10:16 a.m. - 2002-02-10
Time in a bottle (Title may not necessarily apply to entry content)
I don't know if any of you know this or not, but just about an hour east of downtown San Diego is, uh......well, I don't know what it was actually, but as far as I can tell, it was the Swiss Alps.
I was bored, and felt like a drive, so I decided to choose one freeway and just take it straight for a while. I chose Highway 8, which runs from downtown San Diego to the beach. Ah, but what's to the east, I thought.
So, I was going east on Highway 8, and after only about a half hour of driving, I got to a point where my radio reception stopped coming in. Before long, I noticed a sign that said "Elevation 1000".....about 10 minutes later "Elevation 2000".....I got to a sign that said "Alpine 19".....meaning there was a city named Alpine up ahead.
Alpine?!
I wasn't in a beach community anymore.
The highway was steep as hell, my car was maxing out at about 45 mph.....and, to make matters worse....There were no offramps and no places to make a U-turn. I was going to have to keep driving up into these mountains for a while....Which would be okay, I thought, as long as I didn't see a sign that said something like "Strong winds next 150 miles"....
It wasn't long before I hit a "Elevation 4000" sign, and then not long after that, lo and behold: "Strong winds next 150 miles"!!
My car is awkwardly shaped, and I think if you got a group of like 5 kids together, they'd be able to tip it over. So, driving in any wind is a pain, because my car is all over the place.....Driving in alpine mountain blizzard conditions is spooky.
The elevation was still rising, and at this point, there were no other cars around, or any signs of civilization for that matter. I thought I was going to die.
A sign told me I was entering Cleveland National Forest....what the fuck?! Am I in Ohio? A half hour ago I was at the beach.
The wind was hurricane quality, and it kept blowing my car into the next lane. I was the only car around...it was as if they had issued a national alert for people to avoid this area, and I had somehow not heard about it. There were no street lights, so I couldn't see shit, and then it started to hail.
Tumbleweeds were blowing all over the place, chunks of dirt were airborne hitting my windshield, and, so help me god, rocks were airborne.....Actual rocks were hitting my car. I really was expecting to see a cow fly past my car.
If you were out walking in this, you would die.
And still the elevation kept rising, with no place to turn around. It wasn't long, I thought, before I got to snow...and not having chains on my tires, I would very likely get stuck up there.
At the "Elevation 5000" mark, I decided I would have to turn around, even if I had to off-road it....And then I saw an exit up ahead, with a sign that said "All trucks must exit here"....Whoa, if it's so dangerous up ahead that trucks aren't allowed past this point, maybe I should keep going to investigate. But then I saw some blinking taillights in the road ahead of me.....except, they seemed to be floating in midair. As I got closer, it turns out, the taillights weren't floating....They belonged to a goddamn tipped-over semi truck that was blocking the road.
He hadn't exited like he was supposed to.
I turned around right there, so as not to meet the same fate that the semi had met.
I think the wind tipped him over.
