I’ve ranted before about how people fly down this road all the time. They come around the curve going way too fast, and they end up in our ditch. We’ve seen plenty of people wreck in our front yard, and we’ve even seen a couple cars flip and roll down the hill. That’s one of the reasons I had such a problem with UPS parking in the blind curve above my house.

The ditch in front of my Grandparent’s house is a pretty good drop on our side. On that side of the road there’s a small flat spot next to the driveway where my Grandparent’s have their mailbox next to two mailboxes for two of my family members who live across the road.

On the other side of the driveway is another ditch that’s about 2′-4′ deep depending on where you try to cross it. These ditches are where we watch people wreck all the time because they’re going way too fast and run off the road. The speed limit is 45, but they fly through here doing at least 60.

Enough background information. Rewind to 45 minutes ago. I’m sitting here bored out of my mind because I can’t sleep. I hook up my guitar, turn up my speakers, and settle in to play some Frets on Fire. I’m playing the hell outa some Stevie Ray Vaughn, Texas Flood to be exact, and totally kicking ass on Amazing. I know I’m going to end with at least a 95% score.

Then I hear it.

There’s a loud thump. I flip the switch on my speakers just in time to hear a loud crash, a crunching sound, and another loud thump. Then I hear a truck gunning it’s engine.

Oh great. Yet another drunk left the river with way too much alcohol in his system, and he just ended up in our yard. I jumped up and looked out the window, but I couldn’t see anything. No headlights, but that doesn’t mean anything. I knew it was a truck, and I knew it could have easily rolled down the hill.

I ran into the bedroom, and yelled at Hubby, “OMG wake up another dumb ass just wrecked in front of our house!”

We both took off running outside. As soon as Hubby stepped out the door he saw something in the road. My aunt’s street light was shining enough for us to make out something there, but it looked like a big black thing. My first thought was my aunt’s dog, but no it was way too big for that. It was stretched out across the entire lane.

Hubby ushered me back inside and took off running. He wanted to make sure it wasn’t a person in the road, and if it was he didn’t want me to see it. Too bad. I don’t care how gorry a situation is, I’m not leaving someone in the middle of the road dying just because I don’t want to get disgusted. I did a work/school program in the ER for a year. I’ve seen people come in with limbs hanging, a guy with a nail through his head, and I’ve even seen a decapitated body.

Anyway, it wasn’t a person. As soon as we got to the edge of our yard we could tell it was my Grandparent’s mailbox. They’ve got one of those over sized plastic ones. Hubby drug the thing out of the road, then I started checking the tire marks while he ran back to the Blazer. It was clear that it was a truck like I thought, and that it ran off the road in front of our house, missed our mailbox and the tree in our front yard by a few feet, road down the ditch, took out the mailboxes with the truck mirror, cut across my grandparent’s driveway, barely missed my Grandma’s big brick columns by about 2 1/2 feet, and went through the other side of the ditch.

Hubby rode about 2 miles up the road looking for the truck, but of course it was gone. I called my Grandparent’s to tell them what was going on, then I called the cops. It only took about 5 minutes for a cop to arrive because he was already patrolling the area. Apparently they’ve already had a bunch of complaints about the rowdy crowd down at the river tonight. He agreed this was probably one of the drunks he got the call about just about 30 minutes earlier.

He was inspecting the damage with my Grandparent’s and taking the report. Of course he didn’t think they would be able to do much, but wanted them to file the report anyway. As they were doing that I started walking down the ditch with my Coleman lantern looking to see if the truck left anything behind like a piece of metal that got knocked off or something.

Man did I get lucky. When the dumb ass came up out of the ditch he bottomed out. He had one of those magnetic key boxes on the bottom of his truck with a complete set of spare keys! The cop opened it up, and you could tell the keys hadn’t been used anytime recently. They were covered in dirt and pretty old, but we could easily tell they go to an old Chevy truck. The cop called in about it, and came back to tell us the good news. He can have the keys examined, and they’ll definitely be able to pull the year, make, and model of the truck, and there’s a good possibility they can pull the vin, too! Heck yeah!

The scene out there is messy. We all walked around picking up huge mailbox posts that were splintered in 100’s of different pieces. Luckily for my Grandparent’s since they have the big plastic mailbox it didn’t really have much damage…except for a big print of dumb ass’s mirror right where it smacked it. The other two mailboxes were just your regular metal style on wooden posts, and Hubby’s going to get up first thing in the morning to clean everything else up. My grandparent’s really can’t leave their driveway right now without risking tire damage there’s so much debris.

Somehow though, and I just don’t get it, the little plastic newspaper box on the little metal pole is the only thing left standing. It definitely got smacked because it was sitting right in the middle of the two metal mailboxes.

I tried to take photos, but my regular cam is dead as usual, and my cell phone cam is pretty much useless in the dark even with night mode on. I’ve got my camera on charge, and if my Grandparent’s don’t beat us to the cleanup in the morning I’ll take some photos.

Man, what a crazy night! Now I think I’m going to go play some more Frets on Fire. My nerves were shot the second I heard the distinct wrecking noises.