June 26, 2023
It’s a perfect morning for a run and I was out the door at 7am to get some streets between my house and Rehberg and between Poly and Parkhill. It’s a nice and quiet set of neighborhood streets so I didn’t anticipate anything eventful. Here’s the planning map:
I headed down Poly, running on the south side of the street and when I got to Brentwood, just a few blocks into the run, a truck came up Brentwood wanting to turn right onto Poly and, as is done, never looked to the right, only to the left, and rolled the stop sign just as I was coming off the curb. I gave the bed of the truck a thump as it went by and I’m pretty sure the driver thought “WTF?”
A few block down I saw something going on in the middle of Poly.
As it turns out, an elderly woman was crossing Poly with her dog and fell, cutting her head which was bleeding quite a bit. The bus had stopped and the driver and a couple others were assisting. The guy in the car was on 911. The bus driver asked me to come over and help get her up and out of the street and just as I got to her, a gentleman showed up and identified himself as a physician. The guy on the phone said “911 says not to move her.” The doctor was asking if she knew her name and she’s said “Rosebud” which turned out to be her dog but he got her to tell him her name and where she lived. She was a bit combative and said she just wanted to go to her house which was nearby. The situation seemed under control, such as it was, so I took off and continued the run.
The streets sort of look similar, like this.
I was on Colton turning north on Patricia when I saw this:
The Montana marathon was held recently and the course brings the runners down Patricia where they need to turn left onto Colton. Seeing this reminds me of a story. (What doesn’t?). A bunch of years ago, I was involved with putting on that marathon which included, among other things, marking the course. I’d stopped in this same place to paint the left turn arrows, although more on Colton than on Patricia, and as I was driving away on Colton, a car, a VW Beetle with Wyoming plates, pulled alongside me blasting its horn and finally pulling in front of me. This guy jumps out and comes over to me and starts screaming at me about destroying city property and bringing down people’s property values. What? He demands to see my permit to paint the street and says if I don’t have one he’s going to report me to the police department and see that I am arrested. Then he goes on about his friend’s mother’s house is right there and it’s for sale and this vandalism will make it harder to sell the house, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t react to any of this and kept extremely calm and just told him that he’ll have to do what he thinks he has to do. He finally went away and I got on with painting the rest of the course and never heard anything else about.
Notice the second arrow. I wonder if anyone turned into the driveway?
We have people in the city who really do get upset about marking on the streets and the sidewalks. As a runner who covers lots of miles on the streets of the city, I can say that the most common types of paint markings, and there are plenty of them, are related to utility work. But how would you like this accident in front of your house? I don’t know, maybe it would be easier than giving a visitor your address and just tell them “It’s the place with the big paint spill in front.”
I looped through many more streets, some dead ends. Some random photos:
At the bottom of 28th Street I saw some cattle grazing.
I turned left to take the alley to get to Lyndale and saw a wild turkey in the road.
As I got closer it held its ground and started making noises. I wondered what this was about until the little one came out of the weeds on the left and joined mama.
I continued on and saw this fire hydrant. I’m not sure what that additional device was but maybe a meter.
When I passed the place where the woman had fallen I felt compelled, as a completist blogger, to include this photo.
That’s it. A very interesting run today.
