Chasing the Zodiac, Part II: The anniversary of the Lake Herman Road murders

Mt. Diablo, from the scene of Zodiac's first attack.  
Click for larger image    © Pseudocognitive

Originally posted on December 20, 2010

I wrote the following report after visiting the scene on the 40th anniversary in 2008 and amended it the following September. This report holds no new information of interest to anyone who’s followed the Zodiac murders with any significant level of attention over the last several years.  It’s simply a description of my own experiences visiting one of the crime scenes.  This is the second part of a series on Zodiac (read Part 1 first). The sequence of these two reports is opposite the order of the actual crimes because this is the order in which I visited the scenes. Before I begin, allow me to restate in no uncertain terms that this tale in no way seeks to celebrate the acts of such a depraved waste of oxygen as the Zodiac killer, nor is it an obsessive or misguided attempt to "investigate" the crimes.

My brother and I set out early on the morning of the 40th anniversary of the first murders that can be indisputably linked to Zodiac. We planned to get over to the site, take a few pictures, and be gone before the crowds who take this stuff far more seriously started showing up. I exclude myself from the ranks of the truly obsessed because my case is one of mild and intermittent manifestation. Almost all of my doctors (and most of the time, my wife) agree with that assessment. Once again, however, I warn you that this kind of thing isn’t for everyone, and I am fully aware of the fact that some of you may find it rather bizarre that a person who’s been drawing breath for over half a century spends any time at all visiting a site of an infamous crime. All I will say in my own defense is that I know it’s a bit strange, but I only have a high degree of interest for this specific case (for reasons described in the first installment of this series), and I do not allow this mild obsession to interfere with real life. Still, I’ll grant you, it is offbeat.

Enough already with the apologetic tone. Stop watching Hollywood movies that depict such things. Put down your true crime novels. Turn off those shows on A&E like “The First 48.” Sell your Stephen King books at a garage sale. Then tell me I’m weird.

On the frigid night of December 20, 1968, Zodiac killed high school sweethearts David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen in a little dirt turn-out on Lake Herman Road, about 2/3 of the way from Vallejo to Benicia.

Faraday

Jensen

Zodiac approached the victims–who were seated in David Faraday’s car–on foot. He shot and killed both young people, and the crime provoked intense media attention from the start. You can Google this and get tons of hits, so I won't chronicle all the details. All you really need to know is that on a dark, cold winter night 40 years ago, a psychopath murdered two young people on a lonely road.

Faraday's Rambler - zodiackiller.com

That road and the surrounding countryside have changed little since 1968. No development has occurred along that stretch, and some of the original ranch houses stand exactly as they did before. The turn-out where the victims parked in David Faraday’s Rambler is also pretty much the same, save for the addition of a guard rail, a few traffic warning signs, and a new gate across the gravel road that leads to an undisclosed location. Pictured above is the scene in 1968, the morning after the murders.  Note the location of the victim vehicle.

Same place, 40 years later (12/20/08).  © Pseudocognitive

Rambler had been parked near where the motorcycles are.
Click for larger image    © Pseudocognitive

Detective Les Lundblad at the crime scene the next day.  zodiackiller.com

Much has been written about this case over the years.  Some of it is solid reporting that excludes or at least limits any groundless speculation, but a lot of it is sensationalistic tripe.  Given the choice between a simple explanation and one so convoluted that it may attract the attention of a former practitioner of editorial cartoonerism and prompt him to write a yellow-jacketed book that will sell millions and millions of copies despite its many factual errors and outright fabrications, I choose the former. That is, unless and until I write my own book, at which time I might decide to shift strata a bit, since nobody buys books that promote reason and judgment. Here’s one explanation for why Zodiac chose this particular crime scene (besides the obvious reasons that the road is dark and semi-secluded and young people in the area were known to park at night in its turn-outs): Supposedly, Zodiac had a fascination with Montaña del Diablo, and that very place is readily visible from the Lake Herman Road site. Somebody came up with the idea that this symbol,

which Zodiac drew on his famous Halloween card to San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery,            

matches up with the profile of  Mt.Diablo. Let’s check:

© Pseudocognitive

So much for that.  Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

We spent about thirty minutes at the site, taking pictures and observing sullen, muddy horses walk back and forth in the pasture on the other side of the road.  

We left the Faraday/Jensen site shortly thereafter and rode over to Fresno Street in Vallejo, stopping by the house once owned by the man whom many still consider to be the best suspect among those identified as potential Zodiacs, Arthur Leigh Allen. Whereas Graysmith’s second Zodiac book, “Zodiac Unmasked,” and the 2007 film “Zodiac” portray Allen

as the guy, there’s no physical evidence linking him to any of the crimes.
In fact, his DNA did not match that which was found on one of the stamps stuck on a confirmed Zodiac letter. Still, there are intriguing facts that seem to point to him. His status as a potential Zodiac notwithstanding, Allen, who claimed that law enforcement hounded him mercilessly and who died of natural causes over a decade ago, was a very bad guy. The crimes for which he was imprisoned were sufficiently heinous to dissuade us from having any sympathy for him whatsoever. In other words, the world’s a better place without him.

I didn’t want to bother the current occupants of the house, so I parked very briefly in front and took a couple of photos. These do not appear here. As I was framing the  final shot, my brother advised me that someone was peering out at me, and I observed what appeared to be a brindle pit bull of placid affect silently watching through a big picture window. At that point I began to feel guilty for intruding, so I packed away my camera, put on my helmet and gloves and rode off down the street, expecting that my brother was on his way as well. He did not follow, however. I figured he was writing in that little memo book he carries, the one in which he has recorded every last drop of petrol he’s fed the red and chrome Triumph Rocket III beast, so I stopped and waited. What he was actually doing was talking to the owner of the house, who had come out to move his car down the street in order to produce a less cluttered photographic milieu.

That’s the sequel. I am not proud of stopping in front of dead Allen’s ex-house (I must take steps to ensure that act will serve as the absolute limit of my obsession), for, although I was there for only three or four minutes, I know exactly how I would respond if someone stopped on the street and began taking pictures of my house. I wouldn’t move my car to give the photographer a better view, that’s for sure. I suppose the guy figured that it goes with the territory of living in a home once occupied by a man suspected of being the Zodiac killer, and he didn’t seem bothered by any of it, so no harm, no foul, I reckon.

After we finished in Vallejo, city of one cop for every 100,000 residents, we dodged 4-wheeled bullets on I-80 to Fairfield, ate some tasty giant cheeseburgers at Nation’s on West Texas Street, and then slabbed on home to beat the cold. I still feel somethin’ in my marrow, though, and it ain’t exactly warm.

•    •    •

Update: Ten months later
The number nine is or is not important in Zodiac symbology, according to one or two things I may or may not have read. That made September 19th a perfect day to lose my ambitions for a longer ride to the coast (instead of allowing people to believe that I simply lacked the endurance for a longer trip due to my characteristic idiopathic slackerdom) and instead revisit one of the sites covered in previous reports. And to try out the new Nikon D5000, which had languished in its box, unexamined, ever since the big brown truck delivered it the week before. And because a major national travel magazine had expressed interest in paying me to write a series of hastily written semi-factual articles. The preceding statement is not true.

There was nothing of interest to be found at the Berryessa Zodiac site, which was expected yet still disappointing, especially after I had gone through the trouble of persuading the friendly personnel staffing the gate to the camping area to let us in for free. The only item of note is that the place heretofore referred to as Zodiac Island is now a campsite. There’s a picnic table and BBQ pit right there at the scene of Zodiac's attack on 9/27/69. No replacement trees, 90-something degrees. Water level dropping to near subterranean levels. It was not an attractive place to set up camp. I will not show you any pictures of this place because it is now so utterly devoid of interest. Also on account of the fact that, in my usual state of impatience-inspired idiocy, I forgot to change the factory default setting for JPEG quality on the D5000 and everything was shot at “Normal” instead of “Fine.” And because my efforts were not very productive that day anyway. I make no excuses. Except for the idiopathic malaise, ADD, and the heat. And a creeping sense of dread, because the next day was Monday Eve.

There’s no new Zodiac info in this addendum to the sequel to the report on Zodiac. That’s due partly to the fact that I have already explored the Zodiac deal to the point where there’s very little left to interest me, and mostly because the only reason I’m posting at all is to tell you that the best rib eye steak I have ever eaten is available a short distance south of Zodiac Island at Cucina Italiana. With pepper sauce, made with whole black peppercorns. And roasted fennel on the side, and all of the bread and really excellent Balsamic dipping stuff you want. Want to know just how good it really is? I’m sitting there, with my D5000 in the saddle bag just outside the window, and some guy comes in and says, “Stefano, I got a buck, dude! Come out and see it!!!” As the guy with the old “Good Chevrolet, Sacramento” license plate frame and Chef Stefano go out front, I’m thinking about the cool shots I could compose if I could talk the hunter into taking the deer out of the truck and propping him up on the seat of the Rocket III while my brother lies inert under the front wheel of the red behemoth. I’m starting to get motivated to put some effort into picture-takin’, but then I look back down at that rib eye and decide that nothing is gonna pry me away from it. It was that good.

With just the right level of attentiveness from Chef Stefano and his business partner Sharyn, we continued our excellent dining experience. I am telling you, I have never been disappointed by anything I have eaten at Cucina Italiana. Let the crotch-rocket riders patronize those places farther south and east—all they need is bread, sandwich meat, and beer and then they’re off on their next double-yellow scofflaw Team Berryessa adventure, like a flock of angry, buzzing mosquitoes. You want real food? Go see Chef Stefano.

On the ride home we gassed up the bikes and then observed the strange behavior of locals and travelers at the Chevron station at the east end of Winters. It is not rumored that this place has some significant connection with Zodiac lore. I just missed an opportunity to get a shot or two of Winters PD in the process stopping a red car with two occupants, but they were past my vantage point before I could raise the camera. All I have to show for my efforts is an unprintable snapshot of the physical environment. There was a dire warning inside the gas station, though:

© Pseudocognitive

And that’s the word.¹

¹Apologies to S. Colbert.

© Pseudocognitive

RELATED POSTS: The Zodiac Killer on the pages of Pseudocognitive

For detailed information about all of the Zodiac crimes, I recommend Tom Voigt’s ZodiacKiller.com. The discussion forum can be over the top at times and is best sampled as an entertained observer, but the information on the main site is extensive and well-organized.






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© Pseudocognitive  

Non-Redacted Zodiac Killer Profile Part II: He’s dead, Jim

Lake Berryessa Zodiac crime scene

Even the most experienced and highly trained criminal profilers acknowledge that profiling is more art than science. This is another way of saying that when you try to apply the generalizations of psychology to specific unknown individuals, it is utterly impossible to control for even a fraction of the variables that affect behavior. Any profiler who doesn’t acknowledge this is just a quack. I base this view primarily on my innate skepticism of most things; I performed no searches of the legitimate literature on the topic. If someone would like to argue the point, I encourage it.


Zodiac is dead. If you cling to the hope that he’s alive and you might be the person who catches him, I suggest that you get comfortable in your mom’s moldy basement, stock up on ganja and DiGiorno, and get a new keyboard to replace that one with the overused CAPS LOCK key. If I have a few spare minutes, I’ll look for you on the various
fora every December 20 and see what you’re up to.
As I possibly described in part one of the profile, Zodiac is rumored to have had ties to a PETA precursor group somewhere in the high wheat country of western Kansas, perhaps very close to the small town of Holcomb. I got my start on the path to this tentative conclusion when I discovered a previously overlooked piece of evidence: Zodiac’s right Wing Walker shoe. I am not currently prepared to explain the circumstances of this discovery, as it may have been found on federal BLM land, but the shoe has been examined and authenticated by somebody in some agency someplace.  Please remember that many to most of the statements herein are complete dreck. Zodiac was possibly terrified of small insects as a child. It has been suggested that it may have been the sight of scurrying creatures small enough to chew on his eardrums that did more than anything else to steer him toward his eventual fate. Each of his thumbs had a highly flexible metacarpal phalangeal joint. He ventured into two-bit seedy dives in the worst part of every town he passed through in order to hone his fighting skills. It was in one such place that he almost met his doom when the bartender shot at him point-blank with an old 10 gauge his grandpa had used to hunt geese out of season on Suisun Bay. The gun misfired.

A possible former Zodiac haunt in an undisclosed location

Secret place in Rio Vista, thought by some to have an undefined role in the etiology of Zodiac's mental pathology

There are tantalizing hints of Zodiac’s passage in the dry summer of 1960 through many places around the arid southwest. In Needles, California, which sits across the mighty Colorado from Arizona, there was later discovered, carved in the riverbank silt at the spot made famous by Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” a symbol eerily similar to the one Zodiac scrawled on his letters to Bay Area newspapers (and on the door of Bryan Hartnell’s Karmann Ghia).

This is rumored in many zones to be a former Zodiac hideout/staging headquarters.

If the Zodiac murders were happening now, who would the killer be? These crimes are to be treated here—in order to free our minds from the the stultifying atmosphere created by the anti-think mass media/politico-corporate complex—as a scourge of the current day, and we examine the characteristics that may lead us to Zodiac. He’s your neighbor, the friendly guy who’s always willing to help you unload large pieces of furniture but who invariably lets you know that he has a better way to do it.  He’s your other neighbor–the guy who refuses to talk to anyone and takes his solitary meals in the backyard under an old mulberry tree, cradling a varmint gun in his lap in case the squirrels or pigeons bother him. He works at a mini market and buys all the Penthouse and Hustler magazines before they go on the rack. His job involves, as I said before, long-distance driving, usually along deserted roads across the high desert. Last year he tried to prospect for a local second-tier 1% motorcycle club. He didn’t make it, of course, but he still uses the slang he picked up, and this bothers some people. He is the proprietor of a bait shop near Steamboat Slough and he refuses to sell jumbo minnows to any customer who does not first promise to render each of them unconscious with ice water before running a gleaming 1/0 hook through its lips. He is a five foot-six vice principal of the old school who calls everyone “slacker.” He gave up trying to grow hair years ago, and now shines his pale, globe-like head with ski wax. He wears Pendleton® shirts hanging out with only the top button fastened because he once read a book about the history of Los Angeles gangs. He’s your podiatrist, and he’s angry whether you know it or not.

Returning to the actual time of Zodiac’s activities, if you will consult any 60′s era gas station map you will discover—with the aid of a ruler and pencil—that the driving distance from North M and Vine in Needles to the summit of Mt. Diablo is 555 miles.  If you add that to the 111 miles from Washington and Cherry Streets in San Francisco to an unspecified spot alongside US 50 west of Cameron Park, you get 666 miles. These are possibly coincidences, but as hardwired pattern-seekers, you want to accept it, so I suggest that you do.

The gravel turn-out at the Lake Herman Road Zodiac crime scene.

We could, under some circumstances, know incontrovertibly that Zodiac can definitely be placed in the Bay Area by 1961, perhaps. Legends of possibly unexplained phenomena involving gravitational anomalies, mysterious ice blue (or white or gray or silver or pearl-colored) pursuit cars skulking along dark roads, as well as several nearly-confirmed disappearances within a 50 mile radius of Samuel P. Taylor State Park from January 1955 to July 1967 tend to support this contention. This kind of behavior, according to several persons identifying themselves as experts, often escalates to homicide. That these incidents occurred within a nearly 8,000 square mile area over a twelve and-a-half year time frame just about nails it down. Additionally, the socio-chronological progression along a vaguely described continuum of moral permissiveness in that era set the stage for all kinds of undifferentiated behavioral permutations. The time was ripe, and by the end of this period, Zodiac was ready to take his twisted games to the ultimate level.

© Pseudocognitive

Burn rubber

No one was supposed to get hurt. Real criminals never say that or even think it. I would not base my evaluation of any dire progression of chaotic events on Ridley Scott's approximation of human behavior under such conditions. And who the hell says tarmac anymore? There's no rubber on the tarmac; that's out at the airfield at what used to be the south edge of town, where the Koren War era fighter from north of the border skittered down three-zero and slammed into the ice cream parlor sometime between the summer of love and the age of disco. 

This is a parking lot and those marks are burned on blacktop or asphalt or pavement. A guy once got shot near this place and I had to look at his distal innards as they tried to slither out the colander that used to be his belly and those things were still squeezing and trying to move the mail. I tried my best to keep them inside. You don't forget a thing like that.

© Pseudocognitive

Old miseries, myth oxen, and the pungent piss of feral longhorns

On the thirteenth of May we went down the mountain for the last time. Passing quietly through long shadows, our route led us in painful divergence from what we’d once believed we were, offering nothing in place of those beliefs except a more desperate tendency to preserve and defend old miseries. Along our descent, we chewed and snapped at the imaginings of our common fate, like manic dogs unhinged by fleas or pin worms they cannot reach. Farther down, past the place where the creek bends double and tough grasses thrive under the urinary and fecal onslaught of feral Texas longhorns,

the secondary ridge fell off abruptly, so we followed instead the rusted old Union Pacific tracks, all the way around to the south exposure, into a zone where dry grass and scrub predominate more severely the farther down you go. Here, but for the dust and rock and crackly brown plants, there is nothing worthy of careful notation by any but the most desperate chroniclers of human folly in wild places. The truly sobering influence of these lands is best left to others to ponder. None of this would matter anyway, not once we reached habitation, because we would soon be made dead at the hands of self-righteous fools and those who do their bidding. You may have resigned yourself to a similar fate as the likely outcome of the current mess you’ve blundered your way into, but you should remember that I was of a similar mind at the time, yet here I am still.

Continuing down-slope, furtive creatures—perhaps refugees of the last county war—were sighted ahead, shifting in and out of our bleary plane of focus. These were far less substantial than a dusty old boar taking a dirt bath. A man can shoot a boar and eat his muscles and tender parts and use his tusks to beat back the inexorable myth oxen. Not so with these undefined forms flitting about before us. They held fast to no spot for longer than half a moment. We chose to ignore them, and in that manner we passed without further imperilment into town, where the plan was to spend our last night on this earth in stuporous inebriation.

•     •     •

This was the first installment in a senselessly continuing series of fractured ramblings by an old man who’s outlived his usefulness, and it was set down on paper while traveling through the badlands bordering the state of Fugue. The second installment will likely never be set down on these pages. I do not expect nor want you to make any sense of it. Anyone attempting to do so will be consigned to the corners of my mind reserved for blathering media whores like Michelle Rhee and Andrew Breitbart and Tom Tancredo, to name but a few.

About Pseudocognitive:
Meta-nonconformity consultant for a large public agency.  Married father of adult children with autism. Motorcycle rider. Quasi-photographer. Irascible curmudgeon. Get off my fescue. Moved west with the Giants in ’58 but forgot about it until recently. My head grabs a bunch of stuff and doesn’t like to let it go. It has been determined that I should escalate my efforts to rid myself of some of these extraneosities. There is no pattern to be found in the scope or sequence of the topics I post except whatever patterns your own mind creates. Any attempt by the reader to impose his or her patterns on me will be met with apathy. I am a strong and active supporter of the Establishment Clause. Keep your religion out of my publicly funded agencies. I have nothing to do with any ads you may see here; direct your ire elsewhere. I am in favor of eating animals if a person so desires. Save the winter-run Chinook salmon. I post first and proofread later, making numerous edits. I no longer rudely pick my nose in public. No one reads this; you probably shouldn’t either.

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© Pseudocognitive

Down in the Delta: Gambling, drinking, and history

On the main street of an old riverfront town in the Delta there is a former gambling hall. This place and the town where it still stands were built and populated long ago by Chinese immigrants to California. The town is Locke, located at the apex of an elbow-bend in the roiling Sacramento River just north of Walnut Grove, and it packs a lot more substance than the post's title implies. You walk through Locke, you don't come out the other end without some history hitching a ride.

© Pseudocognitive

Bookhouse Gang

Yet another random iPhone shot, taken while I was waiting for my car to be serviced across the street one Saturday morning. There’s a story that goes with it. 

© Pseudocognitive

Your Feets Too Big

Your pedal extremities really are obnoxious.
One never knows, do one?
—The Immortal Fats Waller

Photo © Pseudocognitive All rights reserved, forever.

Random snapshot of the day, again

Long-dead McCammon in Bodega, California, home of Hitchcock’s “The Birds”

Cut in two by a neighbor’s ax. Or trampled by a gang of mutinous mules. Or maybe it was the grippe. Or a ride-by shooting with cut-down shotguns. At least he died long before those avian fiends took over the town and started pecking out human eyes.  No disrespect for the long-dead intended.

Post and photo © Pseudocognitive All rights reserved, forever.

Random snapshot of the day

A snapshot exhibits no artistic pretensions.  It’s content to simply record the conditions in a particular place and time.  Most of the pictures I take are snapshots.


This is the rail station in Jamestown, California, where the hired guns arrived in town in the 1952 film “High Noon.”

Post and photo © Pseudocognitive All rights reserved, forever.

Sutter Creek, California: Cortical rumblings in a 19th Century brothel

The small California gold rush town of Sutter Creek sits in a bubble of historic isolation almost exactly forty miles east/southeast (crow-flyin’ straight line distance) of downtown Sacramento.  Sure, all the usual 20^th and 21^st Century technological amenities can be found there, and yeah, the town has been forced by economic realities to slightly prostitute itself over the years, evolving into somewhat of a Mecca for yuppie antiquers and the bed’n’breakfast crowd, but scratch that veneer and you can find traces of a simpler and more violent time.  That’s beyond the scope of this report, however.  What follows is just a small one-hour sample of life in Sutter Creek as observed by a guy with a motorcycle, a camera, and several neurological acronyms that follow his name when printed on official letterheads and medical records.

My brother and I got a late start on our ride on that lazy Saturday in January, scrapping the original route that would’ve taken us down to the town of Bodega to poke around where Hitchcock shot “The Birds.”  New plan: Ione – Sutter Creek Rd. A couple of secondary roads to a reservoir with some trout. Pack the five piece break-down and a couple of spinners. Might even stop long enough to fry up whatever fish might cooperate and look for the site of the big gunfight of 1850.  Or not, because I’ll never have the attention span to remember, so why bother trying? Hit me again with yet another serving of ADD-induced pessimism.

Good enough weather once the sun made the low southern sky midpoint. Passed by a good photo opp, south-bound US-99 under the RR crossing just north of the Cosumnes River. I do not recommend stopping there because a car or truck will surely claim you. Dillard Rd., Clay Station, Twin Cities east to the home of Preston Castle, where my grandmother lived for a couple of years as a child while her dad worked in the prison. Ione–Sutter Creek Rd. outta town was a cool meander along the trickling granite-lined stream-bed from which it derives half its name. Watch for a grizzled hill man in an old Ford; he likes both sides of the road. The historic Sutter Creek Palace Hotel and Ex-Brothel on Main Street was our destination, but that guy almost took us both out of the story. Upon arriving, my brother began contemplating revenge as we awaited our grub.

Good hamburgers and other stuff; steak sandwich rumored to be great but I eschew those now because I do not intend to repeat what my last steakwich did to me. Esophageal impactions are no fun, especially when the guy doin’ the endoscopin’ is peeved about being pulled off the back nine. I quote: “What the hell? Don’t you believe in chewing?” On this occasion I had the Reuben, its sauerkraut a token nod to my mostly forgotten German heritage.

The historic Sutter Creek Palace has a glass case of Old West shootin’ irons mounted on the wall of the bar, and the interior in general exhibits vestiges of its former glory (the stairs beckon old, dead cowboys to whatever traces of earthly delights may still be found upstairs, I reckon). The windows in the restaurant section look out onto a mostly ordinary side street, but I was able to observe a cleanly restored yellow Honda Supersport through the wavy hundred year-old silicate until the owner/restorer, Jimmy-Joe, rode off on it.

I had originally intended to take some pictures after lunch along Main Street (where they have a commemorative Old West gun battle every spring during some kind of festival), but the camera didn’t clear leather, because this is where the story takes an ice-water-in-the-face turn. Walking out, initially unobservant due to factors beyond my ability to understand or explain (that happens a lot to me; my docs call it ADD), I then observed a rider from a group that had arrived after us shout something and run outside. My first thought was that maybe someone was jackin’ his bike, but as we got to the sidewalk we saw an elderly man down in the gutter with a head injury–the same nice guy who had been eating at a table close to ours just a few minutes before.

Simple scalp-lac or skull fracture/brain bleed–hard to tell at that point. He fell and smacked the eighteen inch-high edge of the square curb with his right parietal. Three guys already had hold of the victim and were slightly elevating his head. Someone yelled, “911!” and another brought out a bar towel from the Palace to press on the wound. Some guy with a little mustache rolled up in an SUV with several antennae on its roof, stating that he had a radio and would “call it in.” One antenna looked suspiciously like a mag-mount. To my knowledge he did not ID himself to anyone, and there may be some interesting lines to read between in this case, but I lack sufficient data.

Since three guys already had hold of the victim and Radio Dude was an unknown factor, and because I couldn’t tell if the employees were calling it in or not, I used my aging Nokia. Fortunately, CHP actually answered mobile 9-1-1 quickly—on the first ring no less! I had ‘em hand me off to Sutter Creek and then asked if they had the call. They didn’t, so I gave ‘em the info.

Sutter Creek PD has a nice shiny Dodge Charger. I don’t know if they have any other cars (population 2,655), but that particular specimen is cool. It arrived on scene about 82 seconds later. The victim was still conscious and appeared to be about as alert and oriented as he had been inside the restaurant. We got outta the way. This incident is STILL doing some darkly resonant cortical rumbling and I am certain that the impending anniversary of my dad’s death is contributing to it.

Down the street, a passerby stopped and asked my brother about his bike (a massive 2300cc, 3 cylinder British behemoth formally known as a Triumph Rocket III which I call the A-10 Warthog tank-killa), opening with, “Hey, that’s not a Harley!” He proceeded to wonder aloud why so many guys who lived in or passed through the area now rode shiny new Harleys, and then opined that to him it seemed like some kind of fashion statement for many of them, because most of the guys he knew had only started riding a year or two before.  He distinguished between those guys and the ones who’d always been riding Harleys even before the big marketing push. He rides an 80’s Suzuki of some sort and several other bikes, apparently.

Homeward, leaving the disturbing events behind but still wondering (some might say obsessing) about the fate of the old man. Somewhere near the town of Sheldon I noticed that the same group of ten riders I’d seen at the gas station in Ione was following us turn for turn and stopping a football field behind us whenever we paused by the side of the road. They began to close the gap a bit, so we pulled onto the gravel and waited for them to catch up so we could determine their intentions. They turned off toward Wilton. Some might say that my suspicions were close to some kind of edge, but I just call it semi-paranoid conspiracy theorist’s situational awareness (a welcome sign after my momentary semi-fugue state back in Sutter Creek). Never did get a close look at those guys.  In this case, score one for ADD over OCD:  I became distracted by my futile attempts to get a circling turkey vulture to descend within the range of my economy model 200mm lens. The sun set eventually, but I was already home quaffing a Hefeweizen milkshake.
                                        

Post and photo © Pseudocognitive All rights reserved, forever.