Saturday, March 03, 2007

Zodiac and Chowchilla

If you partake of any media source whatsoever, then you know that a movie called "Zodiac" about the Bay Area's Zodiac killer opened yesterday. That was (is?) one creepy guy. Killing five people and then sending the newspapers encoded messages about it. Threatening to shoot up a schoolbus. Talking about how there should be a movie about him. Never getting caught.

It is little wonder that there is still a lot of interest in the case something like 35 years after the last murder. There always has been. When I was in high school, my group of friends discovered that one of the San Francisco police officers who had worked on the case had retired to run a trailer park in my home town. One of my friends used to say that he wanted to call the guy up and say "This is the Zodiac speaking." Luckily, we never did that. Wow, we would have been working that karma off for a long time.

One of the things that I have found interesting about all of the Zodiac hype lately is that the director remembers being a kid in Marin County and having his bus evacuated one day because people were worried about the Zodiac. That's something that will stick with you. I think that everyone has something like that, some crime or disaster that you heard about when you were a kid that imprinted itself on your brain and still gives you the heebie-jeebies when you think about it.

My thing is the Chowchilla bus kidnapping. You probably know something about this, but, basically, one day in 1976 or 1977, three young guys from wealthy Bay Area families stopped a school bus with about 20 kids in it at gunpoint and forced the driver to drive the bus to a quarry in the outer Bay Area where they had some kind of container thing buried underground where they shut up the driver and the kids. They then demanded a big ransom. The whole thing fell apart quickly, with the bus driver and some of the older kids figuring out how to escape not long after the kidnappers made the first ransom call. The kidnappers got caught pretty quickly, are still in prison and seem pretty unlikely to ever get out.

This scared the S**T out me when I was a kid. I used to ride the bus to school through the fields every day. Being a kid, I thought this could happen any time. It didn't, of course. Anywhere, to the best of my knowledge. That being said, when I drive through Chowchilla on Highway 99, I think of the bus kidnapping every single time. It's so strong a memory that I don't even think of the time that I had to stop in Chowchilla because The Mermaid got sick and needed to throw up. Wow, that was fun. Nonetheless, for whatever reason, the bus kidnapping is so imbedded in my mind that I always think of that instead.

Well, That's Unexpected

There are some things you never expect to see. Unicorns. Dogs and cats coming together in peace. Paris Hilton with a book. Dick Cheney in public.

Well, I'm here to tell you that these things are not impossible because I saw just as impossible just the other day in my gym's parking lot. Now let me set the scene. Our little town here is pretty darn liberal. In 2000, Ralph Nader got more votes for President than George W. Bush. Not only that, but we have a college here. You put the two things together and the logical result is that there are a lot of Volvos here. There are many, many Volvos here. And not just Volvos, but Volvo station wagons. And not just Volvo station wagons, but Volvo station wagons with lots of bumper stickers on the back.

Now you can see why this happens, just from a physical point of view. The back end of a Volvo station wagon is so large and so vertical and so square that it makes a perfect billboard. If you put a bumper sticker on the back of your Volvo station wagon, that people behind you in line at the Starbucks drive-through, he or she is GOING to KNOW what your politicial preferences are. The back end of a Volvo is such an effective marketing tool that I'm a little surprised that Volvo doesn't have marketing deals to slap stuff on the back of those cars, kind of like NASCAR teams. Well, on second thought, it's Volvo, so I guess I'm not that surprised.

So, anyway, there are lots of Volvo station wagons with lots of bumper stickers around here. Usually, those bumper stickers say things like "Kerry Edwards 2004" (there are a lot of those still around), "Eat Vegan" and "Somewhere In Texas, A Village Is Missing Its Idiot." But, one day, walking out of my gym through the parking lot to my car, I saw something on the back side of a Volvo station wagon that was so shocking that I basically stopped in my tracks and wondered if something had happened to the space-time continuum.

What I saw was this: a Volvo station wagon with a NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION bumper sticker on the back. What the hell?!?

Boy was that confusing. It was like that time I read a quote in the paper from Richard Nixon, in which he said something like, "If we had had rap when I was growing up, I think I might have been good at that." What?!? I mean, if Volvo people can belong to the NRA, what's next? Hybrid Harleys? Tofu tri-tip? Cats and dogs co-existing in peace?

Of course, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. When I was a kid, we had a dog that started nursing kittens. No lie, I think there are still pictures.