When an unknown pervert starts lurking about, you know it’s time to whip it out.
Uh, whip out your cell phone, just to be clear…
“Someone is here,” is all her ominous text message read.
My mother had only the day before moved out to our country plot o’ land, and was celebrating by having a picnic with our 5-year-old daughter, The Younger. I had honestly expected to see some cute picture of The Younger frolicking in the meadow or the pasture when my phone buzzed in the middle of the workday.
But instead of being overwhelmed with cuteness when I looked at my phone, I was slightly awash with dread instead. I had just spend my entire day the day before lauding the praises of secluded country living, including confidently reassuring mother dearest that it would be plain crazy for anyone to go through the effort of creeping around out there.
“Hold on for just one moment,” I turned to my co-worker who had been expecting me to help her run scientific experiments on live mice all day. “I have situation I need to attend to.”
“What do you mean ‘someone is here’?” I said the instant Mom picked up her phone–cause this was not time for fiddle-farting with texting. “Is it a delivery truck? Though I’m not expecting on more delivery trucks any time soon…”
“Well, the two of us were just sitting on the porch and enjoying lunch, when a car came down our driveway, and then disappeared down the road beside the garage,” Mother informed me.
“Wait, what?!?”
It’s hard to explain it without a picture or a diagram, but that was totally unexpected. It would be like seeing somebody walk past you in the hall and then go through a door that wasn’t there. To the untrained eye, our driveway ends after you pass the main house and then dead-ends into our detached garage. But if you look closely, there’s almost a secret path that you can veer off onto, and it’ll take you to down by The Holler.
“What’s down in The Holler?” you, Dear Reader, might be asking.
Well, I’ll tell you what’s down in The Holler: Nothing. Well, except maybe some Possum Juice–the jug of used cooking oil the former owner of this place used to leave out as food for the local possums. There also used to be a water-logged sailboat parked down there, but that’s neither here nor there, but less so ‘here’ because I gave it to our electrician the instant he offered to haul it off.
So a rando car just rolling onto our private property and on down there was quite bizarre–an incident we had a hard time coming up with a plausible explanation for. In fact, my first thought was, “Oh, yeah, that was definitely a ghost stuck in a timeloop.”
“So…it was a ghost car?” I asked Mom. “Just great. The place haunted.”
“No, it was real. At first I thought it had just been my imagination…except your daughter saw it, too. And I now I can see it parked back in the trees, camouflaged amongst the foliage.”
“What can you tell me about the car or the person?”
“Well, it was a green car, kinda like a Jeep. And when they got out of the vehicle, it was a white guy with brown hair, kinda pudgy, and wearing a blue shirt with orange sleeves.”
“Orange sleeves?!? The heck? So was it like a uniform?”
“No, not a uniform, short sleeves.”
“Well, that is weird.”
The picture she had just painted in my mind involved a Zach Galafankis-looking guy wearing a head band and a tube top for some reason. I definitely had to get to the bottom of why some weirdo perv was creeping all up ons my mom and baby girl.
Of course this all had to happen the one day I went into work, which put me a good 45 minutes away from the action, otherwise I would swoop in to the resolve the situation like any good lord of the manor would.
“I would just have you go find the guy and aski him what the hell he’s doing on our property, but you got the kiddo with you, and we can’t afford anything happening to you and leaving her to fend for herself.”
“Yeah, that’s not happening…”
“You’re right, it’s not. I think we have no choice but call the police. You wanna do it, or you do want me to?”
“I’m going to get your daughter in the car, and go stake out down the road. Meanwhile, you call the Sheriff and have them send someone out…”
“Nine-one-one, what’s the address of your emergency?” the dispatcher dutifully asked me.
“Uh, it’s [redacted for our privacy–jeez, we don’t want every Tom, Dick, & Harry on the internet knocking on our the door of our secluded Oasis of Peace (TM)]. It’s where my mother is, all alone with her elderly self; I’m at work.”
“Sir, that address is in [redacted]. We don’t have the number for that county.”
“Uh, so what are you saying?” I couldn’t believe that we were wasting precious seconds with this nonsense.
“You’ll have to dial 411 and they can transfer you over, good bye.”
And just like that 911 hung up on me.
I begrudgingly dialed 411, but not without cussing and mumbling under my breath about how they were dang lucky this wasn’t a super-emergency, one where 20 seconds could easily be the difference between life or death.
And good thing, too–apparently, just yelling ‘EMERGENCY’ at the automated operator doesn’t do much good, and it ended up taking me a couple tries to figure out that I needed to specifically ask for my county’s Sheriff’s department to get where I wanted to go.
*Approximately 3 minutes later…*
“[redacted] County Sheriff’s Department, what’s your emergency?”
“Help! My mom is alone out on secluded farm with our daughter, and there is an intruder on our property!”
“Okay, sir, just calm down. We can send someone out to check things out. I’ll need to call your mom and talk to her. What’s her number?”
“Oh good, she can give you a detailed description of the creep. Her number is [redacted].”
I hung up and anxiously awaited to receive any updates. It was a good 5 minutes before I checked back in, only to find out that Mom had been off the phone with the Po-po for a couple of minutes (which felt like eternity, given the situation).
“Yeah, they’re sending someone out straightaway. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here in my hiding spot, where I’ll be able to see the guy whenever he leaves–he has no other way out!”
“Good thinking, Ma! What a heckuva first day of living in your new place, eh?”
“Oh wait! I see him! But he’s turning the other way. He’s headed up to the neighbors’ place up on the hill. I have his license plate now, though!”
“What in the world is that turkey up to? Anyways, we better call the police back, since we have his license now.”
At that point, I 3-way called into cops, as I wasn’t about to get off the phone with my beloved maternal figure. As we were relaying the license plate number, the dispatcher assured us that a deputy was in the area and would be there soon.
“Jeez, ‘in the area’?!? We could have a potential rapist and molester on our hands, and you’re sending someone over only because it’s convenient. Maybe you are the real monsters here…” I of course said this only in my head.
“Oh wait!” Mom all of a sudden interjected. “He’s coming out–I repeat, he’s coming out now.”
“Follow that car!” I barked through the phone.
“Sir, I don’t think that’s a good–” the dispatcher didn’t get to finish her admonishly sentence before Mom piped up again.
“And I see the deputy coming from the other way. Oh, thank heavens, not a moment too soon!”
Even on the other end of the phone, we could hear a vehicle passing, followed by unexpected silence from Mom.
“Mom, you still there?”
“Yeah, it’s just…it’s just that I would make a terrible witness in a court of law.”
“Whatchyou talking about, Willis?” I asked.
“Well, the car was tan, not green, for one…”
“Okay, no big deal.”
“And you were right he was wearing a uniform: blue sleeves and an orange vest…”
“Okay, that’s encouraging. Unless that is a prison uniform.”
“And it’s a Black guy. Totally could have sworn he was white…”
“Yes, that’s right ma’am. He was a surveyor, not ‘Sir Voyeur’. He was legit, had a name tag and equipment in the back and everything.”
I could hear the deputy fill Mom in on the details of his conversation with the potential perp before he let him drive off into the day.
“Did you catch all that?” she asked me after she had wrapped up the conversation.
“I did indeed. Well, that’s a relief. I bet that was related to our [neighbor’s name redacted]’s efforts to make all these wooded acres out here part of a nature conservancy. I’ll let her know that if they’re going to poke around on private property, that they better notify the owner first. In these parts, that’s a good way to find oneself staring down a shotgun barrel!”
A day or so later, this particular neighbor informed me that they guy was probably not a land surveyor, and that there was a good chance he was surveying the land for any potential endangered wildlife living in the area.
…and it was in that moment I knew it was official.
I mean, think about it, dude:
I had called 911…
…on a Black guy…
…who was just bird-watching.
…
…
…
Don’t you get it? It’s me–little ol’ woke me–I’m the neighborhood Karen.
*Facepalm*.
But wait! Let the record show that I had thought I was calling 911 on a white guy.
Heck, I didn’t even technically call 911 on him–remember, I had to dial 411 just to get to the right person in order to tattle on his wandering ‘white’ ass.
Unlike my poor startled mother, you had better get these details right if the Woke Police come around asking about me…
Content created on: 28 May 2023 (Sunday)
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