I wanted to blog about this for some time, but I've been busy with planning/working on Alan's upcoming birthday party and a few social events with friends (always a good thing).  Here is the latest Adventure At The Hellhole™:  Wednesday the 15th, Alan was busily working on a technical article when a sudden crash rent the air, so loud that it actually shook our house!  This upset the dogs and a fusillade of barking erupted.  Alan started walking through the house looking out various windows, trying to identify the source.

He soon saw what had happened:  a pickup truck had very nearly completely leveled the mailbox of the house next door.  This was not a mailbox on a wooden or metal pole; this was a brick mailbox, an oversized brick one that resembled a beehive, and it was demolished.  Dude did not scrape a fender and dislodge a brick, he freakin' destroyed it.  Rubble littered our yard as well as the driveway of the house next door (currently vacant after having been foreclosed upon) and the tire tracks indicated that the truck had sailed through the stop sign at the end of the subdivision's street and stopped barely in time to keep from plowing through the front yard of the house across the main road.

There was a silver minivan driven by an old guy talking to Pickup Truck Guy (PTG) and Alan at first assumed there had been an accident, so he called 911 to report the incident.  In the meantime, though, the minivan drove off undamaged, so apparently he had just happened upon the scene and spoke to PTG.  After this, PTG disappeared, leaving the pickup truck and shards of mailbox strewn everywhere; Alan thinks he walked back down further into the subdivision.

The police arrived and were surveying the destruction when a small sedan driven by an elderly woman came from the depths of the subdivision, PTG riding shotgun.  PTG got out of the sedan and walked off, heading back into the subdivision while the elderly lady engaged the cops in conversation.  Alan found this very odd, because it would seem like the cops would be more interested in talking to (and maybe testing) the driver responsible for the whole mess, but they didn't seem to have a problem with it.

At some point the pickup truck was towed but no one did anything about the rubble.  Then, about 6 days to a week after the incident, Alan spied a guy over there picking up bricks.  He assumed the guy had been dispatched by the real estate company or bank that now owns the house, but in retrospect it seems that he was an enterprising brick-gatherer, because some bricks disappeared but the majority of the rubble remains, and no one has erected a replacement mailbox.

Rubble - see how close he was to the intersection with the main road?

Close-up of totally destroyed mailbox and displaced house number.








A bunch of this crap is actually in our yard.  The thing just at the edge of the pavement slightly off center to the right is the actual mailbox, formerly encased in bricks.

This is the driveway of the house whose mailbox was destroyed.  Our property starts on the other side of the driveway - see how much debris went all the way across the drive and onto our property?  This was not a light tap from PTG.

All this took place about two weeks after someone, sailing down the main road that connects our road with the interstate, missed the curve and sheared off the stop sign/road signs at the end of the street, sending it 5 - 6 feet into the shoulder area on the other side of the road from whence it came.  A scrap metal recycler evidently picked up the pole and signs, because they disappeared but there is still no replacement signage.  I would assume that the county, even if they had to wait to get street names printed, would have replaced the stop sign if they were aware of this, so it must have been someone other than county workers who took away the stop sign/street signs/pole.

I'm more baffled by PTG and the mailbox than the stop sign.  It's on a pretty dark (non-streetlighted) stretch of road and the curve is pretty sudden and sharp, so if someone was unfamiliar with the area and driving late at night, it wouldn't be difficult to manage, though I'm having trouble imagining how you'd be going so fast on that stretch of road that they could shear the stop sign pole off 5" - 6" above the ground.  The mailbox, on the other hand, is bizarre because it happened in broad daylight, clear weather, the middle of the day - and speed is also puzzling because he'd have had to be going pretty damned fast to level that brick mailbox, and he was approaching a stop sign - one that happens to still be in place, at that.  I feel like Mr. Hand in Fast Times at Ridgemont High: convinced that everyone is on drugs.