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Dead Coyotes, Puffy Jackets, and Hemingway’s Grave
A wise cop—once my beat partner in the downtown corridor of Santa Barbara—and now a successful screenwriter, told me that if I paid close attention each night of police work would develop its own theme. It was impossible to predict, of course, but a couple of hours into any shift the city would show you her cards. It might be crazy bums shanking each other over cheap vodka. It might be a sudden blooming of argumentative Karens in a city parking lot. It might be gang stabbings, car crashes, bloody domestics, or warming fires and found bodies down on the railroad tracks. It might even be—although comparatively rare—an inexplicable and unnerving quiet, a collective deep breath between spasms of homo sapien wilding.
On a recent mission from Oregon to Montana, somewhere east of Boise, a city which has become as suddenly frenetic as any of the cities many of Idaho’s residents recently fled, that notion of developing themes was on my mind because I kept seeing dead coyotes by the side of the road. The 84 through Boise, if you don’t know, isn’t pleasant. It’s just another version of the 405 in Los Angeles, a result of explosive and largely unplanned growth, a slot-car hell dropped into an industrialized wastescape complete with smokestacks, strip malls, and billboards featuring ghoulish plastic surgeons. The day we drove through it was packed grill-to-tailpipe with thousands upon thousands of cars whose drivers were apparently plucked from an episode of Speed Racer, each in a cartoon frenzy to get somewhere, and to get there before anyone else.
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