A Big Red Streak

The wife and I crossed the Cape Cod Canal and ventured forth onto the continent, to go shopping in America.

Route 495

We make the trip a couple of times a year, to stock the pantry and shelves. Buying gallons of mayonnaise is an insane thing to do (we don’t do that), but a fifteen-pak of 3M sponge/scrub pads or half gallons of honey? A carton of bottled grape juice?

That seems sane enough.

The transition from Vineyard two-lane roads to Off-Island superhighways is always a stunning, “Beam-me-up, Scottie!” event.

When you first reach sixty miles per hour on that big, off-island multilane highway, there always is a moment of panic, when you realize how damn fast you’re going. At sixty MPH, you are travelling eighty-eight feet per second. A complete and sudden stop at that speed can instantaneously turn you into hamburger. But, we’re like most driving humans, we suppress that notion, and speed on, despite the peril.

There’s a cop ahead….

What’s that red streak on the side of the road? Is it motorist drippings?

After some head-scratching, we hypothesize that the streak might be from agricultural activity. The idea is confirmed soon afterwards, when we see a flooded bog on the right, its surface crimson with millions of floating cranberries. Taking those berries to the processing plant is what’s making that color on the highway. A fully loaded cranberry truck going around a curve, even a slight one, will leak berries by the thousands.

So that’s where that red streak came from.

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