Hitting the Wall on North Highland

If you are driving north on North Highland, the road starts a curve to the right before you get to the intersection with Wessyngton Road. There are reflective yellow signs positioned to catch the headlight beam of northbound drivers headed straight to get their attention that the road is going off to the right, but still drivers miss the curve. This tends to happen at night, and speeding and alcohol may play a role (having no actual data, I have resorted to weasel language, but I am pretty sure that’s true).

There is a house on North Morningside just north of the intersection with Wessyngton Road that is set up from street level, with a nice front porch and a lawn that slopes down to a stone retaining wall that keeps the yard from falling on to the sidewalk. As I recall the retaining wall was rebuilt a few years ago; it’s a substantial wall, which is good (at least for the wall) because it is one of the places that cars that don’t make the curve end up.

We walk by this house regularly, and one of the things we do is to look for automotive debris scattered on the sidewalk or along the curb or even on nearby lawns. We regularly find the detritus of modern automobiles: hubcaps, chunks of fenders, unidentified black plastic gizmos with plastic-covered wires coming out of them, and shattered bits glass, mirrors, and plastic. I had thought if I lived in that house I would make a gigantic collage, with all this stuff embedded in mortar. Perhaps it could even be shaped like a car – a high tech, glittering vehicle covered with sparkles, a mosaic of glass and broken metal.

There was one particularly spectacular accident there several years ago. As longtime watchers of CSI we know how to investigate the scene and reconstruct what happened. The northbound car was traveling fast and the driver missed the curve, then lost control. The car tilted on to the two drivers’ side wheels and went up on to the sidewalk south of Wessyngton, squeezing between the retaining wall there and miraculously not crashing into anything but pushing a sign out of the way by a few inches. Still on the sidewalk, the car barreled into the stone retaining wall of this house north of the Wessyngton intersection, knocking stones out of place and ending up upside down in the street in front of the house.

The upside down part we know because one night soon after this happened we were talking to a woman who lived in the house. She said that there had been three people in the car. One of them went off in an ambulance, the driver got taken away by the police, and the remaining passenger called a taxi to get home that night. And before the wrecker came to take away the car, still upside down in the street, another intoxicated driver crashed into it.

I had thought what great sport it would be, if I were younger and didn’t have the kind of life I do and if I didn’t need to sleep, to spend weekend nights sitting on that porch, safe above the mayhem in the street below, drinking beer and watching the cars crash into my retaining wall. I’d have my phone out there on the porch with me – a cordless one, not the cell phone, so the 911 operator who know where I was calling from – and call in the accidents. A car just crashed in front of my house. Can you send someone? I think you need to send an ambulance too. They say someone’s hurt.

South of Wessyngton near the intersection of Highland and Morningside, there are now orange reflective barrels. They’ve been there a while now. I don’t know if they are there to try to keep the drunken and distracted drivers on the road or for some other reason, but I haven’t seen as much car debris scattered farther up the street recently. So maybe the barrels have helped.

We’ve been waiting for that stone retaining wall to get fixed; the stones that were knocked out never got mortared back in place. We thought it was an insurance thing or something. But we noticed a couple of weeks ago that the house looked vacant and there were notices posted on the door. Last night when Iain and I were walking to Caramba I walked up to the door and read them. The house has been winterized (“Don’t use the toilets!” a fluorescent orange notice screams), processed by some company, and a simple white notice provides a phone number and email address that the occupants need to contact urgently. And it looks like there are new locks on the door.