the two land masses.
There were a lot of geologists, on both sides of the divide, with a whole lot of egg on their faces, let me tell you. Because the damn thing didn't quite crack along the fault it was supposed to, you see. You see it all the time now. People just don't trust a geologist.
Fast forward to now, when all that's like ancient history. You wouldn't want to jump from land-mass to land-mass now — it's a twenty mile gap!
But that's not what I'm supposed to be watching for, anyway.
I'm up here, land-side, in what's now considered East Los Angeles (without the dodgy reputation it had before the Big 'Un and with a hell of a lot more large trees leafing it over the roads nearly coating the ground somewhere below), sitting in my tower.
We're up here doing the Watching. I'm a Second Lieutenant Watcher, which is why I haven't got a brilliant position, but at least I'm not cliff-side.
Oh, and we take the occasional potshot at speeders. Which is everyone.
To be continued next week...
disclaimer:
It's serial madness again!
Kids, get the buckets!
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