Typically if I'm leaving Beaverton any time after three in the afternoon I don't even bother looking at the freeway. And you can bump that up to, well, an all-day ban now that we're less than a week away from the maxed out credit cards and second mortgages that most American families call Christmas. Tuesday was no different.
I left B-tron around two and headed toward Germantown Road (my favorite route to No Po). At the intersection of Kaiser and Germantown there was an incident. Everyone was out of their vehicles and on cell phones to respective insurance agencies and family members and whoever else people feel they need to call when they survive the crumpled metal and shattered glass that is a vehicle collision. (Nope, I never say "accident". Why? They very rarely truly are.) The important thing here is that everyone was ambulatory; just their stuff was fucked up.
On one corner, facing the wrong direction, was a red four-door sedan (was a time I could tell you what it was, but it was fairly new and therefore mostly nondescript... but that's another bitchfest-cum-blog) that had been struck forcibly on the passenger side. Both doors were ruined. Their formerly slightly convex, aerodynamically beneficial, mostly pleasing shape had been radically altered to a sharp concave roughly the width of a mini-van nose.
The mini-van that matched the ravaged sedan was in all likelihood the more mechanically damaged of the two vehicles. Both headlight assemblies were wrecked, the grill was broken out in the middle and hanging limply from the upper corners like the shutters on a haunted house, and there was the tell-tale pool of steaming green liquid under the lopsided bumper that let everyone know the damn thing couldn't move itself. Next to the van, both on phones, were two women who were visibly shaken. And where was the van? Smack dab in the middle of the intersection, forcing traffic to move around it like some sort of tousled round-about. For the most part cars were moving around it, like it had always been there, but it wasn't making things easy. Since I'm a good person at heart, and I happen to drive a rig capable of towing a mini-van, I pulled around and asked the women if they needed any help moving their catastrophe to a less obstructive location. "No, no. We're fine," replied the older of the women, impatiently waving me on with her left hand as she worked her cell phone with her right.
"Are you sure? You're mostly blocking the road," I tried again.
"Yes I'm sure," she snarled this time. "We're fine right here. The fire truck is on the way."
I then excused myself from the situation, after all I know when I'm not wanted. But seriously... if you wreck your vehicle, get it off the road as soon as possible. Leaving it there is not just inconsiderate to those who can navigate safely around it, but potentially dangerous for the driver who is not paying close enough attention. And don't give me any sort of cock and bull story about how all drivers should be paying attention, because although everyone should obviously you weren't or you wouldn't be in that predicament, would ya?
