Running At Night in a Scary World

 

Running At Night in a Scary World

It was a dark night and I was glad my light was well charged and the road was fairly quiet.  Something was moving about on the road some distance ahead. Closer, closer, it is black; a dog, a deer?  A deer, no, but a calf about 300-400 pounds was walking around in the middle of the road just under a small hill.  My first thought was that I hoped a car didn’t come over that hill about then.  There would be no way for the driver to see that calf until it was too late. 

 

Almost as if I had ordered up an automobile,  headlights appeared in the distance.  Oh my!  I broke into a sprint toward the calf to try to scare it off the road.  Almost as if it had a death wish, the animal ran from me for a distance, and then got right back on the road under the hill.  It was as if this silly animal had some gravitational pull to that piece of  road under that hill.  A couple more unsuccessful attempts running around in circles chasing the calf failed to get it off the road.  Headlights beamed over the top of us as we ran around in the shadow of the hill.  The car was getting close. 

 

No time.  To the top of the hill. With my light in one hand, waving my arms back and forth overhead. The vehicle didn’t slow.  To the opposite side of the road,   I waving my  light  back and forth.  The vehicle  didn’t slow.   Pointing the light directly into the vehicle, right at the driver,  waving the beam from side to side.  Still, the vehicle did not slow down. It sped past me like I wasn’t even there.

 

Bam!  Came that special, dreadful sound of a vehicle cracking into flesh and bone.  Brakes screeched. The vehicle finally stopped. A cloud of steam hissed from it into the night.  Making a dash  down the hill to the stopped  vehicle, I could see  the front hood was caved in.  A couple hundred feet up the road lay the mangled body of the dead calf.  It was my fear someone was hurt seriously or dead, that is, besides the calf.   Not sure what I was going to see, I opened the driver’s side door.  Two young men were just sitting there, looking forward,  like they were waiting at a red light for the light to change. 

“Are you guys all right.”

“Yeah, we’re okay.”

“Didn’t you see me trying to wave you off?”

“Huh?”  They didn’t seem overly concerned.  In fact, they were pretty calm or numb.  I am not sure.  From their demeanor I could  assume something  like this pretty much happened every night.  Maybe it did.

 

There was no smell of alcohol and the young men didn’t appear  intoxicated, but I could it was pretty plain to me that I wasn’t  dealing here with God’s gift to the intelligence pool right at that moment.   Scary thing was, that I had been running in the dark on this road many times not fully aware that people like that were driving up and down it.  For sure, I knew right then that I was going to be much more careful in future; maybe even curtail my night running.

 

“Can I help you push the vehicle off the road before someone comes along and hits you?

“Huh?  Well, I guess we could if you want to.” 

 

It’s a dangerous world.