Filed june 14th

Time for the final approach into Boston. Spent an hour scavenging when I woke up. Found a toothbrush and toothpaste in packaging in a house. Also found a buck knife stashed in what was probably a teenage boy’s room. Found it with his porno stash. Then made my way to the road.

It was a couple hours to a place I felt good about getting off the road, getting close to noon. Got off 90 at the Framingham exit. Found a Country Club. Found food, a few boxes of Powerbars. Great for a hike, great for lunch. The course was a perfect place to stash the bike. Had a garage with riding lawn mowers and golf carts to park and conceal the bike. Packed for the hike in. Also broke into the Country Club’s wine cellar. Stashed a couple bottles in the bike, and put one in my backpack. Booze is always a good portable bribe.

With that I started on foot along 90. Took until evening until made it to the suburbs of the city. That’s when the highwaymen found me. I was still five miles or so from where I was supposed to be, and the area was mostly neighborhoods. Lots of overpasses to hide under. It was an amateur crew. One jumped out in front of me, and sounded a signal, but the others were too far back to get me. I gather the plan was to distract me, have them get behind me, and then, well, these days, it’s mostly about the things you carry.

Ordinarily, you ditch the bag you’re carrying, they leave you alone, but I wasn’t about to lose my sat phone and everything that allowed me to work in the third day on the job. Forget that. Without that phone, I turn into these guys but with student debt, not that it wouldn’t be easy to walk away from that.

When you have to fight a group, of men that are all larger than you, the last thing you want is to be surrounded, so I ran off to the middle of the road, and away from the two coming up behind me. Sensei always said when you’re in a street fight, if the fight lasts more than a few seconds, you’re doing it wrong. The goal of a fight is to take your opponent down, not to dance and talk. The distance that I created between myself and the two coming from behind was enough time to take the first one out. I left him behind, bleeding from the nose on the pavement. After that, they stopped coming. One of them pulled a knife, but he wasn’t too serious. I didn’t hesitate at all, took the knife out of the equation, and then the second, and the third didn’t stick around. I collected another knife and a Zippo lighter. Turnabout is fair play.

The sun was setting by this point, so I took the off ramp and disappeared into the neighborhood.

This close to the city, you couldn’t tell which of these houses might have been occupied. There was no power out here still, and so it was best to seek a place to sleep before the sun went down. It’s always tense going into a house like this. Any place could be a haven for the desperate like the highwaymen, still harboring disease, or any number of other things.

So I picked a house on a corner, where I could see for a way from the second floor. No doggie door on the back, so most likely no wild animals. Anything could be dangerous, but a worst case scenario would be an urban coyote or fox. I checked inside every window, and knocked before entering. Funny the conventions we keep.

Air was stale, so I opened all the windows. No food of value inside. Dinner was powerbars.

Tomorrow I should make my assignment.

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Tags: 2012, Boston, buck knife, Framingham, urban coyotes, zippo

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2012 at 3:03 am and is filed under Lori Kim's Blogs, Reporter's Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.