The snow has altered, likely unofficially and off the books, the rules and regulations of the road.  I think this is understood by all, and if the sight of people cross-country skiing in the middle of downtown streets doesn’t bring that home, nothing will.  The sledders in various neighborhoods I think have had the common decency to quarantine off their streets.  Sidewalks exist sparodically in various forms — cleared, partially cleared, not cleared, snow stacked up where it wasn’t before thus obliterating a bare minimum.

Which is why it was odd, walking just to the side of the street, sometime after one car had passed, the driver for a small truck slid their window open and uttered to me, “Use the Sidewalk.”  It took a decent second for me to process that that just happened, which meant my response went un-heard by him — a shame — there are times when you don’t really want curt responses to be heard, and there are times when you do — this fit the latter.  “There is no sidewalk.”

The comment puzzled me.  He’s driving as per road conditions, like, three times as fast as I’m walking.  This might make sense if I were unusual in my middle of the road walking,  but I wasn’t.  So I can only guess this was an element of low-boiling very low-key road rage.

Sometime later I enter into downtown proper.  I see plastered to a pole a sticker reading “Bring The Troops Home and Put them on the Mexican Border”.  Read further down the sticker, and I’m familiar with this — as seen here — “National Alliance.  Hillsboro.  Call blahdeblah # for radio schedules”, which I suppose means some neo-nazis are broadcasting on short-wave radio during half hour intervals.  The next post over and I see “Call blah de blah to Report fascist and racist activity”.   Activity as far as I can tell is sort of confined to a handful of stickers in the dead of night and your random assortment of graffiti in public places… and the occasional Elks Club Lodge “rock band reunion” “please go away” meeting.  Well, a white christmas for them, I suppose.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 10:11 am and is filed under On the Ground. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.