Hole in the Bridge


I just finished watching Coyote vs. Acme and was inspired to tell a story from back in the days when I was a traveling door-to-door encyclopedia salesman.

Our merry little band of misfits was heading out of town (Vancouver) on another quest adventure sales road trip. We were taking the Trans-Canada Highway east toward the interior, probably headed for some small town in Alberta or Saskatchewan, but we were barely out of town, crossing the old Port Mann Bridge into Surrey.

By The original uploader was Cacophony at English Wikipedia. - Originally from en.wikipedia; description page is/was here., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5124055
As we were in the middle of the bridge, I noticed a strange flutter of movement to my right (I was riding shotgun) and turned my head to see something so odd that in the intervening 32-odd years my mind has on numerous occasions tried to convince me that it never happened, that my brain's wiring somehow got crossed, inserting some half-forgotten cartoon into a real-life memory. But no, this happened.

A perfectly round piece of heavy plastic sheeting had somehow ended up on the roadway until a gust of wind lifted it into the air just in time to get blown against the windshield of a car. I barely caught this happening out of the corner of my eye, and as I turned my head, I saw the car next to mine, its windshield half-blocked by what looked like an honest-to-goodness Acme Portable Hole. The bespectacled driver had a comical wide-eyed look of surprise. While smoking a pipe.

It actually happened.



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