Ambrose Bierce Was Right
There is a small stretch of road just below my house that seems to be haunted. The haunting is caused either by bad spirits, bad vibes, or bad drivers. With yesterday's accident, there's been three or four in the past five or seven years.
If you count in the curve upon which our house sits, the number of accidents in the last thirty years goes up. Accidents on the curve are understandable. In the years we've been living here, we've had two cars try to park under our vineyards. In both cases, the haunting was a case of bad drivers. The curve we're sitting on is about a seventy degree curve, though it has been softened by cutting into the inside of the curve in the last thirty years, and not to be taken at over eighty kilometers an hour. You wouldn't know that from some of the rockets that fly by. Sometimes, I hear a whistling sound coming from the left. Suddenly, there's a roar and an unidentified flying object flashes past, leaving a trail of debris dancing in the air behind. I brace myself for the crash at the next curve, a gentler but descending curve, yet I only hear a motor whine and complain and then the comet continues.
Another case of a bad driver haunting was one New Year's Day over twenty years ago. We were at home; I was still living in my parents' house next door, single. My mother was making lunch, and we hear an errant car come moseying around the curve and noisily destroy part of our neighbor's vineyard as the drunk driver parked underneath it. The driver was lucky. A wooden beam used to hold up the arbor crashed through the passenger window. Yet the driver was nonchalant about everything. The alcohol coursing through his bloodstream made him look at everything through rose-colored glasses. Until his mother took them off later with a backhand, and the alcohol wore off. The rosiness quickly disappeared then, to be substituted by a carless and impoverished grey.
But the spot where the accident happened yesterday is before the curve, and absolutely straight. That place is most likely haunted by bad spirits and bad vibes. Yesterday's driver said she lost control of the car, went off the road, flipped, and struck a lamp post. There was no obvious reason for that happening. The weather was good, there were no brake marks on the road, and her tires seemed okay. She was fine except for a bump on the head, for which she was taken to the hospital for observation.
A couple of years ago, two accidents at the same spot followed each other in succession. Both drivers went off the road. Nothing happened to either. Before that, cars had brushes with wild boars right there, too. It makes you start wondering about places that have old histories of disasters and are damned. Ambrose Bierce, in some of his stories, told about nature spirits that want to be left alone, and become angry with the humans who bother them. On construction sites in the U.S. where many workers were American Indians, some of the workers would put a tree at the top of the structure. It was meant to placate the natural spirits whose habitat was being destroyed. Could there be a spirit whose habitat was destroyed by the road and is now seeking vengeance?
I don't know, I just know I will slow down before driving through that spot.
If you count in the curve upon which our house sits, the number of accidents in the last thirty years goes up. Accidents on the curve are understandable. In the years we've been living here, we've had two cars try to park under our vineyards. In both cases, the haunting was a case of bad drivers. The curve we're sitting on is about a seventy degree curve, though it has been softened by cutting into the inside of the curve in the last thirty years, and not to be taken at over eighty kilometers an hour. You wouldn't know that from some of the rockets that fly by. Sometimes, I hear a whistling sound coming from the left. Suddenly, there's a roar and an unidentified flying object flashes past, leaving a trail of debris dancing in the air behind. I brace myself for the crash at the next curve, a gentler but descending curve, yet I only hear a motor whine and complain and then the comet continues.
Another case of a bad driver haunting was one New Year's Day over twenty years ago. We were at home; I was still living in my parents' house next door, single. My mother was making lunch, and we hear an errant car come moseying around the curve and noisily destroy part of our neighbor's vineyard as the drunk driver parked underneath it. The driver was lucky. A wooden beam used to hold up the arbor crashed through the passenger window. Yet the driver was nonchalant about everything. The alcohol coursing through his bloodstream made him look at everything through rose-colored glasses. Until his mother took them off later with a backhand, and the alcohol wore off. The rosiness quickly disappeared then, to be substituted by a carless and impoverished grey.
But the spot where the accident happened yesterday is before the curve, and absolutely straight. That place is most likely haunted by bad spirits and bad vibes. Yesterday's driver said she lost control of the car, went off the road, flipped, and struck a lamp post. There was no obvious reason for that happening. The weather was good, there were no brake marks on the road, and her tires seemed okay. She was fine except for a bump on the head, for which she was taken to the hospital for observation.
A couple of years ago, two accidents at the same spot followed each other in succession. Both drivers went off the road. Nothing happened to either. Before that, cars had brushes with wild boars right there, too. It makes you start wondering about places that have old histories of disasters and are damned. Ambrose Bierce, in some of his stories, told about nature spirits that want to be left alone, and become angry with the humans who bother them. On construction sites in the U.S. where many workers were American Indians, some of the workers would put a tree at the top of the structure. It was meant to placate the natural spirits whose habitat was being destroyed. Could there be a spirit whose habitat was destroyed by the road and is now seeking vengeance?
I don't know, I just know I will slow down before driving through that spot.
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| The spot is where those three trees are, just after the wall ends. |
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