It’s trying to kill me!!!
US Rt.44 runs right thru little Rhode Island and for about 18 years it ran it’s 4 lanes of heavily traffic about 9 feet right outside my front door back in the 70’s. I was renting my great-grandfathers house from my grandfather. It was a very old house with many quirks. One was its precarious position on the corner of a major highway and a popular country road. It was also made precarious because of it’s closeness to those two roads. If I walked 12 feet straight out of my front door I would be standing in the right lane of a 4 lane busy highway. It took some getting used to at first cause the house would shake and rumble a little when a trailer truck would come hi-ballin’ down the hill and gentle sweeping curve right in front of the house.
For quite a few of those years I lived there with the love of my life Mary. We had a cat we called “Toobadcat” among other names like “Mao-se-tongue”, ‘Beaker (from the Muppets) and just Kat. He was all black (got from the pound day before Halloween) and he thought he was a dog. He would play fetch for an hour.
So let me set this up. We cooked with gas so we had a set of Liquid Propane tanks just outside of our house. So this fine day I had to go to the next town to get something. I think it was a Saturday morning. I pull out the XS650 Yamaha and head out. I hunt down the quarry and proceed up RT44 heading home but as I crest the last hill and come in sight of the danger house I am at first confused. There is a big commotion around my house. DAMN looks like fire trucks and police cars all with lights flashing and …….thats weird….my house is in a cloud! It looks like my house is in a fog bank. As I approach I see a car inserted into my house. Damn that is not good ….! Then I realize that it has entered my house exactly where my LP tanks WERE! Dawn came crashing in on me like the killer asteroid did to the dinosaurs. That cloud was highly flammable propane gas. Now I realize why everyone is standing far away from the house and the road is blocked off. Then my tiny little mind is overwhelmed with thoughts of Mary and Toobadcat! I slid the bike to a stop on her side and leapt off before she stopped. #1 dumb thing…any gas that had drifted down street would ignited because of the sparks but luck was with us and no kaboom was heard…then. I ran for the house ignoring police and firemen who seeing my intent had decided to stop the crazy man. One policeman had a chance to stop me but I pretty much ran through him. I burst into the gas filled house and could see the front end of the car protruding into my kitchen. It had knocked my stove about a foot into my kitchen. It did this by slamming the LP gas tanks into it. Funny how I had never put 2+2 together and saw the bomb that was sitting behind the stove and 8 feet from whizzing traffic. Lucky I was a cheap SOB and had turned off the pilot lights in the stove a couple months before. We were now lighting the burners with a dead Bic lighter. Then I ran through the house calling for Mary and the cat. As I ran into the living room which overlooked the side street I saw Mary. She was sitting on the stone wall about 200 feet away talking with the neighbors. BAM! No, No it’s not what you think. That “bam” was the sound of me realizing I was standing inside a bomb watching the one I was searching for shooting the breeze well out of danger.
Sloooooowly I backed out of the room and out of the house. Now I could hear the police and firemen yelling for me. As soon as Mary saw me come out of the house she stood up giving me a look. I guess she didn’t see me run in there. I went and picked up the bike and got it off the road and by then the police had me and were trying to decide what to do to me. But I just had to get over to Mary and make sure she was alright, which she was with the exception of some adrenaline still coursing through her. The cops decided to let the linebacker move go and not charge me with charging. After a while they told me to go in open the doors and windows and get back out. An hour or two later all clear was given. They had pulled the car and shut off the tanks BUT not in that order! I thought Toobadcat had most likely skipped out a window and was halfway to
Number 2
In the wee hours of the morn while I slumbered in the above mentioned house I awoke to a screetching grinding of metal that became louder and louder. My first thought was “GOOD GOD A TRAILER TRUC K HAS FINALLY LOST IT AND IS GONNA COME RIPPING THROUGH THE WALL AND TAKE ME OUT!!!!”. But the noise finally stopped and all that could be heard was ticking and moaning.
Now let me tell you I sleep in the raw. I have done this my whole life. So when I get to the window and raise the shade I am presented with a set of headlights about 10 feet from me but pointed right at me. Behind these headlights I can make out a car that looks a little too flat but I can hear the moaning real good now. From the light of the headlights I locate my underwear and slide these briefs on as I go running out to see what happened. What greets me is a large sedan that has obviously sheared a telephone pole rolled at least once and came to rest just outside my window.
Sitting slumped over the steering wheel is the driver and SHE is moaning. Having gone through some medical in obtaining my Search and Rescue certification in Scuba I didn’t want her going to sleep or passing out so I went to her and started talking. Once she knew someone was there she sat back and I saw she had taken the steering wheel in the mouth. So I’m standing there in my skivvies talking to this girl who I think has to be hurt pretty bad and wondering how to get to a phone and call the Fire Station which is only about a football field away when headlights come down the road. The driver sees me waving and comes to a stop. As he gets out of what looks like a nice El Camino I yell for him to go to the Fire Station and pull the emergency box on the outside. It takes him a minute but just like Flash Gordon he jumps back into his El Kabong car/truck and lights his tires up right through the broken glass and odds n’ ends covering the road. I am asking her all kinds of clever questions (Tastes great or less filling? Boxers or briefs? Could Top Cat beat Snagglepuss?) when I hear the siren go off calling the volunteers to the station. I found out she was the daughter of one of the main volunteers on the rescue who I knew pretty well. Now cars are flying to the station and I’m hoping the guy stayed to tell them where the accident was. She was bleeding pretty bad but I didn’t want to touch her fearing for her back and the car didn’t seem to be burning so I didn’t think it would blow. The radiator was letting off steam where the pole must have smashed it. So I kept talking to her until I heard the rescue leave the station on its way and that’s when I dashed around and into my house to get dressed. Turns out I was not quite quick enough and my cousin who was also a volunteer came up to me after and remarked about the large half naked man he saw run into my house. I guess he was the only one since no one else remarked or busted my chops.
I even got to see the girl about a year later and introduced myself. She remembered talking to someone but she didn’t know if it was real or not. It was a rather large angel in a pair of white “Fruit of the Looms”. Maybe just a large fruit looming around the accident is more like it!
Turns out she had been drinking but the real sobering part was the realization if she had not hit that telephone pole she would have drove that sedan right into my bed.
One more thing, about two years later a friend’s son took out that same pole but didn’t come close to my house. He was in an early model mini-truck that folded like a origami swan, he didn’t make it. He was a good friendly jolly kid too.
Number 3
As I said before my living room overlooked the side street. I had set up a large drawing table where I did my work. As I sat there I had a grand view of both the side street and the main highway with just a turn of my head. I could also check out everyone coming out of the side road and having lived here for so long I knew about 80% of them. I don’t remember that music I had playing but I always had some rock and roll blaring. What happened next scared the bejeses out of me.
I suddenly heard the familiar sound of air brakes being applied followed by the most awful rendering of metal and crashing of two monsters. Suddenly into my view slides a big Oldsmobile that has had its whole trunk and back end crushed almost flat. The wheels are spayed out and there is a giant tire track going right up the flattened trunk and across half the cars cabin. It’s like slow motion and the car slides around the corner and into the side street. Its momentum carries it as it slides it’s rear end up onto the curb where it finally stops. I can see one of those large dump trucks slowing down but continuing down the main drag.
I look back to the Olds and there is a man just sitting in the driver seat looking around. Then my blood goes cold. The road is turning black. The blackness is spreading at a phenomenal rate as I think….”GAS!”. I start yelling out the window for the man to get out of the car before it blows! He is dazed but after a second he realizes his predicament and has to climb out his window because his door is jammed.
Man that’s a lot of gas I’m thinking as he comes towards me. To this day I think it might be a miracle that the broken, smashed flat and spun up on a curb back end of that Olds didn’t set a spark and blow that corner to hell. Then the guy tells me he was on his way down to the lake to fill his powerboat up and he had 2 fifteen gallon tanks of gas in his trunk.
I am floored. Another big problem is the gas is running down into the road drain that goes into the stream that runs under my house and down into the lake his boat is on about a half mile away. So by figuring anywhere from 40 to 60 gallons of gas went downstream. This stream will play a big part of my next story about this house. But back to this one there was no kaboom and no one really got hurt except an Oldsmobile, really just another boring ho humm day on the corner. Years later I did buy a vehicle off his kid who told me his father used to tell him about the truck rolling over his trunk. I got no credit in the story. Such is life!
Number 4 (a 3 in 1)
Like I said in the above story a stream ran below my house. It also ran under the 4 lane in a pretty good sized culvert. Across the 4 laner was a fire hole. Where in the old days they would fill the fire trucks. Sort of like a small man made pond big enough to fill a tanker in an emergency. It had not been maintained in years and had half filled in. I would make little trips over there to make sure it was not becoming clogged and one time I was greeted with about 5 little ducks trapped against the culvert end. In trying to free these quackers I slipped and went waist deep in muck. By the time I had the ducks and had crawled back on shore I was covered in leeches. Talk about freaking out! I invented a new dance right there and then. The Blood Sucking Get them off me Twist and Shout! It’s really too bad I couldn’t reproduce it without the real leeches cause it would have been more popular than the Original Twist.
Once in a while Mary and I would hear something going on downstairs in the creepy cellar but every time I went to see there was nothing there. Then I discovered a couple holes. They were maybe six inches across and went down towards the culvert. So I told my grandfather and he said we had a river rat and gave me a rat trap. It’s like a mouse trap on steroids. That night I set it with some peanut butter and by the time I got upstairs I heard a snap and a commotion. Returning back to the cellar there was no trap anywhere. ODD! So I figured he dragged the trap back down the hole with him.
The next day I went to the hardware store and bough a shiny new even beefier trap and a roll of wire. Well that night around
The time came and I opened the cellar door and a strange feeling came over me. I turned on the light but it seemed like the light was dim or the light was being swallowed cause it was still dark. I took my flashlight with me. When I got to the bottom of the stairs I was confronted with a GRISly scene. I had caught another one sometime in the night and sometime later his relatives had come to claim him. There was fur and gore everywhere. In the feeding frenzy it looked like another one or two might have been dispatched cause it looked like too much gore for even one of these river horses.
Mary turned ashen as I told her about the carnage. I took off for the hardware store again and got some poison which I put down the holes. I also went to the town garage and got some cold patch that I sealed the holes with. Then I set about cleaning up the mess.
Never heard another peep but that scene stayed with me for a while, especially when the next incident happened.
I stored my XS650 Yamaha in that same cellar for the winter. There was a 6 inch sill that I had to get over to get in and out. That fall I had successfully got her in and turned around for the spring exit.
Now was time to get her out and instead of calling a friend I decided to do it myself. So I have the door open and I am walking the bike over to it when a maw opens in the cellar floor and swallows me to my chest and the bike is coming down to seal the deal. Not wanting to be buried under ground and bike in a rat infested hole the adrenaline coursed through me and I muscled that bike back up and climbed out of that hole. I backed the bike back into the cellar and went to see the hole that tried to swallow me. It was just right to swallow me and the bike. Custom fit. I went and got drunk. Good’n drunk!!
The next day I filled the hole in with rocks and gravel. I then got a buddy and rolled the bike out. I never entered the cellar all that spring and summer believing leave well enough alone. I did not hear anything from down there either BUT when I did go down in the fall I was confronted with another shocking sight. The furnace that would heat my house was hanging by it’s ductwork over a sinkhole about 15 feet wide and 10 feet deep. At first I didn’t know what I was looking at. There was just some huge dark thing sleeping under the furnace. After the shock it took some doing to fill that hole! I had the state come in to inspect the culvert under the house believing that had been the underminer that made the maw appear but it proved almost intact. They did find the river rats hole and sealed that.
It was not until about a year later that we discovered that the property next done had done some creative landscaping and was diverting runoff under my house and foundation. Thanks neighbor!
But all in all it was a hell of a house…literally! I spent about 18 years there. Exciting years at that. One of my cousins lives there now. He has fixed the place up pretty good from the outside but I know the house and how dangerous it is not to mention the rats! RATS…..See that hole? RATS used to come out of that hole! Sorry… that was a old 3 Stooges routine….I couldn’t help myself…..
Be Well
AmbergrismOoOn
