Thursday, December 17, 2009

Three Degrees Below Zero

So I told you about last week when the cops were hanging out down the street and we just assumed another one of the sex offenders escaped. I haven't even bothered to confirm it. When you have 94 convicted sex offenders living in an unlocked institution in your back yard, and with Nexus' hefty track record of escapes, you are always on guard.

I live on a dead end road. Except for the mailman, we don't get much traffic. Last night two vehicles parked in front of my neighbor's house, leaving their headlights on. Eventually Poncho and I saddled up the old pickup truck and mosied up that-a-way to see what was what. We found a car with one headlight and an SUV. There were a couple of teenage boys from the car standing in the road talking to the people in the other vehicle. It was hard to see in the dark.

"You need help?" Poncho asked through the open window.
"No. No. We're fine. We're just talking," the blond boy answered. "We just came from the basketball game and...."
"Drugs," Poncho interupted. I didn't know if he was talking to me or the young man.
"No! No drugs!" the young man said. 'We were just talking! Can't we talk?"

Technically, they can. Its a public road after all. But we asked them to leave anyway and they suddenly seemed quite anxious to go. Perhaps they were all talked out. I didn't think they'd complain to the sheriff about Poncho and me. It would seem a trifle hard to explain why they chose to meet in front of a darkened house at night just to stand in the road and talk when it was three degrees below zero. (sigh)

We didn't know these guys. For all we knew, they planned to burglarize my neighbor. They could indeed be local drug dealers. Possibly, they were get-away vehicles waiting for escaping sex offenders. Or ... they could have just needed someone to talk to...

"WE WILL LEAVE A SMALL FOOTPRINT," Jim D'Angelo once said. Yeah. After metaphorically kicking us in the teeth and considering how much our lives have been ruined, I'd say Nexus wears a damn big shoe.

1 comment:

Steve Florman said...

I have to say, when I read the phrase "94 convicted sex offenders living in an unlocked institution in your back yard," I had to check the date to see if you were talking about the Nexus facility or the old Crosier Seminary staff. :)

As someone who went to several summer institutes at Crosier during the heyday of men like Wendell Mohs and Roger Vaughn (without, so far as I remember, ever being molested), and who was saved by an atheist public schoolteacher father from attending high school there, I can't help but think that I was one of the lucky ones at Crosier.