I am sorry about the title. I should have saved it for Halloween.
And the picture? It’s pretty much the reason we spent two hours motionless on the autostrada tarmac between Monzuno and Florence. Yes, we skidded to a halt behind a whole bunch of stopped vehicles about ten minutes after the mayhem had occurred.
Let’s back up a bit. It was one of those fine, sunny mornings that makes you smile when you hit the road. Blue skies, sun, warmth, and when you look down from the side window of your leased car upon the lower valleys, thick fog like puffy lamb fleece fills them. It looks like you could just jump out the window of the speedy little diesel and the fluffiness of all that fog would wrap you up and let you down on the valley floor soft as a snowflake upon a mitten. Little fantasy islands pop up in the fog now and again, so as you ride along and you see a compelling one you tell the driver, “Stop! I gotta take a picture!”
And she does, finally finding a pull-off point in front of yapping dogs threatening to tear our necks to shreds if they were to escape the flimsy fence that separates our aortas from their menacing incisors.
The problem is that the fog is not near the pull-off point. So as not to waste any more time and to save face, I point the camera toward some trees and click. Done. Hackle-raising yaps, signs of doggy blood lust, fade softly into the distance as we drive away. We’ve allowed maybe 15 glorious minutes to flutter by.
Which, if you’ve been paying attention, is about 5 minutes too long.
In any case, because of stupid light interaction with trees and fog, we are now survivors of one of those long, long waits after one of those humongous truck crashes on the Italian autostrade you might come across when you’re looking for the weather on the television but they break in to tell you of the big truck crash while you wait intently for the temperature in Rimini to appear on the screen.
But this is not the end of the story. In America we might break out the sandwiches while waiting for the emergency vehicles. Some people would lay on their horns and annoy everyone.
So what do Italians do? Well, they get out, scramble up the hill adjacent to the autostrada, and discover things. When one of them hollers down, “hey there’s a beautiful chestnut grove up here!” then Italians rush to action. Bags come out of parked cars. People scramble up the hill like the tsunami is chasing them down. Old men poke the ground with sticks. It’s bedlam in Chestnut land.
Soon an entire busload of Japanese tourists join in the fun. I’m thinking, “what the devil are people sleeping in hotels going to do with endless bags of chestnuts?”
As I’m thinking this, an Italian mumbles that someone ought to remind the fer’ners that you need to cook the darn things.
But hey, free chestnuts. You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Folks uninterested in chestnuts head off in search of coffee and return with tales of the truck. Animal carcases are spread over two lanes. A smashed hubcap suggests the presence of another car which might have scraped the side of the tunnel and bounced into the truck lane.
Then, of course, there’s the delicate matter of the undersized human bladder.
So shifts are set up. I don’t mean people organize everything. No. Heck no. This is Italy. Women gather in a gaggle and yell at the peeing men to get the hell off the hill so the women can have a go. The men wrap things up and totter down the hill. Italian men know which side the tortellini are buttered and saged on. Soon there’s a sort of clockwork thing going. Men, women grasping tissue. Men…
Then the police remove the barrier between lanes and we all get to drive our cars backwards about 150 meters down the autostrada. It’s like a race run in reverse. We are a double row of cars trying desperately to escape our fate, reversing and lunging toward our opening in a rather serpentine manner while trying not to hit each other. They should set this kinda thing up and charge for it, so much fun was had.
Eventually we wiggle out the hole onto the fast lane that’s been taken away from people going in the opposite direction. Forward is not as fun as backwards, but is faster and straighter.
Once we’re out of trouble, we start to wonder if dinner will have to be vegetarian.