A Wedding With A View Of All Those Pretty Roadside Crosses

CONTENT WARNING: Car Accidents, Fatality Mentioned, Blood

My neighborhood went to war with some of our neighbors. They don’t live here, but they owned property on the road via a deceased relation. (May she rest in peace; she was a sweet lady.) The wife wanted to build a huge wedding barn for paid events of all sorts, mostly weddings, with a maximum capacity of around 300 people. They claimed they’d have a “no alcohol” rule, but we all know how that would go. There are always people who bring booze regardless of the rules. And it’s not like this place would have security personnel to search bags and make sure alcohol didn’t get brought in.

The location is on a part of the road with three possible routes to get to it. ALL of them are freakin’ dangerous if you don’t know the road. There are two deadly curves on my stretch, a one-car bridge on a dirt road with deadly curves on the long way ’round (the road’s a circle), and a gravel/dirt road with a single-car bridge at the bottom of a pair of steep hills. (A classmate died going off the bridge into the ravine when I was in high school. The road has a body count.)

This ain’t a place you want drunk or tired drivers cruising through. My mom had me make some big maps of the roads to show the county people (whatever group is in charge of permitting for building such projects) to illustrate just how dangerous our little roads are.

So, there was that dangerous road, the inevitability of alcohol being present at a party barn, the complete and utter lack of infrastructure (no county water, no sewers, and no public transit of any kind), and the fact this is prime hunting land and dogs are running all through the woods behind the property. (Who wants hounds baying in their wedding videos?) That, plus the fact that nearly the entire neighborhood showed up to hiss and protest the project…

Well, it was denied.

We celebrated. The would-be party barn planners posted on social media about “ignorant hillbillies” ruining their plans.

It was a very emotional subject. My parents still remember when I was tiny and they came home to find bloody handprints all over the lower half of our front door. It turned out that a guy had rolled his van on the dangerous curve. Luckily, he was spotted by a passing motorist and got help in time, but that was a scary homecoming. It stuck with us. And that guy wasn’t drunk, just speeding a little.