Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

The Central New York area was hit hard with lake-effect snow this week. The Syracuse metro area (actually, I feel a bit funny describing it as a "metro" area -- the "metro" prefix to me implies, well, a bigger town than this) got hit with probably a foot or so, total, over the three days; it was the towns north of here -- closer to Lake Ontario -- that got pounded.

I'm only bringing this up because I was driving on the NY State Thruway today (that's Interstate 90), and there were the usual semis that went off the road during the big snow. One of them, my wife tells me, has been there for two days, and from what I could see it's going to be there for quite a while. It's a double-tractor-trailer, and it is currently located at the bottom of a very wide ditch about thirty feet from the Thruway itself. It is buried in snow up to the tops of its wheel-wells, and there is an impressive pile of snow immediately in front of the truck's cab, probably the result of the vehicle's plowing effect as it moved through the snow. The funny thing is that the truck is perfectly straight and parallel to the Thurway; there is no jack-knifing, no tipping, and no bending of any kind. It's almost like the truck driver meant to park it there, and park it he did.

Not so, unfortunately, the smaller truck -- roughly the size of the biggest U-Haul available -- that went off on the other side of the Thruway, in that exact same spot in the road. The ditch on that side is not nearly so wide, and it's much deeper -- so this poor guy put his vehicle head-first into that ditch, so that he is positioned perpendicular to the Thruway, with his back axle and wheels now roughly two feet in the air.

I suppose I could switch into "tinfoil hat" mode and speculate on the fact that these two trucks went off the road right in front of the Syracuse location of defense contractor Lockheed-Martin....