At the exit ramp, a Highway Yeti in city hall overalls is painting orange arrows on the asphalt, chevroned epaulettes on the hard shoulder, directions from the middle of the road to the curve of the curbstones where nestles a grass verge in rush-hour obscurity. Here is an exhaust fume clouded wilderness where the windswept detritus of transient life finally runs out of gas; a graveyard of blown-out tires and rusting hubcaps scattered across a landscape of broken glass. A single luminous traffic bollard stands sentry over a jagged pot hole. Nearby, an abandoned bottle of brake fluid is rocked back and forth by the jet stream blasts from passing cars, which also briefly inflates a fast food wrapper that takes flight then falls quickly back to earth again. This is the domain of the mythical Highway Yeti, the Interstate Sasquatch, the Turnpike Bigfoot, or the Abominable Automobileman, call the creature what you will.
I've taken several pictures of this cryptozoological figure, photographic evidence that shows a large, unidentified biped loping across the median disguised in a DayGlo high-visibility vest and hard hat, sometimes smuggling a coil of fiber-optic cable back to his lair, sometimes not. Of course, skeptics will claim such sightings are just the fevered imaginings of a weary commuter caught in interminable gridlock. They will dismiss my photographs, admittedly blurry and out-of-focus, as merely depicting some regular humanoid from the city public works going about his business, and definitely not digital proof of an ape-like monster of the road hitherto a stranger to scientific classification. But if that's the case, how do they explain away the fact that none of these so-called "public works" ever seem to get done? After all, that pothole isn't going to fill itself unless a Highway Yeti falls into it unawares.
Comments