‘Gifts’ of the Freeway Gods

In this time of frequent holidays, some might call it an unsolicited or unintended gift; others view it as debris, potentially dangerous debris. Now as we attempt to excavate the holiday paper, cardboard and food debris from our homes, important word has reached us from Lithuania. There, residents of the Baltic resort community of Sventoji recently awakened to find some 50 tons of briny bananas washing ashore. Either that’s a long way for escaping bananas to drift from Central America or a container of fruit fell from a vessel in nearby shipping lanes. People turned out to collect the floating fruit from four miles of chilly beaches.

The seasonal debris floating closer to home on Los Angeles freeways, usually in traffic lanes, is less prized. It can come as quite an early-morning surprise to be cruising along at, say, 60 miles an hour (well, it could happen) and suddenly, just ahead of your car’s bow, is a gift from the freeway gods -- a 16-foot steel ladder, strong, sharp and ready to slash tires, shear metal and send vehicles careening out of control into each other. Or suddenly there’s a perfectly good but out-of-place queen-sized mattress. A giant, broken watermelon. Or a large cardboard box containing who-knows-what. It’s not even uncommon along these lanes of motorized combat to find auto body parts -- entire bumpers, wheels, tires, batteries. Where’d the rest of the body go?

But the imagination wonders, at times when traffic creeps considerably slower than 60, how a bookcase, colored cushions the size of a Volkswagen or a Shaq-sized teddy bear wander into the middle of an interstate highway. Suspicion centers on pickups and other vehicles with open backs.

What a simple way to prevent losses and accidents: Tie things down! True, it would take some advance thought and maybe consideration. But shouldn’t responsible motorists anticipate events? They place fuel in the tank expecting noticeable vehicle nonmovement without it.

Say you’re loading a pickup to move your household. Isn’t it at least conceivable that the vehicle might at some point be traveling 50 miles an hour on a freeway? And couldn’t it theoretically occur to the driver that although it might be psychiatrist office-calm in the driver’s seat, the wind outside would probably match the large, glowing number on the speedometer?

What part of “50-mile-an-hour winds” is slippery to the mental grasp? Hurricane winds do it. We’ve seen them on TV, removing entire roofs like soup can lids and tossing them onto already-jumbled parked cars. We’ve seen Santa Anas move stuff too. So besides losing weight, talking nicer to people you dislike and putting your car keys and cellphone in the same place at home every evening, let’s consider as a candidate for a 2004 resolution reducing the amount of unsolicited gifts Californians deposit on their freeways.