One More Shot

I gave it another shot at the rest area last night. I'd slept all day yesterday so I figured why not. But it was just another frustrating night. Dog owners. They'd drive up, and turn out two or three huge dogs to run wild and to take a shit in the picnic area. Over and over again, this was repeated, until, early this morning, when a big fat cowboy hat guy came out of a huge trailer he'd spent the night in, and turned his hound loose, who raced up to me in the dark, spooking the hell out of me, I could no longer contain my frustration. I went off on him.

At first I tried to explain why I was upset about the free roaming dogs, that I was trying to find a lost cat, that dogs were supposed to be on leash, and walked only in one area, but he didn't give a shit. That's when I blew up and told him off good.

I was in the process of picking up my traps, convinced this is a senseless endeavor. Dog owners have sealed her fate in part. In all my time out there, I saw only one man pick up his dogs' shit. I saw a ton of dog owners let their dogs run, shit and pee in the picnic area, often peeing on the table legs or tables themselves. I saw dangerous dogs let loose to run, big dogs, little dogs, and not one owner seemed intent on behaving according to the rules posted at the rest area, except a handful.

Also last night, four young men pulled up in a white car, got out their big cans of beer, dumped their trash out the door of the car, into the parking lot. One of them couldn't wait, and was unzipping his pants as he exited the car. He looked over it me with a sly grin before pulling out his penis and taking a whiz near the sidewalk a few feet from my car. I stared, incredulous. Then he turned to me and said "Happy New Year" and they drove off, leaving their trash, mostly empty beer cans, in a pile beside where they had parked.

I guess the rest area fascinates me now. I think it'd make a good movie just called "Rest Area". You never know what to expect, really. It's kind of disgusting and seedy, but I think as a movie it could be dressed up enough to be digestible, with a plot thrown in.

I call the rest area "my vacation home". I can go there for a night whenever I want to. It's not so bad, really. LIke a cold C grade motel. Lots of action and drama. Lots of abnormal behavior. Lots of sad stories from people who live in their cars. And then there are the truckers. Many are nice but many are also extremely sexual.

I made a new trucker friend. He's from Texas and wants to call next time he's through here "go to dinner or something". I can imagine what the "or something is" and I've already forgotten his name and recycled the paper he wrote his number on. Before he took down my cat website, he had told me about getting stuck at the pass, down at the CA OR border, so he went off with some woman trucker and got a hotel. Well, I never would have guessed.

I felt like saying "Mister, from dealing with cats, I know the cats who have been breeding all sorts of partners are full of parasites and diseases so no thank you. No Thank You, Mr. Texas Trucker, not interested."

Some of these promiscous truckers must harbor all sorts of diseases and maybe even be the breeding grouds for mutating viruses, since they likely get exposed to different strains of everything all over the country, sleeping here and there and everywhere. Man alive. That's just disgusting.

You don't see most of the truckers. They pull in, in the overflow area, park, and go to sleep, in their sleeper compartments, engines idling away. That rest area doesn't have many trucker spaces and it's tight parking there, especially if the RV's pulling cars or pickups don't have the brains to pull forward far enough. The trucks pull out straight ahead to get back on the onramp to the freeway. They come around when getting off the freeway, looking for a spot in that line up, but there are pull in passenger spaces facing south, too. Often there is no room for trucks to go on through. More than once I got awakened by a truck's headlights blasting in through my car windows. After the first time, I knew the routine. They were stuck, couldn't squeeze through between me and the rear end of some other rig, usually a badly parked RV pulling a car or trailer. So I'd have to move.

ODOT says they can't make that any bigger because it floods clear to the parking lot at times, from the river. It's kind of dangerous as a passenger car to park in the car spots in the overflow due to the big rigs trying to get through very tight spots between the backs of cars and the backs of big rigs and RV's with their excess vehicles.

You wouldn't know the economy's not so good if you park in the overflow area. It's the RV's you see, the excess, huge trailers, too. The RV's are often pulling an extra vehicle, or a trailer filled with expensive toys like ATV's, or even a boat. You see the excess in the overflow parking lot.

You see the sadness over in the regular parking lot by the restrooms--the ragtags, the rubber tramps, the lost souls down and out, filling jugs from their trunks with water to fill an always leaking radiator, always out trying to fix a broken up possession packed car. But they're almost always friendly and smiling, too. These are the souls you can talk to, who have empathy for a lost cat. You can't talk like that to the arrogant pedigreed RV'ers' or those camping out free in their big trailers with their big dogs shitting in the picnic area who have no empathy whatsoever that a cat is out there somewhere, scared, hungry, and dying.

But there is a cat out there suffering somewhere. I never found her. But I tried. Oh how I tried.