Last night’s run was a bit of an adventure. Nothing at all happened, but still.
Here’s the thing. You should know that I’m a huge horror story fan. Zombies, werewolves, I love it all but real life horror stuff. So you can see why I was disturbed when I moved from Arizona where it monsoons for like a week a year and is dry as can be the rest of the time to Florida where apparently this sort of thing is normal:
I mean come on! I can almost hear the balloons rubbing against each other and that damn clown’s eyes peaking out. (If you haven’t read IT then get to it then come back and you’ll totally get it!) When I first started running at night here I would actually make a point of not looking at them. Would you like to know the worst of it? There’s never just one. That’s right, where there’s one on one side of the street there is also one on the other side of the street. So any self respecting person obviously has to run dead center down the road to avoid the evil things.
Also, when you run past a storm drain it seems that at least 70% of the time a frog/toad/who-knows-what has to jump down into the water just as you run past, scaring the living daylights out of you.
Anyways, back to my run last night. Obviously it involved storm drains.
So, I ran a bit and then I ran past a particular storm drain and dang if it didn’t sound like 3 men were talking down there. Now I know perfectly well that it was a few toads or frogs down there, but that didn’t stop the creepiness one bit. Knowledge is power and all, but so is superstition and watching too may scary movies.
On I ran, right down the middle of the street. A little while further I was coming up on yet another storm drain and I started to hear a little dog barking. A very hollow, echoing little dog bark. I stopped in front of the drain and tried to look down it, wondering if that is what I really hear at the last drain (brave, I know). That wasn’t scary, that was a dog stuck down there! So I stood in front of the drain and started dialing my dad’s number to have him come on over. He is part of the neighborhood watch so he’s the perfect person to call. Why yes I am in my forty’s and why yes I did call him when I found roaches in my car. I never claimed maturity you know.
As I was calling him I took a couple of steps back and realized something. The hollow echoing dog barking was coming from the garage of the house behind the drain.
You have no idea how glad I am that I realized that before the phone started ringing! The rest of my run was dead center down the road, in the direction of home, and very difficult due to the fact that I couldn’t stop laughing at myself. This is what happens when I run without my headphones. Never again!
Do you run at night? If so do you find that every once in a blue moon it’s creepy even though most nights it’s great? I do, tell me I’m not the only one!