Traffic Counters the Criminal Justice System

I expect that you all have seen them.  Two rubber hoses nailed down in the street.  One that runs from curb to curb, the other that only extends to the middle of the street.  And both of them connected to a medium sized metal box.  Typically chained to a tree, metal sign post, or telephone pole.

 

Traffic Counters.

 

As kids, my brother’s and I were fascinated by them.

 

I mean, how can it be that they count cars driving on the street?  And how do they tell which way the car is going?  And more importantly, how do they do it all without electricity?

 

We had “inquiring minds”, we just naturally wanted to know.

 

 

Now-a-days, a kid that wanted to know something like that could just sit down at the computer, heck even the phone, and find out.  But not when we were growing up.  Nope, back then, knowledge came only from personal investment.  And while truth be told we could likely have learned how they worked by going to the library and doing some reading…..my brother’s and I were more “hands on” kinda guys.

 

We used to sit on the curb in the summer, right next to one of those things and try and figure it out.  We’d listen to the thing and see if it whined; they never did.  We’d listen to see if they made any noise at all; the only noise was a quiet “click” as a car drove by.  Heck, in all truth, we weren’t even sure if those were hoses, they could just as easily been electric cords nailed out across the road.

 

Yep, Traffic Counters were a mystery. 

 

And worse.  They were a mystery that came and went by magic.  We never saw one laid out, never saw one picked up.  One morning going to school they wouldn’t be there, coming home later and there they were, all laid out and chained to a big old elm tree. That part we figured was being done by some guy while we were in school, but it added to the mystic somewhat none-the-less. Even questioning the retired people in the neighborhood didn’t help, no one had ever seen a traffic counter put in place.  Just all of a sudden, there it was, chained down.

 

 

Our curiosity got to be too much one time, and while I won’t I won’t say who done it, I will say that one day after school there was a traffic counter gutted like a fish lying on the dinner table.  Metal case open like a clam, panels and parts spread all over the table.  And people were rooting through the internal organs.

 

Pretty interesting device. 

 

Those are rubber hoses by the way. 

 

And the way the thing worked was that when a car drove over it and flattened a section of the hose, it pushed the air down the hose and into the metal box.  The air pressure and volume did two things.  First, it caused a small paper strip to roll forward, and second, it caused a pin to make a mark on the paper.  One mark every time the long hose is run over, a different colored ink mark every time the short hose is run over. 

 

Let’s say blue ink for the long hose and green ink for the short one. 

 

Total up the green marks, and you know how many cars drove down the side of the street that the short hose crossed (say the eastbound lane).  Total up the blue marks and you know how many cars drove down the street either way.  Subtract the number of green from the number of blue, and you know how many cars drove the side of the street that the short hose did not cross (westbound cars).

 

Yep, pretty ingenious. 

 

Oh, nowadays they are probably battery operated; computer controlled, with digital counters, and such.  But you have to marvel that someone figured out how to do that before electronics and computers.  Pretty smart them old guys were.

 

 

But, back to my tale.

 

 

So, spread out on the table is a thousand and one parts.  All removed, although not necessarily gently removed, from the traffic counter’s metal box.  Wheels and cogs; levers and cams; pistons and pens; screws and bolts; nuts and washers; metal plates, and bearings. 

 

It was pretty obvious that there was no way that that thing was going back together.  Certainly it was never going to work again.  And of course there was the little problem of the fact that the thing had been liberated by using a pair of bolt cutters so the chain and lock looked a little worse for the wear.  And then of course, the hose had been torn up from the street, rolled up and carted off too.

 

In broad daylight to boot.

 

 

Yes indeed.  Wasn’t going back, so the only thing to do was to dispose of the evidence.  Fair is as fair does, and so the two boys who had nothing to do with the acquisition decided that it was up to the third to dispose of it.  Only thing that wasn’t taken into consideration was how little consideration was going to be given to disposing of the evidence.

 

Let’s face it, splitting the parts up in to three roughly equal sized groups and chucking those groups over the back fence into neighboring yards isn’t exactly the plan the mob used with Jimmy Hoffa.

 

 

A few days later, and while sitting in class (arguably a rare event) a Vandermolen got called to the Principal’s office.  Well called isn’t really the right term.  Escorted is more the truth of the matter.  By the Principal himself. 

 

I suspect that the principal had previous experience on his side, indicating that the best way to get a Vandermolen to his office was to drag them there personnally.  In any case, there was some discussion in the hall about needing to go back into the classroom and getting a coat, and hat. 

 

A discussion that the Vandermolen both won, and lost.

 

For on getting to the Principal’s office fully attired, there were a couple of cops there, and an eyewitness.  The eyewitness blurted out; “yeah that’s the boy, he’s wearing the same coat and hat”.

 

Now, one could argue “due process”, after all, there was no line up of similar looking suspects, and the witness had been told they were going to get the boy who did it and bring him in for identification.   Yep, no doubt about it, due process was short changed.  But then this was in the days before the Miranda decision, and the Law was more concerned about arresting and punishing guilty people back then, at least more so than they seem to be these days.

 

And while that argument may have broken “new judicial grounds” and may even have held up in court….it would have brooked no headway with our dad, so there was little reason to try and go there.

 

Nope, best thing to do was throw oneself on the mercy of the court….cause there was no reason to expect any at home.

 

Copyright © 2013 Marty K Vandermolen

The Wedding Pig - Part III

The three of us came back together for a late lunch at the cabin on the ranch. Barry and Jerry had spotted a pig during their morning hunt, but were too far away to get a shot at it and as they were trying to stalk in closer, the pig crossed a stream and moved up a hillside into what was likely its daytime napping location.

I related the story of my morning’s hunt and we worked up a plan for the evenings hunt.

The cabin sat directly next to the stream that flowed through the property year round, the same stream that Barry and Jerry had watched a pig cross some mile or so downstream from the cabin site.  The stream flowed away from the cabin site about a third of a mile, then swung to the left through a full 90 degrees and continued on. 

As it happened, the pig I had scouted was uphill from that bend in the creek, the pig that Barry and Jerry had seen was downstream from there by a quarter mile or so.

We decided that the evening’s hunt plan would be to watch the water, one or both of those pigs would have to be coming down to water after a long hot day.   I stationed myself near a game crossing of the creek between the cabin and the bend.  Barry settled in just around the bend where he could glass the entire stream from bend downstream for a good half mile, and Jerry moved downstream a bit over a quarter mile and settled in where he could watch the main stream, and an empty stream bed that cut through a meadow.

I had slipped down into the stream bed which cut down about 8 feet from the valley floor.  There, with my back to the cut bank, Snugged up leaning next to a Live Oak tree, I settled in for the evening.  I pulled a bit of camouflage net out of my pack and hung it from the drooping oak branches in front of me.  The netting helped to mask my feet and legs, which I often shift for comfort while sitting on hunts.  Directly across from my hide was a narrow flat area along the stream covered in green grass and then a rising hillside.

Settled in and waiting quietly, as the temperatures began to drop out of triple digits the land around me began to stir.  Sparrows and blue jays cruised through the skies, often dropping onto a rock in the creek to stop and drink, then back on the wing.  A couple of ground squirrels began a sweep of the bank on the opposite side of the creek, nuzzling here and there among the dry grasses and dead tree limbs seeking their evening meal.

I had been in place about 30 minutes when the same cow elk I had seen earlier in the day stepped up to the edge of the cut bank about 30 feet to my left.  She stood for a minute, scanning the stream bed and the air currents for any signs of danger.  She slowly walked down the trail and forward until her front hooves just slipped into the edge of the stream itself.  There again, she stood still, nose flaring, right eye roving, searching the area around her.

After assuring herself all was safe, she “mewed” and the calf I had seen earlier came tripping over the cut bank and down into the stream bed.

For 20 minutes I was able to sit quietly and watch the cow and her calf drink, then wade the stream, browse the grasses on the far side, drink again, and then move off up the game trail on the far side of the stream from me.  All in all, she and her calf had passed within 30 feet of my hide, and then spent 20 minutes drinking and eating ranging from 30 to 75 feet away from me.  A treasured memory I will hold all my days.

After the elk left, the evening continued to drift towards dark.  Little was happening in front of me until about 20 minutes after the elk had moved on when I heard a single rifle shot from down around the bend.

It turns out, that at about the time that the cow was gathering up her calf and moving up the trail opposite me, the pig that Barry and Jerry had seen earlier in the day was drifting down off of the hillside down towards water.

Barry had spotted the pig coming down off of the slope opposite and downstream of him roughly half way between his position and Jerry’s position.  Knowing that pigs have fairly poor long distance eyesight, and having the wind in his favor, Barry predicted where the pig was going to cross the stream and began to move down to be in position for a close up shot.  His plan was to let the pig cross the creek, climb the near side bank, and shoot it just as it stepped onto the dirt road, thus making game recovery a simple matter of driving up to the downed pig and lifting it into the pickup.

Barry successfully slipped down the road, positioned himself behind a large oak tree, and settled in to watch the pig that has moved by now down to the water’s edge and is drinking.

Jerry noticed the pig just as it reached the far bank and began to drink.

Jerry knew the importance of harvesting that pig, and was excited that the hunt was going to be successful.  He was hunting with my 7mm Mauser and lined the cross hairs up on the pig’s side, right where the heart should be. Just as he was taking up pressure on the trigger, he remembered that the Mauser was sighted high at the range the pig was, dropped the cross hairs 4” and promptly put a round right through the pigs heart.

The pig dropped instantly, falling directly into the stream just off of the far bank.

By the time I walked back to the cabin and drove the truck down, Barry had stripped down to his shorts, wadded the stream, tied on the pig, and he and Jerry had hauled the pig across to the near bank.  We carried the pig up to the road, into the truck, and back to the cabin for skinning.

That was the most pleasant skinning job I have ever done.  There is nothing quite so nice as skinning a clean pig that all the fleas, ticks, and other vermin have abandoned while it was being drug through a cold water bath.

 

Copyright © 2013 Marty Vandermolen