High Strangeness on I-505
The following is a true story and happened not too far from here. It was 1982, and my husband Richard and I were traveling with two friends late at night, from Redding to Bolinas in our friend Artie’s Alpha Romeo. We had stopped for gas in Dunnigan before switching drivers and heading off on 505. It was late, maybe around midnight, as we had gotten a late start. Artie and Zoe were cuddled up in the back while Richard drove and I rode shotgun.
Interstate 505 is more populated today, but back in 1982, it was all but deserted. Especially at night. There were no services, just some big farms and ranches and empty land. We had been driving for about a half-hour when Richard looked down at the instrument panel and said, “Hey, Artie—does your temperature gauge work?”
Artie sat up and leaned forward to take a look. “Usually it works just fine,” he said. “The needle stays about in the middle.”
“Well, it’s not working now. It’s on dead cold and we’ve been driving for about three hours.”
Artie shrugged. “Must have broken,” he replied. “I’ll get it checked out tomorrow. The car’s driving okay, right?”
“Yeah,” Richard told him. “It’s driving fine.”
Artie settled back with Zoe but five minutes later Richard cleared his throat and said, “Uhhh…would you all look out the back window and tell me if I’m hallucinating? Or is there a big jeep behind us without any lights on?”
We thought he might be pulling our legs, but we all turned around to look out the rear window, startled to find that indeed, a Jeep Cherokee without any lights was driving about a foot from our bumper.
“Jesus!” exclaimed Artie.
“Do you think it just lost its lights or something?” said Zoe.
“I suppose it could have,” Richard told her, “but I’ve been checking in the rearview mirror all along and I never saw this thing coming up on me. I haven’t seen any headlights at all. It must have lost its lights a while ago.”
“But how fast are you going?” I said. “How could it have gotten here without any lights?”
“I’m going about seventy. So this thing had to go at least that fast to catch up with us.”
We fell silent. Soon, Richard spotted a pick-up truck ahead of us and he said, “Good! We’ll get this thing on his tail.” He passed the truck and when we pulled back in the right hand lane, we breathed a sigh of relief. Two seconds later, though, the truck came roaring up behind us and passed us like we were standing still. This left the mystery jeep back on our rear end. I sneaked a glance behind us and saw that oddly, sparks were shooting out from under the chassis. Was the muffler dragging? Why was this car driving so fast with no lights and a scraping muffler? At first we thought that it might get off at one of the few exits that we passed. We told ourselves that it was just following us to get to the next exit safely where it would stop and get help. But it ignored every single exit that we passed.
Eventually, we came upon another car, so once again we tried to pass. But this time, the mystery jeep passed with us! It no longer seemed interested in just following a set of lights; it seemed particularly interested in us. When the headlights from the other car shone through the interior of the jeep, I turned around and tried to glimpse what manner of person was driving it. I beheld a very peculiar shape. Either the driver was wearing some kind of Darth Vader helmet or he/she/it had a bowl for a head. There was no neck. No hair. Just a smooth, hard-edged semi-circle propped on a pair of wide, boxy shoulders.
“Maybe we should get off at the next exit,” Zoe said, her voice wobbly with fear.
Richard shook his head. “I’m not about to end up in the middle of nowhere with that thing.”
“Oh, right,” she mumbled, sliding down even farther in her seat.
“Well, maybe if we slow down, it’ll pass us,” Artie said.
Richard hesitated, then thought, apparently, that this might be worth a try. So he eased up on the gas pedal. The jeep swung out into the left hand lane and it looked, for a moment, as if it might pass us. But when it drew even with us, it swerved toward us, trying to force us off the road!
Richard stomped on the accelerator. We shot out of there so fast it was like we squirted down the highway. Richard hit a hundred and didn’t slow down for miles. Then he dropped down to eighty and cruised there for a while. We kept checking out the rear window to see if we had outrun the thing, and it looked like we had.
Then Richard groaned, “Oh, man.”
“What!?” we all exclaimed in anxious unison.
“Look at the temperature gauge.”
We all craned our necks to see. The needle had climbed back up to the middle of the gauge; it was back to normal.
What was it?
We have absolutely no idea! Once again the strangeness of the universe surpasses our ability to explain or define it. But I, for one, am glad that there now are a couple of gas stations along 505.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008