A few months ago on my way to work, I was driving down the little road to White's Ferry when I noticed something in the road ahead. As I got closer, it looked like someone had hit a squirrel, so I moved to avoid it, still traveling at the same speed. At the last possible second, what I had thought was a dead squirrel in the road jumped up and scrambled off to the side. I don't know how I managed to miss it, but I did.
A short distance further, there was another squirrel sitting in the road, motionless.
Oh, no, I thought, I'm not falling for that trick again.
I honked the horn. The squirrel scurried off. Fine.
I went around the turn at the river, and there's another squirrel sitting in the road. I slowed down a bit. It doesn't get out of the way until it's obvious I'm not stopping.
A little further down the road, guess what I see? Moose? Demon llama? Phlegm-spewing bronchial yak heads? Nope. Another squirrel. Sitting in the road. Not in one of the hundreds of trees on either side of the road where there are no cars. Not under one of the hundreds of trees where it would stand a better chance of finding nuts or something to eat. Nope. In the road. This had all happened within a span of about sixty seconds, so I starting thinking the squirrels were conspiring to make me late for work.
My daily commute takes me past a llama farm, among other interesting things. I've gotten into the habit of taking different ways home from work. There are dozens of little winding country roads which will all eventually get me where I want to go, and since these inevitably lead past abandoned buildings, I get curious and pick ones at random to drive home on.
Just outside of Hauptratte-Sperren's campus is a little one-lane road that someone at work told me about, and I checked it out on the way home one night. It had a lot of hills and turns, and eventually turned into a dirt road. Very bumpy. Then, after a little bit of that, there was a standard yellow diamond-shaped road sign which read, quite simply:
STREAM
Sure enough, a little further ahead, the road went through a little stream. I had seen a big old pickup truck pass me a few minutes earlier, so obviously if one had a big old pickup truck, one could cross the stream. I, however, had a cute little Honda Civic hatchback. Hmmm.
I stopped at the stream and got out to take a look. It was about 20 feet across, and maybe a foot deep at most. At this point, my little Shoulder Angel pops up and says:
"That looks kinda deep. You might get stuck in the middle of it, and there's nothing but abandoned buildings and evil squirrels conspiring to get you for miles around. You should turn around and take the main road home."
And then my little Shoulder Devil appeared to add his two cents:
"C'mon, where's your sense of adventure? If you got a running start you could make it across that no problem." Then he took my Shoulder Angel and strapped him to a giant inflatable horse and posted nekkid pictures of him all over the internet and said he wouldn't show me unless I crossed that stream.
So I got in my car, backed up a bit, and started driving through the stream. I remembered too late what my Shoulder Devil said about getting a running start. Oops.
There were lots of rocks and sand in the stream. I felt them in detail as the front wheels of my car started slipping on them midway across.
"Yaaaaaaaaahhh!" I yelled, to nobody in particular, and in another second, I was safe on the other side. Whee!
I sort of giggled and babbled to myself as I drove down the road some more, and eventually came out next to the llama farm. I don't take that way home anymore, simply because I don't want to be involved in any real-life Gothic Horror movie where the unsuspecting commuter gets stranded out in the woods and devoured by squirrels the size of Saint Bernards or something.