A cluttered Hell

So that was the plan. As I say, by Sunday things were beginning to fall in place. We were quickly accumulating tons (literally) of materials, including cast-iron and cement foot-diameter pipes, meters and meters of 2'x4's and plywood, metal sheets of various sizes, dry cement, 100-lb broken cement blocks, massive metal desks, the Purgatory couch (a traditional component of the blockade), reebar, tools, nails, and all kinds of other random stuff. We were beginning to get the frame for the concrete wall in place, and progress was beginning to be very visible. Hell was quite a sight!

Then Sunday evening a very strange and frightening thing happened. Alex, a Hell Frosh, a friend of everyone, had three friends from his high school visiting him, and at some point they decided to go out to get something to eat. He also took Ryan, another Hell Frosh, and three others went in a separate car. Alex was driving down the 210, doing 60 to 70 mph, when his car suddenly went out of control. They started swerving back and forth, first very gradually, then violently. Suddenly they went off the road and the car began to drive up a bank before it flipped over back on to the road, upside down. They skidded down the road, sparks flying, until the car eventually stopped. Amazingly no one was hurt. There weren't many other cars on the road, and they didn't fly off the other side of the road, into oncoming traffic. A girl cut herself minorly on broken glass as she climbed out of the car, but that was the extent of the injuries from the wreck. In the meantime the other car that was going with them, which had been a little ways ahead of Alex when the problems arose, had stopped and ended up taking the girl who cut herself to the hospital. I don't know the exact details here but whatever they are, they're bizarre: for some reason there was a camping knife protruding somewhere in the other guy's car, and as the minorly injured girl got out of the car at the hospital, she cut herself very badly on this knife. She needed several stitches for that cut --her car accident injuries requiring nothing in comparison. Alex was understandably shook up. Actually, to me, an observer, he seemed both incredibly p.o.'d and scared to death. One of the girls in the other car got to Blacker first, and told everyone about the accident and warned us about Alex's state. Meanwhile Ryan, the other Hell Frosh in the car --who's a bit of a psycho at the best of times (sorry Ryan! :) )-- was obviously in some sort of a state of shock. He could not get his mind off how near he was to death, and how "ironic" things were. He hadn't been wearing his seatbelt, you see, and that really scared him. He walked around talking to himself for hours afterwards. Things like this don't happen every day, and for it to happen while we were so involved in the Hell Ride contributed to a general eerie feeling about those days. Nothing at all was like life as usual at Tech.

Ryan