Bob
Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:
Bits of this sound Ballardian and bits like John Wayne. It's much longer than what I'm posting here. I'm sending it because I think there's info here that would be good to have if you're stranded on the freeway:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-freeway11dec11,1,3042549.story?page=2&cset=true&ctrack=2
>From the Los Angeles Times
COLUMN ONE
No place for pedestrians
On Southern California's freeways, the numbers -- and the physics -- are against anyone walking. The circumstances may vary, but the result is too often a death. By Mike Anton Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 11, 2007
He didn't know it, but when John Tun stepped from the Honda Accord onto the shoulder of Interstate 5, he entered a realm where flesh and blood are no match for the kinetic fate dealt by the freeway.
As Tun's wife and two children huddled in the back seat, he and a friend examined a flat tire near Santa Clarita. It was about 1:40 a.m., too dark to see broken bits of vehicles scattered about. Too dark to see the Toyota pickup bearing down on them.
"He didn't have a chance," said Tun's widow, Rumchoul Ok.
Ok heard a scream. The car's side window exploded. Tun, 27, was dragged 150 feet. His friend, Thoung Pok, dropped to the ground, her body shattered. The driver, who is serving time for vehicular manslaughter, kept going and later told authorities she thought she hit a pole.
Freeways course through California's landscape like raging rivers, each with its own danger level based on flow and volume, hidden hazards and seemingly safe eddies that belie swift undertows.
The 405, wide and powerful as the Mississippi; the Pasadena Freeway, one treacherous serpentine canyon after another; the 5, furious and full from bank to bank; the 15 over Cajon Pass, a crushing waterfall of speeding cars and 18-wheelers.
Falling out of the raft -- finding oneself on foot on the freeway -- is a primordial fear endemic to Southern California's car culture. It's a horror almost everyone has witnessed, accidents waiting to happen: the middle-aged couple huddled around a callbox; the man talking on a cellphone in the fast lane behind his disabled SUV, cars and trucks flowing around him as if he were a boulder; the family outside a broken-down van, Dad under the hood, Mom herding the kids away from traffic.
Meeting one's maker as a pedestrian on a freeway occurs with surprising regularity. About 1 in 10 freeway deaths is a pedestrian.
Last year in Southern California, 81 pedestrians, ranging in age from 14 to 83, were struck down on freeways -- 14 of them on the 5 through Los Angeles County, the region's most unforgiving highway.
The circumstances that land people in this forbidding environment over the years range from the prosaic (involved in a fender-bender, stopping to switch drivers) to the bizarre.
What was a naked man doing walking on the Golden State Freeway? What are the odds that another naked man would be hit on the 105 just three months later? Why was a 91-year-old woman pushing a shopping cart on the 10?
The man who said goodnight to his 53-year-old wife can't explain how she ended up hours later walking on the Antelope Valley Freeway three miles from their home. The man who stood up in a convertible to remove his shirt probably would have waited if he knew he'd be blown onto the 15. And the 22-year-old skateboarder who decided to cross the 10 near downtown might have reconsidered had he known what awaited.
For some, including John Tun of Long Beach, destiny arrives with a flat tire.
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