Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Stop Wriggling My Sign!


Right out front we have a stop sign with our street name attached to it as well as a yellow reflective arrow telling cars to make the turn and please not to run through the wooden fence.

The saga you are about to hear about this sign is true. No names were changed to protect the inner fence.

A few days ago,I heard a large truck pull up in the gravel out front- which always makes my dogs bark- and it caught my attention more than usual (we live right at the edge of cell-phone reception and have a gravel pull-out right in front of our gate) because of the odd place the truck had pulled over to, so I glanced up and watched as a stocky youth with short brown hair, officer, got out of the passenger side and pulled something away from the right front wheel. I just assumed it was a hubcap come loose or a piece of wire from the fields, and as the truck drove off I never thought another bit about it until I went on a bike ride much later in the day and noticed that all of the county signs had been knocked over the way young dudes will do when they are feeling bored and destructive.

So as I rode I went over what I saw. Dark blue truck, maybe a Suburban, maybe it had a matching camper shell and was a Ford? Maybe it was dark blue-green? Or charcoal? The passenger had short hair I am certain, and brown, and he was stocky and not tall, big torso, short legs... the kind of guy who grows up to run a backhoe in life... The truck had squared over hood folds, meaning it was older, before all the bubble cars came out, but had shiny paint, not oxidized, so prolly a mid-nineties vehicle well waxed and looked after.

The boys had their dad's baby out for a ride around the neighborhood...

Now me being me, I went out and put the sign back up into the hole it was knocked out of. I figured one of two things- it would keep people from running through the wooden fence on this Memorial Day weekend (lots of new visitors down at the lake coupled with beer) and maybe the offenders would see it and try to knock it over again, in which case I would for sure find out whether or not they drove a Chevy or a Ford and I might just even get a digital photo of them to hand over to the local sheriffs who were busy handing out drunk-and-disorderlies.

So Memorial Day morning I hear a car full of people pull up next to my sign and my dogs bark and I go out to take a look. There are some pretty straight-laced folks out there, like a bible-study group looking for a meeting, and they are standing around my sign and one of them leans against it and it wriggles so they wriggle it a bit on purpose and I think "I just stuck it back in the hole. Of course it wriggles. I didn't tamp the dirt down around the post."

Then they talk amongst themselves on the other side of their vehicle and drive off (people who use their GPS units to find the short route into this area often stop at my pull-out to reassess their navigational skills).

But then another car full of people pull up shortly after, and another group of do-gooders get out and some girl walks over and starts wriggling my sign! Then they talk among themselves on the other side of the vehicle and drive off.

Weird.

Another forty minutes pass and another vehicle pulls up. There are two women in this one. They get out, walk over to the sign, and start wriggling it. Then (because everbody has been wriggling it and the sign is now really loose) they both grab hold of it and PULL IT OUT OF THE GROUND AND LAY IT DOWN!!

I think "What the hell?"

So of course I have to go out and call out through the douglas fir boughs "What the heck are you two ladies doing?" which made the younger one squeal a tad. The older one took charge (I presume a mother daughter combo) and yelled back "Oh don't mind us, we're playing a game. We'll put the sign back where we found it."

Which they did, as promised.

"Oh OK. If it's just a game..." ????????????

I watched them for a few minutes more and then realized they were looking for something specific.

It turns out I have a geocache in a *mumble mumble* right in front of the house...

That explains alot...

3 comments:

Jeannie said...

That would be annoying. My son & gf have hiked around for various geo caches. Did they leave little trinkets behind?

fuzzbert_1999@yahoo.com said...

Reminds me of a time near Tupelo me and two girls rode around and snapped off road signs. In that day and time, you could torque them just right and they'd pop off!

That was just before we went parking in a nearby graveyard!

dogbait said...

We have a couple around OG but I'm damned if I can find one of them. Might take my geezer glasses next time.